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Snapshot restraint - edit, edit, edit
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/05/fa.../05photos.html May 5, 2005 Stop Them Before They Shoot Again By AMY HARMON THE baby pictures just kept coming. At least once a month Suzanne Weber opened her e-mail to find the same friend had sent a link to as many as 50 pictures, often including multiple shots of the same child at the same moment at slightly different angles. Finally Ms. Weber, who enjoys the occasional digital baby snapshot as much as anyone, stopped responding, and the friend, taking the hint, stopped sending. Ms. Weber's e-mail, however, is by no means picture-free. Like many regular Internet users, she estimates that she will view more than 1,000 (why stop? it's free) digital pictures this year of friends, family and their assorted offspring. And she has some unequivocal advice for snap-happy e-mail correspondents everywhere. "Edit your pictures, people," said Ms. Weber, a writer in Brooklyn whose pen name is Anita Liberty. She suggests no more than three pictures by e-mail, no more than 12 to an online "album," no albums more than twice a year. (Exceptions may apply for grandparents and best friends.) Ms. Weber is not alone in her plea for restraint. At a time when this country is indulging in an unparalleled binge of personal picture taking, and some digital photographers find themselves drowning in the product of their enthusiasm, the notion is dawning that even in a digital realm less may still be more. Some critics warn that a great photograph's singular power to trigger memory may be at risk. For many people a photograph they have seen a thousand times itself becomes the memory. With digital pictures it is rare for a single photograph to achieve that kind of status. "When you have hundreds of pictures where you used to have one, people are less likely to ever go back to look at any of them," said Nancy Van House, a professor in the school of information management and systems at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the social use of photography. "A lot of people are getting to the point in their digital photography now where it's becoming a problem." Tinamarie Fronsdale, who is the keeper of her extended family's photo albums, shot more than 300 pictures after getting her first digital camera last year. She saved some on CD's and printed others. But she has not used the camera in months. "It's too much," said Ms. Fronsdale, 47, a special education teacher in Berkeley. "Looking back at our family pictures from our childhood, I see it isn't important to have so many pictures. We do not need to record every moment." The idea of passing on hundreds of CD's filled with pictures to her nephews was wholly unappealing, Ms. Fronsdale said, when she realized they would never casually pull them out the way she did with an old-fashioned photo album when she and her mother were recently reminiscing about a family friend. AMERICA'S amateur photographers produced 28 billion digital pictures last year, 6 billion more than they shot on film, even though only half as many own a digital camera, according to the market research firm InfoTrends. That does not count pictures deleted before being printed or transferred for storage. People are not just switching formats. They are taking more pictures, 13 billion more last year on film and digital combined than in 2000, when the price of digital cameras began to decline. The number of albums compiled using Kodak's popular Ofoto software (now called EasyShare Gallery) jumped nearly 90 percent in 2004. In an era when no moment passes that is not a photo opportunity, pet owners compile vast photo archives of their cats and dogs, teenagers wielding cellphone cameras take pictures of one another to fight boredom, and it is not uncommon to receive dozens of pictures documenting a baby's first few hours of life. Many new photographers - and the newly prolific - extol a new category they call ephemera. It might include a picture of an interesting glove on the sidewalk. Seen through the lens of a camera that never requires its owner to pay for film, the mundane takes on new meaning. The digital shooting spree is only expected to accelerate as a growing number of camera-phone shutterbugs join the ranks of those reveling in pictures immediately available and easily shared. Many digital picture enthusiasts say the medium has taken on a new currency as a running document of everyday life. Others say that even if they never look at a picture, just the experience of taking it engages them with a scene in a more interesting way. Most people save all of their pictures, no matter how blurry or unremarkable. Many store them with the file names automatically assigned by their cameras, like "DSC31.jpg." Others develop complex classification to take the place of shoeboxes or an envelope with "Grand Canyon, 2003" scrawled across it. Van Swearingen, an avid gar-dener in Greenwich Village, has sorted the 6,000 flower pictures he has amassed in three years into seasonal subfolders on his computer. Within them are folders labeled with the date and within those are other folders of the pictures he has cropped and color-corrected to his liking. But when he was looking for a particular image of a lotus the other day, it took him half an hour sifting through computer files. And the hundreds of pictures he exchanges daily with other garden hobbyists has made him look at his own with a jaundiced eye. "The constant stream of images somewhat cheapens the medium for me," Mr. Swearingen, 43, said. "It becomes almost too immediate." It is partly the pleasure of that immediacy that propels people to take all those pictures. Many digital photographers, including Mr. Swearingen, describe the immediate gratification as addictive. But