After reflection.
No we won't!
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| Golden Dawn London 27 October 2012 by iPod Touch and Instagram |
I'm new to Instagram and smartphone photography and these images are my first attempt at using this new and extremely popular technology. As a photographer I was initially excited at the prospect of going out and seeing what I could come back with and it kind of renewed my interest in just wandering around taking pics.
Well it did for two days (these images were taken within that time) and I have already lost interest.
However I initially liked the idea of using the square format again (I used to shoot with Hasselblad and many of my favourite photos were taken with that wonderful camera and it's famous square format) because I think one has to really think about composition a lot more when trying to fill a square with an interesting image. I liked the idea that my iPod camera did not have a motor drive and I would consequently have to put some thought into placing a well composed interesting image within the frame rather than banging off 6 images in a second and hope that at least one of them would work out. So you have to be more alert and wait for something or someone to appear within the frame and then wait for the right moment to touch the little camera icon. And lastly I kind of liked the Instagram filters that can hopefully uplift an awful image.
All this was great till I got the images back home and put them on the computer and then I saw how crappy they looked - grainy, noisy, many were blurred and the filters on Instagram weren't exactly exciting.
More after the jump.....
This technology has re-kindled an interest in mass photography like the Kodak Box Brownie did when I was a kid and I took lots of really awful images on it. Some of those images I have recently found and all they did was document a few years of my youth and being horrible photos they didn't hold my interest. And I think smartphone photography will do the same. I do not think they will have any lasting merit because there is so much really horrible stuff out there taken by people who by adding an Instagram filter believe that what they have taken is really cool.
'If you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig.' paraphrasing the photographer below rings true. For me it is like buying a pair of stone-washed jeans. What the hell for?
However I am happy to see one or two of the 200 million images that are uploaded to Facebook every day because it makes me, as a person who has to make a living out of it, feel more secure in my profession.
Here's two sides of the story:
For......
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/14/opinion/hernandez-mobile-photography/index.html?hpt=hp_c1
Against
http://kennethjarecke.typepad.com/mostly_true/2012/10/instagram-the-devil-and-you.html
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