Networked Lenses

With the advent of the smartphone, the digital camera became ubiquitous. And soon photos of cats, sunsets, breakfasts and selfies began to rule the day. No wonder then that every time Instagram goes down, news sites have fun with lines like “Breakfasts everywhere went undocumented” or “Instagram is down – just describe your lunch to me”!

But has the smartphone-Internet combo really ruined photography? Isn’t Alex Furman’s point on the “immensely valuable and often overlooked” aspects of photography just as true today:

“It forces you to see the world around you in a completely different way. It teaches you to find beauty and impact and symbolism in places that most people wouldn’t grace with a second look. Photography teaches you to pay attention and to appreciate. It’s about seeing much more than it is about capturing what you see.”

What did the smartphone-Internet combo change?

“Now we have legitimately capable cameras in our cell-phones, complete with filters and functions that make pictures look “artsy” with a click of a button. Another click of a button, and they’re on the web for all to see and appreciate.”

And that’s what many dislike today, the fact that:

“You can click away until the cows come home, producing masterpiece after masterpiece.”

Chris Mod gave some serious thought and points out that the smartphone-Internet combo:

“squish(es) the full spectrum of photographic storytelling: capture, edit, collate, share, and respond.”

The turnaround time from click to applause fell by several orders.

Those who argue that the smartphone camera is nowhere near the quality of a DSLR are obviously right. But does that even matter in the Internet world, asks Mod:

“While we’ve long obsessed over the size of the film and image sensors, today we mainly view photos on networked screens—often tiny ones, regardless of how the image was captured—and networked photography provides access to forms of data that go beyond pixels…like location, weather, or even radiation levels…Once you start thinking of a photograph in those holistic terms, the data quality of stand-alone cameras, no matter how vast their bounty of pixels, seems strangely impoverished. They no longer capture the whole picture.”

Like it or not, perhaps Mod is right when he says:

“We see cameras transitioning into what they were bound to become: networked lenses.”

In any case, it’s a free country, as this xkcd comic summarizes so well.