In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing | Hacker News Reader

In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing

newyorker.com

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“Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove twenty-two miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides-pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn." He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others. "We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

Excerpt From: Don DeLillo. “White Noise.” (published in 1985!)

More people have independently recommended this book to me than any other. Now I HAVE to read it!

highly recommended. read it over a decade ago, and still think of it often. the feelings/emotions, as they relate to all sorts of mundane aspects of society (e.g. the barn), haven't faded in the slightest.

Like you'd expect, almost like an art installation, the kindle version costs $2.67 more than the paperback. Thanks middlemen!

Why did you consider buying the Kindle version rather than the paperback? Because it's more convenient? Maybe that's why they're able to charge more for it.

In USA there are format shifting rights in the Fair Use doctrine I gather. So one could buy the book and scan it and create an ebook, as this is logically equivalent to getting a copy from a torrenting site but is far less economical and wastes more resources it seems the moral thing to do is buy the paperback and send it for pulping and download a copy of the ebook?

The author gets paid, the publisher gets paid, you get the copy you want with less resource waste than scanning it for yourself.

Anyone have a moral objection to that they'd care to elucidate.

Is the torrenting it really illegal when you own the book already?

For now.

Arguably, yes, since in bittorrent downloading content is directly tied to distribution of content.

By torrenting a work you own in a different format, you are (potentially) also distributing that work to someone who doesn't already own a copy.

SO just downloading without uploading should be fine?

I'm no lawyer but I'm sure someone could make that case. The torrent peer swarms don't like that though, and I think most clients tend to penalize that behavior (leeching).

I'd wager so since you own a book, not the content of the book. But the law is a funny thing.

Yes it is. But illegal might be the wrong question. Is it unethical?

I'd say no.

Convenience for sure!

http://amzn.com/dp/B001R11CAI

Same thing at Times square during New Year's Eve. Almost no one looks at anything during that time directly, it is all through a camera lens. Which is fine, it is their choice - but it becomes super annoying when hundreds of flashes are going off around you, at the same time, and if you were the odd man out who actually wants to see things with your naked eyes than a lens, it is impossible.

It is a real disappointing experience

I thinks its important whether they are taking pictures of people in those situations. Tourist locations get plenty of photographs, but the people doing the visiting are properly the object of photography. I don't care about yet another picture of the Eiffel tower; a picture of someone standing before the Eiffel tower is much more interesting.

I was with him until the pseudo-babble about auras and energy.

And it occurs to me: that situation was self-selected for those people. See, some folks are not really capable of the perception effort required to really look at something. To experience it fully. But they can buy a camera.

Just go somewhere else. They apparently travelled through wonderful countryside to get there - just stop! Barns are not rare, and many are made on the same plan.

> pseudo-babble about auras and energy

Those labels are metaphors for an experience you may not be aware of. He's not talking about something measurable, but ethereal. It's akin to an artistic feeling. You can feel it through certain meditations and awareness practices.

Claiming to know what it is is contrary to knowing it, because it transcends labels, but I will claim that there is a "something" to be experienced that can be referred to as "aural" or "energetic". It is the essence of something that is both inclusory of itself and its context. It grows beyond the thing itself.

Seek and you may find it's more actual than our linear logic, and that it shows once and for all the absolute nudity of our emperor Logicae.

It is for experience alone.

The words "auras" and "energies" here have nothing to do with pseudo-babble, new age-ism or whatever.

It's just a quite standard poetic / descriptive use of the word, in fact the term "aura" is used in its most common literal meaning -- those photographs of "the most photographed barn in the world" maintain its myth and it's allure. That's what he means with "auras" there.

>And it occurs to me: that situation was self-selected for those people. See, some folks are not really capable of the perception effort required to really look at something. To experience it fully. But they can buy a camera.

The idea behind the passage what that those "some folks" are increasing, or even the majority.

It's not about there not still being other people who can appreciate the things they see.

Personally I take and look at more photos these days then I did before. The reason is I feel free in ignoring major targets (Roman colliseum etc) and focusing on impromptu shots featuring people I love (spilling ketchup from burger all over ones shirt). To me, that's where my personal photography is heading and I find it much more valuable.

