i’ve decided there’s a very good reason to hate digital cameras
I’m not an analog snob. It doesn’t have to do with image quality or some kind of silly nostalgia for the good ol’ days. It’s not about how they don’t “feel right” or that the colors are flat or the shutter lag or image noise.
My only problem with digital cameras is also one of their greatest conveniences: they put virtually no limit on the number of photos you can take. With film, of course, you have a limit of 24-36 photographs per roll. You could keep a few extra rolls with you, but each roll costs a few bucks—not to mention the price to develop them. As a result, for that two-week trip to Shanghai, you’re probably going to take under 200 photos—something like 14 photos a day.
For the price of six rolls of film, you can buy a 4GB CF memory card. If you’re using a high-quality SLR shooting RAW, you’re sort of subject to about the same limit of somewhere between 100-200 photos. Except you can just transfer the photos to your laptop and empty the memory card and start over again.
Because people now have the ability to take as many damn photos as they please, they DO. Cyberspace is cluttered with hundreds of millions of photos of drunk twenty-somethings and every one looks the same and doesn’t tell you anything about the people pictured or even what made that particular night or that particular moment special. I know, I’m in a lot of these pictures.
So please, next time you’re out, imagine every photo you take costs you one dollar. Make it count. Just put a tiny bit of thought into it.
I am an analog snob. Digital cameras speak about color like a deaf man speaks of music.
As for the pictures, I wholeheartedly agree with you. I’ve written a few posts about how flickr is a cesspool. The large body of people taking photos are either amateurs whose idea of a good photo is of something ”pretty” which is just ugly boring cliched etc to a discerning person. The other large subset are gearheads who are only concerned with the resolution and focus etc etc completely ignoring subject, meaning, composition beyond a simple mathematical concept, etc etc.
The worst part of the proliferation of digital pictures is that digital cameras make human beings into something uglier than this hag with a stone face that pursues me in nightmares I have whenever I feel specific anxiety about something that’s to happen the next day. Faces are torn apart, cheeks are no longer a simple part of the whole face and instead pore filled deeply creased minefields of crater pores. Noses project into infinity. All faces are coated with greasy sheens literally bright as the sun, thanks to digital camera’s version of color. Bad posture makes man into grotesque, lack of tan makes human into waking dead, flushed drunk faces are crayon red.
Polaroids are consistently ridiculed as being ‘something something hipster stupid i can put a billion pics on my digital rebel im a cool web dude’ When their appeal should be blindingly obvious. They make people look like normal people. Grandpa is grandpa, not a wrinkled pore monster, Taylor looks like a cute girl and not a bloated mythological beast, Chip looks like a handsome man and not a bumpy algae coated figurehead from a sunken ship.
Fuck digital cameras. The only digital cameras I’ve ever used that produced satisfactory pictures start at 3,500 dollars used. And those pictures are simply analogous to a 300 dollar 35mm camera
HAVE A TINY BIT OF SELF CONTROL , DO NOT HAVE A FACEBOOK WITH 3,500 PICTURES OF YOURSELF , DO NOT UPLOAD 1000 PICTURES OF YOUR CATS , DO NOT UPLOAD A PICTURE OF A FLOWER IN ANY CIRCUMSTANCE UNLESS YOU CLEAR IT WITH ME OR MY FRIEND DASHA OR A COOL VIETNAMESE GUY I KNOW
THANK YOU
Digital cameras make a mockery of every living thing
oh and a little addendum:
I have a theory that digital cameras may be responsible for a huge rise in skin cancer. You need a tan or to be naturally dark complected to not look sickly on digital. High school girls and boys religiously go to tanning salons so they don’t look bad in the infinite march of photos documenting nothing. Some will die! Digital cameras are as hateful as anything I can think of. And I’ve been reading so much nazi literature
