Digital Photographic Volume Explosion: Losing The Tree in the Wood!

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

PRESERVING OUR PRESENT: SANS CEREBRE SNAPPING

  

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.

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.

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.