I like feeling liberated from socially "important" photographs such as touristy spots. I never placed that much value on them if at all.

The last time I was at a crowded museum I spent roughly 20% of the time just trying to avoid getting in the way of people taking pictures. Everyone was taking pictures everywhere of all the installations. I considered doing so too, but realized 20 years too late that there are far better photographs of a work of art (or at least enough) by professional photographers with different takes/interpretations than I could do without decades of training (on average). If you like a piece, there's nothing to stop you from buying a print or downloading a picture. I get it that some people do it more for remembering "that time I saw it in person" instead of trying to capture the essence of a piece, and that's fine (that's why I used to take the pictures), but multiply the amount of time it takes to do that by every piece you come across, plus how much posting it on instagram/whatever/facebook removes you from "the zone", and I think it's just a different way of massively disrupting your attention when the MAIN reason you're there in a museum, for a limited amount of time, is to suck it all up. I'm sure many people don't get distracted by trying to take photos of all the art, but once I stopped and just focused on concentrating and nothing else, a trip became much, much more enjoyable, and even memorable.

I agree with basically everything you said, yet I take quite a few pictures during my trips; a cheap phone shot that takes as little time as possible, that may be awfully blurry and with horrible colors, but that is enough to get the relevant information. Which is:

- Get a quick access to references that are mentally organized (because of the trip), without having to take time to actually gather the pictures.

- The specific element might not be photographed, or not possible to find at least. Maybe it's the design of some doorknob that's really great, in the middle of the countryside. Good luck finding that on google. Even some painters in the rijksmuseum are impossible to find on the web, so...

- Nothing existing picture may be satisfying. Maybe the specific arrangement of shapes works best from a very specific point of view. Maybe it's because of the lightning conditions. There are many potential reasons.

- You can use the ref without fear of copyright infringement (well, orwellian states would differ, but nearly).

Allow me to recommend the 1972 documentary series "Ways of Seeing" by John Berger. It is an astonishingly prescient examination of our changing visual culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk&list=PLlhSx0L1hp...

There is also a book of the same name. It's very thought provoking.

Will def check it out, thanks!

I went to The Louvre and instead of taking a photo of the Mona Lisa, I took a photo of the crowd taking photos of the Mona Lisa. Much more enjoyable.

You should try that at Pisa. https://static-secure.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Travel/Pix/pictu...

I've been there. The people pretending to hold back the leaning tower are more entertaining than the tower itself.

The pose incidentally seems to be some sort of universal human reflex. When we visited there were at least 100 people in the same position while their friends took pictures. They all seemed to be having a good time.

Except there are now so many photos of the crowd surrounding the Mona Lisa [1] that maybe it would be a more productive use of your time to take photos of the people taking photos of the crowds around the Mona Lisa.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=photos+of+crowd+mona+lisa&sa...

A+ suggestion

Ohh, almost meta-meta-photos of Mona Lisa!

Could get better: the museum could place some camera over / behind the paiting, and we could get pictures on how Mona Lisa sees those photographers

Your Google search has such a photo[1], and I actually really like it.

Actually on closer inspection she might just be taking a selfie. Which would also be ironic in a different way, as neither the Mona Lisa itself nor the crowd would be in shot.

[1]https://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/07/29/arts/SUBMUSEUMS/S...

I went to the Louvre last year a few days after Christmas which I assume is not tourist season (first time in Paris). It was packed, and the Mona Lisa was surrounded by a sea of people 10 feet thick, most of them waving their phones around in the air on selfie sticks.

I think it's like this all the time. There's a reason they put it in a dead end hallway. The worst for me in this vein was going to Versailles, and being there at the same time as a big tour group of people, seemingly all of whom had a digital camera, an SLR, and a camcorder (this was in 2004...), and all of whom had to capture every significant artifact in each room and then move on. None of them were looking at the things except through their cameras' lenses and screens. There were so many of them that they made the tour pretty miserable for the rest of us.

