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| A Dutch artist Erik Kessels has unveiled an exhibit which features a million photos that were uploaded to Flickr, Facebook and Google over a 24 hour period. |
On our recent
visit to India, I took about 500 photos and 50 short videos. We were there for only
twenty days. My wife also took approximately the same amount if not more. It is
true, we attended two family weddings, both in very picturesque cities. We also
visited one of world’s most beautiful and most photographed monument; Taj Mahal. But even after making allowance for these, 50 photographs per day seems a lot!
As you might
have guessed all these snaps were taken on our phones. The cameras on recent
phones are so good that in quality they can even compete with many high-end and
large free-standing cameras. The mobile phone is almost always at hand. We, like
many others have completely stopped slugging a separate camera even on our holidays.
The ease of
use and constant availability means that most of us are taking a large number
of photos. As these photos and videos taken on phone are so easy to share, we end
have collecting even more. This has given rise to two major problems, quality
control and storage.
In past
before this digital revolution, the films and their processing were costly, we
took a great care in choosing the subject, fussing about light and composing
the scene, In a year I wouldn’t have taken more than hundred photos. At least
one third of those, if not more, would be discarded after the prints came back.
These photographs were personal and were shared with only few close family and friends.
And then
came the digital photographic volume explosion when mobile phone married the digital
camera. Initially their resolution was low but soon that improved. My first mobile
phone with camera had a resolution of 2 megapixels and the present one has 108
megapixel! With this kind of resolution each photograph takes a lot of storage
memory.
Because it
is so easy to click, at no immediate cost and instant gratification, we take
multiple photographs of anything and everything almost compulsively. At that
moment we think, we would edit them later and discard the unwanted but most of
us never accomplish that with the rigor and vigour required to do so. The
result; the ever increasing need for storage memory and a lot of poor-quality
and irrelevant photos. According to one estimate from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, 2.5 million gigabytes of data is being
added every day, a good chunk of which is from mass digital photography*. Our phones,
laptops are easily getting filled up and even online storage is becoming problematic.
As we are
snapping more and more banal and mundane things, we lose the sight of what is wonderful,
life enriching and special. If Gold was available with the same abundance as
Coal, will it still be cherished and valued as much?
*https://news.mit.edu/2021/dna-data-storage-0610
