I’ve taken too many pictures.
As I write this, it is just four days past Christmas; I have plenty of free time between Christmas and New Year’s and I’ve been spending that time doing various “projects” that seem to accumulate throughout the year. One of those tasks led me to my digital photos folder on my home file server, which of course immediately produced an hour of squandered time as I meandered down memory lane.
I recently explained to one of my friends—who is far more serious about photography than I will ever be—that digital just works for me. I have had many cameras over the years, but until three years ago they were always film-based. I took quite a few pictures, mementos from various fun times, and another one of my projects is to scan those in so I have a digital record of them. But by far my biggest downfall in picture-taking has been the hassle of actually having film developed. For someone like me, an über-geek who builds web pages and e-mails photos with all the difficulty normally associated with breathing, the ultimate, final resting place for any photo is a file on my computer. Taking photos onto film is just the first step; developing and then scanning are two more required steps. My friends can easily testify that I am, at times, a professional procrastinator; with such high hurdles to getting the images into the computer in usable fashion, it is quite clear that it is just one of those things that will never get done.
Thus began my foray into digital photography three years ago. With a digital camera, it couldn’t be easier; the photos go straight from my camera into my computer, all the better to choose and edit those pictures. I am now on my third digital camera, at which point I may have to retract my statement that photography is not one of my hobbies. But that is another matter. Today’s rant covers something a bit more fundamental: I’ve taken lots of digital photos.
Unleashed
I sit here, at my computer, thinking about all the photos I have. At this point I have just a few photos from my trip to New York City in 2001 posted on this site; I had intended to do more, and I will actually post some. But in examining the photos I have in order to decide what to post, I discovered that I have thousands of archived photos. Thousands. From just three years. Weddings, vacations, holidays, birthdays, parties. At least they’re organized; I can tell where each one came from. But the sheer number is daunting. One trip to Mexico City produced over 1100 pictures.
Clearly, access to digital photography has not only simplified the process of taking pictures for me, it has also changed the way I take pictures. I am not the first to observe that digital cameras make the act of taking the pictures themselves essentially free; the cost is in printing the images. With film, I could take twenty-four pictures, have them all developed, and discover half were good. With digital, I can take a hundred pictures, of which only a quarter were good—and still end up with more good pictures. I can take chances. I can take bracketing shots with varying exposure levels. I can take big multi-photo panoramic shots. I don’t have to spend time wondering, “is this photo going to be worth it?” I can just take the shot. If it doesn’t turn out, I can delete it. (I deleted over 300 images from that Mexico City trip.)
But today’s foray into forgotten photos showed me a downside to digital photography: I have a glut of photos, so many that it’s not even practical for me to look at them all. Much as the ability to self-publish on the web has lowered the publishing bar to the point where personal web sites are rampant, digital photography has lowered the threshold of picture-taking to the point where it becomes a reflex act, one done without thought.
The Human Lens
So much for my original plan of posting photos on the web. My friends would be just as happy to sit on the couch with a photo album and flip through them; they might actually look through two dozen photos from one trip, but they’re not going to sit through a hundred, and certainly not a thousand. All of my friends who went with me to Mexico got a CD with the photos, but I included a thumbnail index to help them find the photos they want.
That is the key. Not that I included thumbnails—that is simply a tool. The key is that while I have a lot of photos, it is still important to choose what is relevant, what is important. I shot about forty photos in New York; I posted thirteen, thirteen that were significant to me. In so doing, not only did I share the photos, but also a little bit about what’s important to me and how I think.
Digital photography has changed the way I take photos, certainly. It’s given me a much bigger selection to choose from when I select images to share, and in that sense, it makes the values of the human lens—the human way of seeing things—much more important than the simple value judgments of “is this photo worth the film.” In the end, I think the human part of it is more valuable than the actual photo anyway.
This human lens applies to more than just photos. I create fractal art, an art form that uses mathematics as its paints and brushes. I could sit and make dozens of “pretty” images in one night, but if I did, they would be soulless. I’ve seen galleries such works, hundreds of images without names. If the artist didn’t put enough meaning into a work to give it a name, why should I give it any consideration? It’s just eye candy. So I name every image I think is worth sharing, and even choose amongst my own works which are my best pieces.
Writing is no different. I could write a hundred rants, and they would be just that—rants. Worth no more consideration than the temper-tantrum of a four-year-old child. But if I filter what I share to what I think is important, I avoid overloading the reader with irrelevant noise. And that increases the value of actually saying something.
I think I’ll get back to sorting my pictures now.