I thought it was pretty funny. I took a great picture of the mass of people fighting each other to photograph the Mona Lisa. The ones with the iPad are the dorkiest.

There is no such thing as a "no tourist season" in Paris

In a way, I also take a lote of notes that I never read back, but the actual process of taking the time to write it makes it easier to remember.

If it works the way, when you take a photo, even if you don't look it back, the fact that you did take the time to photograph a moment may ease to remember it.

just my 2 cents of pseudo-science

I think writing notes helps us remember things because we're concentrating on the information being recorded, and because in order to record it we are forced to create a well structured representation of that information which will also be easily remembered.

However, when I take a picture, I'm mostly concentrating on the camera and the spacial aspect of what I am photographing (getting it into frame), which doesn't help me remember any of the details, which are the genuinely important bit.

I do like your explanation though. I wouldn't be surprised if people who are more (for lack of a better word) artistic than myself, focus more on the details as part of the photo-taking process, and so retain those details better.

Trying to actually get good at photography is slowly teaching me to see- I see animals I didn't before, I see pretty compositions that didn't register before.

It's never been any different, that's how people are. What's different is that in periods of technological change people will engage in new behaviors which are then unfamiliar to us. So we take notice of them and realize that there are a lot of problematic aspects to culture and society. Oh golly gosh, people spend so much of their lives just stumbling through, unthinking, sometimes unfeeling. Anyone who has spent any time studying mindfulness is well aware of how pervasive that mode of living is for all people for most of their lives. It's not that we are automatons, it's just that we are creatures of habit and imitation and we find it very difficult to be truly individualistic. It often takes a great amount of training to be routinely "present" and mindful in every day life.

Let us remember the era that has just passed not so long ago prior to the advent of smart phones and prior even to the widespread popularity of the internet. An era when many people in the developed world would digest "the news" from only one local source and be satisfied with whatever they got fed. An era when most people would spend half their non-working waking hours watching whatever was on one of a few channels on television.

Yes, people should live their lives a bit more thoughtfully. Yes, people shouldn't be so caught up in all the trappings of documenting and effectively "scoring" their lives via smart phones and social media. But at the same time it's difficult to make the case that this is a decline. This is just different. And compared to people living passive, purely consumptive lives filled with monotony and vast sameness, it's hard to complain. People are doing things, experiencing things, and sharing their lives with their friends. That they are not doing it in the maximally best way is a complaint people could make about any generation in any era. And it's not as though people are wasting their lives in worse ways or to a higher degree than they were before, but merely that we'd grown accustomed to the old ways of doing so, and mentally swept them under the carpet.

The author gets it wrong. In the future you only will be allowed to take shot if your camera gets location-based DMCA authorisation clearance to take it. It will be blocked at all other times, and there will be pay per view from camera producer for displaying shots that were already taken, automatically sending money to copyright administration agency.

Yeah it's disgusting. Witness the fight to copyright architecture, so that folks must ask for permission to take photos of public buildings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_architecture_in_t...

I'm not sure if I follow. Could you point me to the section you are referring to? All I found was this, which seems quite positive.

"First, when a building is ordinarily visible from a public place, its protection as an "architectural work" does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work.[13] Thus, the architect will not be able to prevent people from taking photographs or otherwise producing pictorial representations of the building. "

The bit you found is reasonable, but there's a movement to forbid it.

For example, it's illegal to photograph the Eiffel Tower at night when its lights are lit:

http://wiki.gettyimages.com/897/

I am boggled.

Yet again, The New Yorker hobbles closer to the realm of click-bait.

After the Malik trots us down the obligatory Sontag shortcut to establish credibility on the subject of photography and authenticity, he goes into some genuinely informative and interesting stuff about Google Photos. But this appears to be a ruse, as Malik pulls back the curtain to reveal that it is yet another article proselytizing about the death of authenticity and the increasing shallowness of us digital heathens. The ensuing unqualified speculation at times borders on the ridiculous:

"We are all taking too many photos and spending very little time looking at them."

