Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The other day, we bought a toy camera for my daughter. What she did with it and the things she said took me down memory lane. Within a short time, she was talking selfies with it! I was contrasting that with how much effort and planning it took my dad to get into the family pic he was taking: he’d put the camera on a tripod; add a timer device to the camera; and then rush to be in the pic before the timer expired. It took her a while to understand that there is such a thing as a standalone camera. Isn’t a camera always a part of a phone, she wondered? We had to show her my old, analog camera to convince her that such things actually exist! It made me realize that separating a camera from a phone must have seemed like the splitting of the atom to her! As this pic below shows, the smartphone is the atom for today’s generation. While showing her that analog camera, I was telling her this is how cameras used to be in the old days. How old, she asked? Was this used when the ...

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 functio...

I read this awesome Clayton Cubitt article on the implication of the ubiquity of cameras on photography . He starts with how a photographer used to be “like a hunter”: “(Henri) Cartier-Bresson believed that the photographer is like a hunter, going forth into the wild, armed with quick reflexes and a finely-honed eye, in search of that one moment that most distills the time before him. In this instant the photographer reacts, snatching truth from the timestream in the snare of his shutter.” That instant when a photographer clicked his camera was the Decisive Moment. And so it used to be a blink-and-you-missed-it world: “One photographer. One lens. One camera. One angle. One moment. Once you miss it, it is gone forever.” Fast forward to the present day: “Imagine an always-recording 360 degree HD wearable networked video camera…With a constant feed of all that she might see, the photographer is freed from instant reaction to the Decisive Moment, and then only faced ...

Point a camera at my one and a half year old niece and she will drop whatever she’s doing and give a smile. Or what she thinks is a smile anyway! Makes for good photos, so who’s complaining? Contrast that with the way most Indians, at least the older ones, pose for photos. (If you don’t believe me, go look at the albums your parents have). They will either refuse to smile at all, or if they do, it looks very put on. Well actually, it even looks like a constipated expression at times. Hardly the recipe for fond memories or what? So why is that? Were times tough back then? Was there so little to smile about that people had forgotten how to smile, I wondered? I used to think so until I saw these portraits of some Indians kings and queens: Notice what’s common? None of them has even the hint of a smile. Surely these guys had plenty of reasons to smile. After all, they led, well, a king’s life! Surely, the king who killed the tiger could have smiled? So is the reason that most Indians...