photography

We live in an increasingly visual society, in which our lives are now catalogued as a flood of images - everything from where we traveled to what we had for dinner. Now that smart phones are cameras as much as they are phones, it’s easier than ever to snap a photo of a perfectly ordinary event, add a few filter effects, and impress your social media friends with your photographic prowess. It's almost too easy.

I carry my camera (Leica) for 2 reasons. One is to capture pictures that remind me of what I've experienced or just something for inspiration and two is to share with others what I am doing. A picture can often tell a story better than a thousand words. Photography can capture the pure spirit and beauty of life, to tell a story to tangiblize humanity or to create a real (or fake) personality and to communicate an idea. I called it the practice of visual anthropology. Does it mean I am now an anthropologist?

The Crimean War of the 1850s was a revolution in communication. For the first time reports from the battlefield were returned in what felt like near-real-time thanks to the electric telegraph transmitting messages in just hours rather than them having to be sent by horse across Europe. Many people complained about the impact of this real-time news, and the harm that it did reporting on the events tragedies of the war as they happened.

I took my first Kodak Photo Spot (wiki) pictures at my spring break trip to the Disney World in the mid-1990s, and through all these years I've never stopped admiring their genius. It's a marketing idea whose elegance has rarely been emulated. I love how organically spreadable the signs were, how they subtly nudged you to spend another scarce frame of  film, and how they made people's lives a little bit better by giving their memories just the right composition.

The technology world is all about tipping points, and last month marked the first time ever that a mobile phone (the iPhone 4) became the most popular camera on the popular photo-sharing site Flickr. The change speaks to a broader cultural zeitgeist, in which the ability to transmit images instantaneously to your online social network is valued far more highly than image quality.

Marketing of any innovative technologies always encounters one big problem, they are being compared with an older generation of technology and although usually do better in many fronts such as performance and features, there are always those who wonder if the analog quality is better than digital.

The digital camera market has enjoyed some growth the last few years but I think it is reaching a point where sales will be flat or in a slow decline with the exception of DSLR. Digital camera has almost completely replaced earlier film models, and already camera makers have begun emphasizing DSLR or special features for customers to upgrade to.