Maybe Sedaris and the New Yorker IT dept have developed a secret algo to qualify factual statements like this one? Then there's this factually-stated pearl:

"Photos are less markers of memories than they are Web-browser bookmarks for our lives." How so? Certainly not for myself. Albeit anecdotal, but I spend much more time these days joyfully poring over high-def Iphone photos snapped on trips away or of portraits of loved ones.

Also, its always a bit of a tell with an article's quality when its title commences with "In the future". We only have to look at the amazing HoloLens video on Ars (1) the other day to see that photography may well fall by the way-side once that kind of tech reduces to contact lens size, and virtual imagery will become much more enabled to move at 24 frames per second.

(1) http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/04/hands-on-hololens-on-...

Hint: writing about photography is as subjective as photography itself. Sontag is the lowest hanging fruit a writer on photography can grab to prop up their writing.

I mean, look at the recent discussions Teju Cole sparked when he trashed Steve McCurry's work in the NYT Magazine.

Tangentially related, but Black Mirror has a great episode which covers a similar premise to your 'contact lens size HoloLens' one.

Basically everything you see is recorded, and you can revisit any moment you've experienced any time you want. Which has many negative effects in the show, but which would actually avoid the author's problem altogether, as you no longer have to 'spend time' to take pictures.

If recording of all of your experiences (good and bad) are implicit, then will it improve our ability to live in the moment? Will it dilute the significance of the moments we want to 'choose' to remember if everything else is bundled in there too?

One of the suggestions of the episode seems to be that allowing ourselves to return to the past to such a degree can make it hard to escape from it and move on with out lives.

This episode was "The Entire History of You" if anyone is looking to check it out. It is one of the strongest episodes of all the series.

Thank you. I take several gigs of photos and videos of my two children every month, which I religiously back up to multiple places. As my boys get older, they love it when I open up a folder of media and get to watch themselves from times before they had developed the mental faculties to form memories of these events. I love it too. A year ago in a child's life seems like an eternity, and I cherish my photos and videos of what seems like such a long time ago.

That's why the first piece of advice I give new parents is, "You have a camera on your phone, use it every single day." Our memories are so fallible and life can be so wonderful, I don't understand how people can object to bottling up as much of it as possible to savor over and over again.

>The ensuing unqualified speculation at times borders on the ridiculous: "We are all taking too many photos and spending very little time looking at them." Maybe Sedaris and the New Yorker IT dept have developed a secret algo to qualify factual statements like this one?

If you treat social observations like physics, and expect statistical confirmation you're missing the plot.

Some of those cannot be statistically confirmed, but are nevertheless apparent to anyone with some life experience.

Others don't need to be confirmed, because they depend on subjective evaluations. You either come to see the writer's point and share their ethical values or not.

This very modern idea that any talk about society needs to be measured and analyzed with numbers and statistical proofs, is hampering our thinking. And it's even dangerous, people it gets people from thinking and evaluating arguments on their own, to blindly trusting some numbers which could be BS, manipulated, statistically non-representative etc.

But even more so, it kills their own appreciation and understanding of the world they live in, having them wait for 'the research' to come out for them to affirm anything.

I don't take pictures. But I like them. I'm still waiting for the vacation-album app - where I just photobomb other people on vacation, then on Facebook it finds all those pictures from other people that I'm in (maybe using my location-info history from my phone) and makes me an album!

In the Future, We Will Bookmark Everything and Read Nothing

The future is now. :-/

Nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Oscar Wilde https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde#Lady_Windermere.27...

I will choose what to feed my neural net :)

Reminded me of this, from Douglas Adams's Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency:

"An Electric Monk is a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers wash tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watch tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believe things for you, thus saving you what is becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expect you to believe."

I fit the description of the perp. I take a lot of photos and don't spend a massive amount of time browsing through them. But I do this because I know that one day I will be old and frail and won't have the physical capacity to get out there photographing any more. At that point, I will be content with task of organising and curating them all.

How do you know now what you will be content to do when you're old and frail?

Um, talking to old frail people who are like you. They are real people who used to be programmers and photographers and surfers and skaters. Chat to them and they often show you their old photos. I assume that because they were like me at 30 then I will be like them at 70.

