Digital Photography

I was raised in a household of photographers. My father was infamous for his Sunday night picture shows. Squares of Kodachrome slides were arranged in carousels and projected on the retractable screen. In later years he liked to jumble them up randomly. In one picture you were a baby, the next you were at your high school graduation. We had seen these so many times we knew the punchlines by heart.

In my early teens, I adopted his 35mm Pentax and started to take my own pictures – twenty-four or thirty-six frames at a time. Carefully composing the shot and then dialing in the right shutter speed and aperture to get a passable exposure. It didn’t take long until I switched to black and white negatives and then improvised a darkroom in the basement with a second-hand enlarger and brown-tinted bottles of developer, stop bath and fixer in the door of the refrigerator.

In college I found a part-time job at a photo-finishing shop. This was still before the one-hour kiosks. We would take your film, affirm your preference of bordered or borderless prints, glossy or matte finish, and ask if you wanted a second set for a dollar. A few days later you would return to collect them and see that lab technician had tagged some of them as duds so we wouldn’t charge you for them, or in some cases affixed a sticker that suggested you consider having an enlargement made and framed.

All that changed with the arrival of digital cameras. A whole industry flipped on its head. Now your only limit was the capacity of your memory card. If the camera had a screen on the back, you could review your picture and evaluate it instantly. The consequence, intended or otherwise, was to urge you to take more and more photos, with less and less care. When the cellphone became a camera – a really good camera – this went into overdrive. Kids today are carrying around supercomputers in their pockets with thousands of high-resolution images and think nothing of shooting dozens of selfies until they get just the right expression.

As the phone got smarter, photo apps emerged with the ability to crop and edit your images. In a twist of irony these filters seek to imitate the analog nature of film and various old school darkroom tricks. They can add textures of grain, scratches, lens flares and light leaks. You can dodge one area and burn in another.

Around the same time new ways to share your photographs proliferated. Oh sure, you could still print them individually or in photo books and posters, but even that started to feel old-fashioned. Since everyone else had phones, why not cut out the middleman and just send the photos as files. Better yet, post them somewhere for all your friends to see.

One of the most ubiquitous of these platforms is Instagram. I’m on Instagram. I love Instagram. I have more posts than followers and I don’t expect that to change. Critics describe it as “our life’s highlight reel” and that’s largely accurate. Few of us post the mundane or the ordinary. It must be special in some way, notable, artistic or provocative, if what you are hoping to get is “liked”. It’s nice to see a notification with a comment or a little heart. The same way it felt getting a quiz back from the first-grade teacher with a little star on the top. It lets me see what my friends and family are doing. It lets them know what I’m doing without having to send them a postcard or picking up the phone. When I’m stumped trying to recollect a date we did something, or think of a place we went, I can use my Instagram checkerboard like an archive, and scroll back in time.

Professional photographers are hosting on-line courses to instruct people in how to become better with their iPhone cameras. They’re schooling them in resurrected principles from the silver nitrate era. Things like depth of field, exposure, panning shots, focus lock, and composition. I like to hope this is a harbinger of a return to the deliberate process of making images and that the photographer will be intentional. When you had twenty-four shots on a roll, you considered carefully what things to document. You paid attention and waited for the right moment. You were thoughtful and the images were better because of that. And sometimes you just put the camera away and absorbed the moment with your own two eyes as memories for yourself alone.