A quote from Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" that may speak to your frustration(?).
"The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start."
When you make it easier to take photos, you'll get more shitty photos. There's nothing to be nostalgic about. I could flip his complaint on its head--old timey photos, due to the scarcity of film, were way too posed. Easy photo-taking allows me to take tons of photos, lots of them candid , unposed, and hence more authentic, and then cherry-pick the best ones.
If I have a good memory of an event, I will have it regardless of whether I took the damn photo or not. Doesn't matter if it was shared with Instagram or developed in a dark room.
I think he has some good points regarding the lack of curation in photo libraries nowadays.
However, I'd argue that having the filters actually pushes for curation. Since there are more steps to make a picture "interesting" before posting, you're most likely to pick more carefully. In a way, because you're using filters, there's an expectation that the picture should be interesting.
The other thing is that, honestly, using filters has produced pretty nice pictures for me and I'm taking more casual pictures as a result. Maybe I'll regret not having the unaltered version later… but in the meantime, I made some pictures that are more interesting than they would have been without any filters. The banality of some subjects gain from the filters, even if they're canned. For example, instead of just posting "Painting today", I took a picture of my painter tape, applied some filters and posted it with "Painting". I wouldn't care about that picture otherwise, but it looks good and adds a little bit of something. (IMHO)
But, as with all things, this fad will most likely pass.
I'll also add that people tend to like professional pictures better than their own. If I think of my wedding, as pictures, I like the professional ones better, while I like the ones my friends took more for the memories they bring than for the inherent quality of the picture.
The pictures you see in magazines are all touched up and beautified. You barely ever have pictures straight from the camera.
And this is definitely the appeal to all these filters: anyone can make a picture that has some of the qualities of a professional picture, but for banal events and things of your life, when you wouldn't get a professional.
Part of this is hardware, specifically lenses. Camera and phone manufacturers toss around megapixels and other technical specs with impunity but just look at a SLR prime lens. It is much larger, so that for a given shutter speed and ISO, it just simply lets in more light. Which allows for better pictures that have more dynamic range, more detail and less noise.
Curating a large photo library is easy. Just don't worry about it until you actually want to worry about it. I take a few hundred photos every month, rarely delete any of them. Every once in a while I'll group the photos together by the year and month they were taken and stick them in a folder.
At the end of the year my wife and I use Shutterfly to create a nice bound book w/ our favorite pics from the year. We'll occasionally create smaller books for trips or other special occasions.
No stress. No lost photos, no lost history. My parents photos have big gaps... a few pictures here and there to capture an event they thought was photo worthy. My kids will be able to sift through hundreds of photos, looking over details about their child hood, their first house, the old couch, dad when he had hair, the dogs, all of it. I don't see a downside.
Interesting, most photographers I know keep the original RAW file from their cameras and work on copies for processing, storing the source as raw material for future projects. Instagram (and the like) forces your hand in the production of a finished product, no looking back.
That's why I like Hipstamatic, it requires setting up that ideal filter for a shot ahead of time, and if the photo doesn't turn out then you've lost your shot. Add in the random shifting of the photo and you get some wonderful found photos with a bunch of low quality attempts.
I'm no photographer! :) To be fair, I'm using Camera+ which gives me the ability to save the original file too. In general, I just don't because a lot of the pictures are just for punctual use and present little interest to me in their original form.
you can always use photos from your camera roll in instagram, making it a post-process only app. Or you can take photos in instagram and (unfortunately) not have a 'raw' file left.
The "pure" photograph is a myth. Every single aspect of taking a photograph imposes the same kind of artificiality that the author claims Instagram filters impose. From the most basic technical considerations: the aperture and shutter speed, to the most practical: what you are pointing the camera at. Even seemingly innocent choices like the kind of camera and lens you use are guilty of this.
With every one of these choices, the photographer creates a distance from the "real" world. A filter is no different. It is merely another tool available to a photographer to achieve his goals.
Stylized photos are a great way to cover up for the poor photography skills common to virtually everybody who uses a camera to take pictures. They are in that sense a huge usability win, and I love them.
On top of that, photography itself is an attempt to create something that is inherently artificial. Complaining that Instagram goes too far in helping the user to recreate something that never really existed misses the entire point.
Isn't the attempt to reflect reality in a photograph photojournalism, though? I always thought "photography" was a form of fine art, to be judged on its aesthetics, while in photojournalism the information communicated by the photo was paramount.
In photography school we defined photography as just the act of capturing a scene in a photograph. We tend to define the purpose of that capture through the various sub-genres of photography.
For instance, I'm a "fine art photographer" in that I take photos which I set up in a studio that are meant to have artistic merit. They happen to have no bearing on reality (but that's not a prerequisite for them being fine art.) There are many examples of "realistic" fine art photos (some of Lauren Greenfield's work for instance[1]).
Photojournalism is generally defined to be an attempt to tell a story through a photograph. Whether "reality" is reflected or not can be a component of any type of photography, I don't think it's a category unto itself.