When you're typing, you don't have to write "um" at the start. That has a use in verbal communication but it's superfluous in the written word, and forces me to choose whether you're deliberately giving the impression of being a teenager or you just type as if you were speaking.

That aside, I still disagree. I bet that if those 70 year old people had the choice of looking at things they used to do, or being able to actually do them again as if they were 30, they'd prefer to do them again. They're forced to settle for the pictures because that's all that's on offer.

You say you disagree and then go on to agree with me. Huh?

When you're typing, you don't have to say "huh" at the end. That question mark you've used can be used to indicate a question; the tonal grunt of "huh" isn't needed.

Good lord you are the most boring person in the world, we all read technical manuals all day and some of us enjoy playing with language.

I suppose you watch TV and moan that it's fucking entertaining with amusing puns and clever use of language (fuck Bill Shakespeare eh?) No no NO NO! TV should be a series of facts presented as white text on a black background. You sir are an arse. Why are you even on the internet spewing your hate? EliRivers is a boring bland person. No sense OF FUN and not at all interesting in any way.

I bet a lot of people respond to you with tonal grunts. Is it that they all just wished you'd go away and leave them alone? Huh? Yep. 'fink so.

I like curating my photos that are 10 or more years old, just not yesterday's. It's like taking a vacation through my younger years. Because of this, I take more photos today knowing that I'll really cherish them later.

I have to add this as I just returned from vacation myself. I have caught myself stuck in what I like to call "click and walk" syndrome when traveling so on this trip I resolved to significantly reduce the number of photos I took.

Being aware of it made me watch the people around me more. A large number of people don't look at sights anymore. They see it through their phone because they hold the device up constantly as an intermediary to the real world. They walk towards something, raise the phone, look at it through the camera/screen, click a photo, immediately turn away. My hobby on this trip was observing the people who really weren't looking at anything at all and it surprised me how many there are.

Made me think back to the trips I have taken where I returned with hundreds of photos of things I had barely taken the time to actually look at. If you're doing that, just travel via the web, it's cheaper.

This is how people watch fireworks these days: through small screen of their phone while recording the scene.

But this is also a huge positive for future historians. Imagine the huge amount of data they will have to study what today's society was like. Imagine if we had such data for the last couple of thousand years.

Historians have had 'too much' data for many decades now. Your photo of the Mona Lisa is probably not going to fill a significant gap in our future understanding of the times.

Often, this supposedly redundant data is useful in ways current society can't fathom. Millions of photos of the Mona Lisa taken over decades won't tell you much new about the Mona Lisa. But it will tell you a lot about changes in camera technology over that time.

Also, the long tail is long. There are whole cultures and subcultures that would be completely forgotten if not for archives.

At Defcon 19, Jason Scott gave a talk titled Archive Team: A Distributed Presentation of Service Attack[1]. In it, he explains why this data is important. As you rightly point out, the vast majority of it is boring and useless. It matters to no one but the author and their friends. But some of it is weird or funny, and a tiny bit of it is pure historical gold.

The early days of usenet, for example, contain tons of interesting conversations involving people who are now prominent. Thanks to these archives, we can get a better picture of these people's lives than in earlier times.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ZTmuX3cog

Maybe, but I bet all those photos the person took while walking to the Mona Lisa might be interesting.

This assumes someone will back it up, re-archive it as storage technologies/costs change and then remember how to decode it that long from now.

My thought on that is if it becomes that big of a deal to maintain then we likely have bigger issues to deal with on societal level, such as end-of-society type things.

Changing archival methods during analog times might have been troublesome, but it has to be getting easier. Hard drive technology can change dramatically but if it interfaces with my current computer then copying files over to it will be trivial.

Who is going to pay for it? Who is going to care enough to archive digital artifacts?

The Internet Archive is having trouble with their task. Who is going to make sure Grandma's iPhoto album is archived?

Things can be put in a box and forgot about for 90 years. Files on digital media probably won't last that long.

You almost answered your own question: the Internet Archive already has a lot of stuff, and with more resources, we could do even more. And yes, there are people uploading Grandma's photos already... even home movies. Great stuff, send more!