Jim Lewis, a novelist who wrote an opinion article for Wired magazine titled "Memory Overload," suggests it is the hollowness of the gratification that fuels the addiction. "You take the picture to capture the memory of being there, but if you take the picture, you aren't really there," Mr. Lewis said by telephone. "You're trying to satisfy a hunger which is actually being created by the activity." In his article Mr. Lewis compared mushrooming digital photography to a map of the world that grows in detail "until every point in reality has a counterpoint on paper, the twist being that such a map is at once ideally accurate and entirely useless, since it's the same size as the thing it's meant to represent." MICHAEL KUKER, 31, does not see a problem with that. He has deposited 9,946 images on his hard drive since buying a digital camera two years ago. The no-risk nature of the technology, he said, has emboldened him to express himself. He shot 200 pictures of a bridge in Redding, Calif., and saved them all. "Once it hits my computer, it stays, even if I don't like it," Mr. Kuker said. "In a historical context, 20 to 30 years down the road, someone else might find it interesting." Or even tomorrow. Like many protophotographers, Mr. Kuker has been inspired to take more pictures to attract an audience online. He is a member of Flickr, a photography Web site (www.flickr.com), where half a million people have plunked 8.2 million pictures since it opened for business last summer. Caterina Fake, Flickr's founder, argues that people just have to get used to a new way of interacting with photographs. The digital deluge may make it harder for single images to stand out of the dense crowd, but it also offers greater intimacy with friends and family and a new means of communication among strangers. "The nature of photography now is it's in motion," said Ms. Fake. "It doesn't stop time anymore, and maybe that's a loss. But there's a kind of beauty to that, too." Adam Seifer, the founder of another photo-sharing site, www.fotolog.net, said the glut of pictures is a problem only when they are channeled to the wrong audience. Mr. Seifer, who takes a picture of every meal he eats, concedes that his mother-in-law might not be interested in those pictures. "It becomes sort of the new spam," he said. But Mr. Seifer's food log receives 15,000 visits a week from people who are apparently interested. If photographers save the baby pictures for their mothers-in-law, Mr. Seifer argues, and store the rest in a central location where others can choose to view them or not, no one would suffer from overload. Still, even in the enthusiast bastion of online photo sharers, there are signs of paring down. "I'm thinking of going on an image diet," Frederick Redden, 52, of Stuart, Fla., wrote on a Flickr discussion board. His plan to delete some of the 250 pictures he had put up, based on unpopularity, was met with cries of disapproval. One respondent wrote, "If I did that, I'd have to delete all of my pictures!" |
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Alan Browne writes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/05/fa.../05photos.html May 5, 2005 Stop Them Before They Shoot Again By AMY HARMON [snip] MICHAEL KUKER, 31, does not see a problem with that. He has deposited 9,946 images on his hard drive since buying a digital camera two years ago. The no-risk nature of the technology, he said, has emboldened him to express himself. He shot 200 pictures of a bridge in Redding, Calif., and saved them all. "Once it hits my computer, it stays, even if I don't like it," Mr. Kuker said. "In a historical context, 20 to 30 years down the road, someone else might find it interesting." Hardly. The disk will crash, the computer will get obsolete and disposed without the files being transfered to a new one, the storage medium and its technology would change, old file format would get desupported with nothing to read your RAW image files etc etc etc. Dragan -- Dragan Cvetkovic, To be or not to be is true. G. Boole No it isn't. L. E. J. Brouwer !!! Sender/From address is bogus. Use reply-to one !!! |
#3
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Alan Browne wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/05/fa.../05photos.html May 5, 2005 Stop Them Before They Shoot Again By AMY HARMON Too true. I was commenting on this to someone just the other day. I've been taking lots of photos and then having trouble culling them down to something reasonable. I thought it was just a newbie experience. I try to take enough shots to cover my deficiency while I'm learning, more so with the candids than with static scenes. I upload them to my computer; then, I make several passes. First I pull out the out of focus shots or those too badly exposed to recover. I pull out where the subject got badly clipped, or is in an unnatural position, etc. That's generally the easy part. Once I get to that point I have a lot of trouble weeding out the others. I almost feel guilty deleting photos of my little nieces & nephews, etc. Even in my best of the best (which isn't all that good) gallery, there are some perfect examples of the needless duplication that the author mentioned in the article. It's hard know what to keep. Some are obvious. A particularly warm smile or expression. A humorous pose. A landscape that appeals to you on more than a superficial level. It's the others that are hard to let go of. I'm not sure I trust my judgment yet on what I might like tomorrow. Randy. -- First Shots: http://thepierianspring.org/gallery/ |
#4
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In article ,
Alan Browne wrote: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/05/fa.../05photos.html May 5, 2005 Stop Them Before They Shoot Again By AMY HARMON [snip] Nothing really new, but eloquently stated. |
