zoomingin

Zooming in

by Bob on June 30, 2007

Everyone is taking photographs these days. With their cell phones, with digital cameras, and other devices.

This can be a wonderful avocation and passion, a source of joy, or a mixed blessing, or even a dubious habitude.

These days one has to have little knowledge of photography or even imagination to use a digital camera and take "good" pictures. In fact, as an old-time, old fashioned photographer myself, these pictures taken by the digital devices are too good.

A typical photo taken has all kinds of computer AI (Artificial Intelligence) and fuzzy logic algorithms to make anyone's photos come out great.

Not only that but the image is actually huge and huge in information content with mega-pixels. That's an amazingly complex characteristic. Both technically and also socially. Why socially ? Well, you can see everything on the photo in very great detail. People are not supposed to be satellite maps. But I can see the threads on someone's shoes. The freckles on their face which weren't meant to be seen. The tiny holes in the jeans. And such things which normal old-fashioned film wouldn't show up well even on a blow-up print. These things, like was said in the brilliant 1994 movie, "Pulp Fiction", when Mia (Uma Thurman) says to Vincent (John Travolta): "That's a little more information than I needed to know" after Vincent tells her he's off to the loo.

Then there's the aspect of immediate gratification of seeing the results of the picture immediately on spot, in vivo, when the digital photo is taken. That is great ! Polaroid tried that for years with immediate print film with mixed results, mostly due to the physical chemistry required for the process in the camera. It was a mini-development lab. But the downside of immediacy of digital photos now is that people likely take far too many photos. And they're not durable. They are aetherial computer bits or pixels if you insist. Who needs to see someone in a million poses in front of a hot dog stand in New York City ? Take a couple of good shots and let it be.

The Beatles sang that. "Let It Be" and they were words of wisdom. And Paul Simon sang in 1973 about "Kodachrome" in reference to life itself.

I guess the people who really prosper from the digital images are the battery makers (bet they're related to the camera manufacturer) and the hard drive and flash drive manufacturers. And if anyone ever needs paper prints anymore, the printers and paper manufacturers. Maybe.

We can fool ourselves into believing it's great because it's immediate, it's accurate (I say far too accurate) and we have more photos from our expedition to choose from. Yeah. Maybe. But who is going to go though 2,000 pictures from the most recent weekend trip to Bermuda ... hardly anyone. So they just get saved on the digital shelf, the hard drive, taking up space forever. Like books in our heavy backpack we carry every day that we never take out to read until the backpack falls apart.

The brilliant song "Anticipation" by Carly Simon was a very prophetic and Pavlovian (or Skinnerian) prediction.

Let's not even get into the internet traffic jams caused by 3 megabyte pictures flying through the wires of the internet. "Let's not and say we did", as the old saying goes.

The internet bandwidth has been choked for a long time with no clearing in sight.

So it goes. The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan predicted.