Seems Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and many others are solving your online storage dilemma as we speak. Of course, there is the question of how historians shall gain access to all that data originally stored for people would be dead by then. I think a law about releasing private data to the public domain after a certain period of time after a person's death, if no living relative to claim it, should be considered.

Also, over time storage has just been getting cheaper and cheaper. When I started with computers I couldn't dream of storing the amount of data that I currently store on my phone without thinking twice about it.

That's one of the unanswered questions of our time: how to deal with information overload?

Some hints (that I use for my personal answer):

https://sivers.org/hellyeah

https://sivers.org/gifts

https://github.com/eniomauro/hamster-gtd

"In the future, he said, the “real value creation will come from stitching together photos as a fabric, extracting information and then providing that cumulative information as a totally different package.”

What? Obfuscating language that is supposed to sound "profound" or "smart" just sounds like bullshit, which is exactly what it is.

The future of photography as predicted in this article sounds depressing as hell. How much further can our society be dumbed down and turned into a superficial shell of itself? That said, there is no guarantee that the future of photography will unfold as predicted here.

But a society that values only money and denies ever growing numbers of people a stable future and the fair chance to earn a decent livelihood is a society that is on the road to revolution. The rise of a demagogue like Trump is a warning shot across the bow. There is more at stake here than photography. Laugh, roll your eyes or downvote but people who predict unpopular, fantastic sounding societal change are often laughed at...until they are proven right.

A variation of this is being with people but not actually being present, i.e. texting, updating Facebook status, email, etc. etc.

How often do I see a couple at a restaurant, or a group of friends at a social gathering, who are barely interacting with each other but all have their noses glued to their smart phones and frantically typing away.

"...based on the ultra-conservative assumption that we each upload about two photos a day to various Internet platforms, that means we take about four billion photographs a day."

2 per day? I guess I'm a massive luddite then. 2/month possibly.

Yeah. I find that the ease of taking photos has ironically made me do it less. I used to think I had to take as many photos as I could. Now I only take them when I think I'm going to want to look at them.

Well done for not being average, I guess?

I was wondering if anybody else got the same impression after reading that phrase. I guess it is a conservative estimate, but not worthy of the "ultra" adjective.

This is already as it is now.

I miss when pictures were meant for special moments / events, not for every single day.

I feel I can relate to that, I'm still in my twenties and has recently begun to see in myself and some of my friends this eternal shift from youth to 'adulthood' (this words don't reflect my points accurately but I lack the proper ones right now), the loosing track of the dominant (sub)culture(s), the "it was best before" phenomenon. But this is completely subjective, maybe "old age" come from the tiredness to be always updated / on page with the current trends, happy with our past experiences and memories. Is there a best moment ? somewhere everything has to change and everything will change.

I hope I'm alive when it's not socially acceptable to take/post pictures, and post them online.

I have taken photographs for years. I love getting the right shot. I love photography. I have tons on pictures of loved ones, and all my pets. Hate to call them pets--they are family members.

That said, I don't post every one online.

Maybe it me, but I don't like people who post every aspect of their life. I understand posting if your genuinely excited about something, or have the need to share something new.

I just cringe when I see a upwardly mobile individual take another picture of the beautiful meal. It was cute at first, but we all know you will have another beautiful plate of food in the future? We all know you have good bone structure. We all know you have tons of friends.

It seems like too many people are using the Internet to publicize, re-engineer how they want world to view them?

In my twisted world, a person's stock goes up if I can't immediately figure them out with a simple google search.

I do understand people who are lonely, or have low self-esteem. I understand the need to overcompensate for the perfection this society expects of us.

Less has become more in a lot of sectors.

I totally agree with all of this.

The cult of oversharing has devalued everything to the point of bankruptcy.

Twenty years ago I didn't care what you had for dinner. Including a uncomposed phone pic of it doesn't mean I care now. Twenty once daily bad photos of your cat? No.

The photos that I do care about - the well composed image from my semi-pro photographer friend, the photo of the meal celebrating your 20th anniversary or the photo of your animal companion doing something unusual are lost in the sea of mediocrity.

