Filtering Photos

My wife doesn’t like the fact that I delete many of the pics on the phone very soon after I take them (I delete even more after I download them to a computer’s bigger screen). And it’s on this filtered content that I crop, zoom and apply the photo app and application filters.

Why do I purge so many? Because let’s face it: most of the pics are average or worse, and certainly not the kind I would look back at years later fondly. I want to avoid what photojournalist Kenneth Jarecke describes:

“Instead of having a body of work to look back on, you’ll have a sad little collection of noisy digital files that were disposable when you made them, instantly forgotten by your followers (after they gave you a thumbs up), and now totally worthless.”

Most people, of course, don’t do that. They just post anything and everything they clicked and applied a filter on onto Facebook or Instagram. After all, isn’t What-I-had-for-breakfast the most common theme on Instagram? I agree with Ted Nyman:

“We have begun to pollute and desecrate and cheapen all of our experiences. We are creating neat little life-boxes for everything, all tied up with a geo-tag, a photo, a check-in; our daily existence transformed into database entries.”

Though I feel he may be exaggerating a bit when he goes on to say:

“The end-game is this. Slowly, gradually, without realizing: we stop participating in our own lives. We become spectators, checking off life achievements for reasons we do not know. At some point, everything we do is done soley to broadcast these things to casual friends, stalkers, and sycophants.”

I guess my dad’s attitude from his photography hobby and slide shows from the analog/film era rubbed off on me. Of course, his job was much tougher: he had to do what most of us today have to put a lot of effort to do, what Wired describes as:

“Imagine actually trying to get the lighting and composition right before you take a picture.”