[JJ_SO]

Be fair, Reinier: how often do you look again at your own pictures? So, snap and forget is also our old fashion guys thing. The older we get the more we snap.... The selfie makers at least entertain Google's and Facebook's servers.


And it might be risky to take selfies, but at least, at the places they are aware of things, while the same smartphones are used to post whatsapps while driving a car. Here they are not only endangering themselves...


Sometimes Imalso have to look at lowres pics on a smartphone (in bright sunshine, of course) and being told "and their other boat was also fantastic, maybe even more, but can't find it at the moment". Be nice. Say you'd looooove to see that other boat and enjoy the moment why they discover the discrepancy between picture and memory

[Rover]

Reinier, what you're talking about is nothing new. I remember that 20 years ago when I was doing my first travels, I hated making the pictures which included myself - even though back then it involved handing my junk film camera(s) to someone else and then "enjoying" the blurry 9x12 cm printed picture some time later. My mother was not pleased for some reason - I remember her criticizing me for doing too many "postcard" shots and not enough "memory" shots with my ugly self sticking in the middle. Yeah, right - I know where I've been. Well, most of the time.

 

Of course, getting too vain - as in posing for a shot that might get you killed - is an extreme case, but I guess it's nothing new. It's just that the imagemaking devices have become way more widespread and easy to use, so the proliferation of "vanity" shots (with all the attendant perils and peculiarities) has become extreme.

[southerncross]

It willl burn itself out in time. For most people it is just a phase of their development.

[Reinier]

Maybe you are right, I sound a little bitter. But I don't have anything against selfies, I remember my last holiday in Wales in 2000 (I haven't been on holiday since, because of severe backproblems). I traveled alone and at the south-west coast I set my Canon EOS 50E on a tripod, set off the selftimer and took a picture of me and the stunning coastline.

 

And I enjoy watching photographs from other people's holidays, also the ones with the people themselves on it, but when you see 10-20 or even more of the same images in a row, the fun is short lived. Because it doesn't cost anything to take a photograph, people keep on snapping. In the film era, people took more thought before pressing the button, because it costed money and so the people were more cautious. Of course many bad composition have been made too back then, but in general the pictures were better from the general public.

 

And I found myself also taking just too many pictures, because of the same reason. It doens't cost me anything and you can always erase the ones you didn't like afterwards and if the harddrive is full, I can buy a bigger one. And hence I have to go through tons of mediocre images and it would cost me so much time to sift through them, that it started to annoy me. I even lost the love for photography, because of it. Pictures where 'stacking' up, without ever watching and post-processing them, because there were just too many.

 

So, I try to go back to the old way of working I used to do in the film era. Is the scene or subject really worth capturing? If the answer is yes, then the next step is finding out the best possible composition and not taking the subject from 5 different angles and hope there is one good one. It slows you down, but that's a plus, because I am much more focused and it is much more enjoyable to experience the process instead of snapping aways without much thought. It is like a treasure hunt.

 

Kind regards,


Reinier