I consistently took more pictures when I used a film SLR than I do now. I've almost completely stopped taking photos, and losing interest in photography.

When we had film, we'd throw away the bad ones, and just keep the highlights. I'd take 36, and end up keeping just one. Now we take so many that we can't filter. But they're nearly all fit for the bin.

Everyone now thinks they're a photographer though. Clearly they're not.

I find these comments interesting, because I'm on the other end of the spectrum when it comes to photography -- I'm just now getting into it more than just casual phone photos.

My father was a professional photographer back in the 70's. Not famous by any means, but a number of shots were published in magazines. He's getting up there in age. It feels like photography might be a way that I could connect with him a bit more since we're not super close, and I've been yearning to do something creative and artistic. So I decided to pick it up by purchasing a new DSLR and a few lenses.

After refreshing my memory on ISO, aperture, shutter speed and taking a few hundred exposures I realized...photography is not easy. You can take thousands of photos and apply Instagram filters to them to your heart's content, but they just feel empty.

So now I'm letting the camera collect a bit of dust while I read about theory and composition, and looking at others' photos to find out what makes them appealing (or not appealing).

I'm just going to throw this out there: If you want to become a better photographer you do it through practice and repetition, not theory. I know it's the counterpoint to this thread, but don't let your camera collect dust, use it every day. Critique and then delete your own work. Get muscle memory to be your friend so you never miss that split second where you have the perfect shot.

Obviously there is always more to learn (and you should), and clearly i'm NOT advocating that you upload all of your photos to instagram/facebook. But I am suggesting you will learn more by doing then you ever will reading theory.

That being said, I bought Understanding Exposure http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Exposure-3rd-Edition-Pho... based on some HN recommendations (i think), and it covered the basics of everything I needed to know from a technical perspective. I recommend it if you are starting out.

Just finished that book last night, actually.

And perhaps I was being a little over dramatic with the "collecting dust" bit. I've used the camera everyday since I've gotten it, if not just to drill the features and how to access them into my head.

And also, part of the reason why I've been reading more than shooting for the past week has been that spring still hasn't come yet up here, and I haven't wanted to stand outside in the below freezing cold during the ~2ish hours of daylight after I get home from work.

Appears that you're upstate New York from your previous comments. I'm in Edmonton, Canada. For half of the year it is literally dark when I go to work in the morning and dark when I drive home. I'm envious of your 2 hours. (Of course the flip side is that the other half of the year it's never dark).

Ah, okay. I'm about an hour south of Ottawa, actually. Not quite as bad as up in Edmonton, I'm sure, but I can relate to the winter darkness. Between November and March I'm lucky if I get a cold 15 minutes of sunshine on my drive in to work in the morning.

I agree with asteadman. You'll improve far more with practice than reading about theory. The most useful exercises I ever did were in school photography club - most weeks they'd set us somewhere boring to burn a couple of rolls of b&w film with "interesting" shots. I found this really difficult to start - everything turned out terrible. I think that was the point.

So take the camera somewhere dull and burn a few dozen shots. For instance go in the kitchen and find some interesting compositions, like a dripping tap. Experiment with unusual angles, framing, depth of field, very long and very short exposures and extreme closeups. Can you get some interesting effect or a sunset reflecting in the chrome at the same time? How can you make it more creative?

Go in the garage and do the same with a drill, a saw, or a car wheel. Portraits are a whole new can of worms, so a sympathetic partner or family pet helps. You'll start to use longer lens than phone, be further back, and take much more flattering portraits.

I'm sure there's some websites out there with better ideas for learning composition than me.

It's a little like the process artists call "learning to see". You'll gain internal awareness of what might make an interesting photo, and see the framing, and notice the light, rather than just taking snapshots.

And sometimes none of this applies, the best photo is being there at that moment with a camera :)

Right, I tend to agree, but as I noted in my response to asteadman, the weather hasn't been kind to going out and finding interesting shots outside yet, and my little one bedroom apartment has been getting a bit stale. I've taken at least 20 or 30 shots of my bookshelf, for example.

