Last month we were in China for about two weeks. We visited
Beijing, Xian, Guilin and Shanghai. Tons of sightseeing, some amazing and
awe-inspiringly beautiful scenes and some not so good. We met many people, some
became good friends.
We took a lot of photos. I really mean lots. I had a 32
gigabyte memory card in the camera which we nearly filled with about 4000
photos, 400 a day. I used my phone camera as well, adding another 200 photos.
It seems we spent more time seeing the country through the lens of the camera
than without. It was not just us, everyone was doing the same.
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| Not so Forbidden now |
In past before the days of digital camera We were constrained
with number of snaps available on the film loaded in the camera and the cost of
developing the photos. We used to take time, first in deciding whether
something is worth photographing and then in composing the picture as best as
possible. Now, because it is virtually free, we just take snaps of anything and
everything. Instead of spending time in composing, we just rely on taking
multiple snaps and hoping one of them would be good.
With the ubiquitousness
of the smart phones and digital cameras, this decade has become the most
photographed period in human history. Our children and grandchildren have more
photographs in a year than what a box office Hollywood star had in his or her
entire lifetime before the age of digital cameras.
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| Preserving memory of Mao and Me |
Why do we take photos? I think it is because we earnestly
wish to pause the present. Time is relentlessly moving; present immediately
becomes past and moves away in oblivion. We try to overcome our fear of getting
lost in this great void by trying to preserve the present. Our memory is the
earliest tool we developed to do this. The digital camera is just an extension
of our memory. We hope that our present will thus be here when we are a thing
of past. You might ask “How long for?” The answer is literally and truly in the
clouds.
That is where I back up my photos, on the cloud storage. It
will be there even if I lose my desktop. One can see the photos anywhere, on
any computer, anytime as long as there is an internet connection. At the moment
Google and Microsoft provide free and unlimited storage for the pictures but I
am sure soon they will say “enough is enough”. Until then we continue our happy
sans cerebre snapping.
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