#5
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Alan Browne wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/05/fa.../05photos.html May 5, 2005 Stop Them Before They Shoot Again By AMY HARMON The way I handle it is to keep the best few pics in the top folder & make a 'seconds" folder, sometimes a 'thirds' folder. I do this for the online galleries too, otherwise it's way too tedious to pour through. I think it's very valuable to keep the seconds but essential to sort them! -- Paul Furman http://www.edgehill.net/1 san francisco native plants |
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On Thu, 05 May 2005 11:42:52 -0400, Randy W. Sims
wrote: Too true. I was commenting on this to someone just the other day. I've been taking lots of photos and then having trouble culling them down to something reasonable. I thought it was just a newbie experience. When I came back from my first trip with a camera and showed my parents about 200 pictures, they made their displeasure quite clear. They did me quite a favor; I haven't made that mistake again since. (Mom, on showing photos: "Use restraint." Me: "Good idea -- I hadn't thought of tying my audience down.") First I pull out the out of focus shots or those too badly exposed to recover. I pull out where the subject got badly clipped, or is in an unnatural position, etc. That's generally the easy part. Once I get to that point I have a lot of trouble weeding out the others. I almost feel guilty deleting photos of my little nieces & nephews, etc. I'm a newbie at all this myself, but I have some strategies for editing, and maybe you'll find them helpful. 1. Name your photos. I find that if I can't quickly describe a photograph in 1-5 words without thinking too hard, it generally lacks coherence and interest, and should be deleted. 2. Think about what each photograph might be used for. Not every picture has to be great to be worth keeping, but if you can't even imagine it adding something to a family photo album, maybe it's junk. 3. Review your old photos every so often. For me, as time passes, it becomes easier to let go of a picture. -- Ben Rosengart (212) 741-4400 x215 Sometimes it only makes sense to focus our attention on those questions that are equal parts trivial and intriguing. --Josh Micah Marshall |
#7
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"Randy W. Sims" writes:
It's hard know what to keep. Some are obvious. A particularly warm smile or expression. A humorous pose. A landscape that appeals to you on more than a superficial level. It's the others that are hard to let go of. I'm not sure I trust my judgment yet on what I might like tomorrow. I just distinguish between audiences. For *myself* I keep virtually everything. I may toss images that are hopelessly out of focus, or unrecoverably mis-exposed, but I keep everything else. Storage is cheap. (And I have all of the film negatives I've ever shot since high school filed away in binders too). On the other hand, when selecting images to show *someone else*, I'll pick only a small number that show what I want to show, only one from a similar group of images, etc. Essentially, stuff to show someone else needs to be selected and organized, while what I keep is just a collection that doesn't need to be organized. Dave |
#8
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In article ,
Alan Browne wrote: Some critics warn that a great photograph's singular power to trigger memory may be at risk. For many people a photograph they have seen a thousand times itself becomes the memory. With digital pictures it is rare for a single photograph to achieve that kind of status. "When you have hundreds of pictures where you used to have one, people are less likely to ever go back to look at any of them," said Nancy Van House, a professor in the school of information management and systems at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the social use of photography. "A lot of people are getting to the point in their digital photography now where it's becoming a problem." I don't think that is anything new. Most people's pictures are boring. Digital pictures that you get over the Internet has advantages and disadvantages compared to looking at somebody's photo album: - I think the main disadvantage is that there are just pictures without any context, whereas when somebody shows you an album, you can talk about it. - The advantage is that you don't have to look. Or you just look briefly when you have nothing else to do. "It's too much," said Ms. Fronsdale, 47, a special education teacher in Berkeley. "Looking back at our family pictures from our childhood, I see it isn't important to have so many pictures. We do not need to record every moment." There are never enough good pictures. Lots of bad pictures can be a problem though. The idea of passing on hundreds of CD's filled with pictures to her nephews was wholly unappealing, Ms. Fronsdale said, when she realized they would never casually pull them out the way she did with an old-fashioned photo album when she and her mother were recently reminiscing about a family friend. Boxes filled with slides have to same problem. It is a nice selection of prints in an album that makes the difference. It might include a picture of an interesting glove on the sidewalk. Seen through the lens of a camera that never requires its owner to pay for film, the mundane takes on new meaning. If you do the same thing in B/W and frame it properly, you can call it art :-) -- That was it. Done. The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it could believe what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard done by. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap to make. -- Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency |
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