Reading about composition can only help me prepare for spring when interesting things (and people) finally emerge from this frozen wasteland that is upstate New York.

Yeah cold and dark isn't the best mix for encouraging you!

Does sound like you're doing the right things, so good luck with it.

Agreed, and this is what keeps me off the dominant social networking platforms. I'm not interested because the "show-off" culture seems so normative that even otherwise self-secure people can be dragged into it, either by participating themselves, or being misled into a feeling of inadequacy based on this exposure.

However, I do really like the ability to share recordings of experiences with specific people for which there is a shared personal context. So I use sharing tools whose features are biased toward this use case.

I've noticed that a lot of folks I talk to about this don't see the difference between these two use cases.

I miss when people spent more time looking at pictures than taking them.

Nothing better than seeing a picture on paper, that's the memory I want to look at.

This certainly doesn't apply to me. I'm one of those nuts who gets annoyed by people taking out their shitty camera phones to record video during fireworks displays. It's so irritating to have everyone with their bright screens whiting out the night vision required to properly enjoy the show. Nobody even watches the fireworks anymore, as they're too busy staring at tiny blobs of color on their phone screen or preview window on the back of their camera.

I've stopped going to fireworks shows. I also no longer go to the cinema, lest I murder a fellow moviegoer for using their fucking cell phone during the movie. If the cinema wants my dollar, they're going to have to install Faraday cages / jammers. Which will never happen, because "Think of the children - what if the babysitter has an emergency!" and "What if I need to call 911!". I can't imagine how people managed to watch a movie back before cell phones were the norm. How in the world did people disconnect from the digital network for 90-120 minutes?! It's unfathomable!

It is absolutely technically possible to make a Faraday cage and install a local emergency-services-only cell inside it.

Rather, it is legal and societal implications as you mention that prevent this from being done.

You do sound like a nut. Watching fireworks is not stargazing, it's never that dark to begin with. And unless you're in NYC on the 4th of July, it's not that hard to find a spot a few feet away from someone with a camera and ignore them.

And yes, cell phones at the movies are annoying. Sometimes people are annoying. If they didn't have cell phones, they would talk, or open loud snacks, or something. It's not a sacred temple, it's a movie theater, get over it.

But don't you love the feeling of superiority as you scorn your fellow fireworks viewers? Surely this only enhances your experience? I hear you can even get magic internet points if you moan about it online too.

I don't see the point of recording fireworks either, but the wonderful thing about fireworks is that they are big, bright and loud, meaning it's pretty much impossible to ruin someone else's viewing of them.

> whiting out the night vision required to properly enjoy the show

Doesn't the very first firework do the very same thing?

https://drafthouse.com/ > We have zero tolerance for talking or cell phone use of any kind during movies, and we aren't afraid to kick anyone rude enough to start texting their friends during a show right out of the theater.

About 20 locations in the US.

I remember when camcorders with flip out screens started to appear, and everyone commented the same thing - people only think something is real if they are watching it on their camcorder screen. I guess the smart-phone has replaced the camcorder now, but this is hardly a new phenomenon, and it didn't end the world the first time...

EDIT - just realised this is a three-day old comments page, nm

This article reminds me of this picture:

http://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/10...

For the people in the back, the phone is acting like a periscope. It's probably improving their view.

And everyone on their phones in the front? Is the digital zoom enhancing their view?

I enjoy taking pictures of the people I know, not so much their surroundings. Video is even better!

The future of recording is an interesting thought exercise... photographs will become antiquated as video takes over, but what comes after that?

Headline reminds me of one of my favourite poems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5IERp2OdJs

Maybe in the future we will actually look at everything and have to photograph nothing because it's being done automatically by our brain chip.

Computers will look at everything and organize, link, collate, combine,and transform the mountains of data and metadata we generate.

Pretty much this, but I'd take it a step further.

We are, collectively, only marginally more aware of our role in a larger system of observation and cognition/emergent behavior than a rod or cone in our retinas (or, more aptly, an extraocular muscle) is of its roles in our own individual visual system.

We are, increasingly, sensor platforms for leviathan.

Soon you won't have memories, only pictures.

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