Although welcome to having a discussion about art, where no one is right.
..and by making photography easy, fun and simple to share, Instagram encourages practice, which then increases the user's skills. It's an awesome feedback loop.
People find it fun to take and share stylized photos with friends. Someone thinks that form of expression and socializing is fundamentally flawed. Pretentious blog post ensues. Nothing gained.
Looking at it now, I realise that this photo not real.
If we're going to go down that route, then neither is any other photo you take. I feel a sense of disconnection with every photo I've ever taken (I don't take many) because the resulting image never feels like what I saw. The filter he applied is just deciding what manner it's not going to be real.
You're precisely right. Calling a photo with an instragram filter applied to it "not real" simply means you're constructing a continuum of "realness," which introduces the obligation to draw the line somewhere on the continuum between the "real" photos and the "not real" ones.
Cameras don't work exactly like your eyes, much less your entire visual system. Gamma curves are different, and dynamic range is way different. Not to mention the obvious fact that a photograph is a frozen instant from a single vantage point, so for example a facial expression may look way sillier that it did in person. Then there's the subtler filters and modification like levels and white balance adjustments, cropping, etc.
The author is flat-out wrong in some points, like this one:
By doing so, we’re missing the point: the flaws we so deliberately recreate were never intentional and never wanted. The fuzzy glow and odd colour-shifts were to due limitations of the film and processing techniques used.
Actually, the films and processing techniques were painstakingly created over the course of a more than a century. Sure, there was certainly as much chance and serendipity involved as there was design, but the chemists, marketers, and end users all made conscious choices to lead us to where we are today.
As it happens, this is almost exactly how I feel on the analog v. digital audio debate, when vinyl proponents advocate their choice by talking about how "warm" it sounds. I don't want warm, I want accurate.
My photo collection is the raw JPGs coming out of the camera, and they'd just plain be the RAWs if I saw any advantage to that. (But I can't tell the difference, so I don't sweat it; on my camera RAW is a bit of a chore.)
The jpgs coming out of your camera are far from raw. The camera makes as many choices as a retro camera filter does, if not more. It chooses color balance, color space, contrast/response curves. It reduces noise, sharpens, and can even adjust the final exposure. There's no one way to display a RAW file on an 8 bit per channel monitor. Furthermore, the "accuracy" of your image is going to depend on the situation and whether or not you override the metering. For example, a snowy scene will almost always be metered into a dull grey, unless the camera is told to overexpose a bit.
My camera is "prosumer"; I have more control than a point&click, though it's not "expert" class. What gets cut off isn't important to me. There is no unbiased data source, it is literally mathematically impossible, so that's not the standard I use. Going back to audio, just because I like digital fidelity does not mean I'm obligated to be snooty about getting the full 24-bit/192KHz digital masters or it's just not worth it; 16-bit is good enough for most use cases I have, few of which involve listening to music in utterly silent acoustic environments with my yearly salary's worth of reproduction hardware.
You're missing what I'm saying. I wasn't speaking about fidelity at all, I was trying to explain that conversion from sensor data to JPG is a matter of stylistic interpretation, even if it is done automatically.
For example, if you have a Canon, you likely have picture modes like Neutral, Landscape, Portrait, and Faithful. Or, if you have a Panasonic, you'll have modes like Standard, Dynamic, Nature, Vibrant. While you may consider one of these modes to be more realistic or take Canon's word at their concept of 'neutral' you'll find that, for some cases vibrant or nature is actually more accurate.
Even a monochrome color mode is likely to be more complicated than just equally averaging the red green and blue values. It will probably have stronger response in the reds, and the least response from blues because of the pleasant effect that has on skin.
There's nothing wrong with letting the camera make those choices for you, but the jpgs your camera spits out are tweaked in ways that are intended to be pleasing, not necessarily the most accurate.
To me, this is quite similar to choosing a particular film or a post-process filter that you like.
I'm not sure you got my point. There is no non-stylistic interpretation, though I used the more technical term "biased" in the machine learning sense of the term. There isn't even one mathematically. Even RAW is inherently biased by the nature of the CCDs. Even what you physically see is fundamentally biased by the nature of the human visual system, which makes an amazing variety of choices for you long before it reaches your conscious mind. I don't sweat the fact that I'm not getting something that absolutely can not exist.
Your point is meaningless, because there is no way to choose a system such that it isn't affected by your point.
Tied into this is the general devaluation of photographs over the last decade. Previously, you might take three or four rolls of photos while you were on your holiday; now, you can take three or four rolls’ worth every single day of you holiday and still spend less that you would have spent on a single roll of film. The result is hundreds or even thousands of photos, and the chance of finding the one photo that evokes the feeling you had on that holiday drops dramatically — that one photo gets lost in the flood.
This is demonstrably false, just ask any professional photographer how many photos they shoot. It's not like good photographers just sit around thinking until finally everything is just right and they snap their one exposure. No, you shoot and you shoot, because most photos are nothing special. If you don't keep shooting, you'll miss that opportunity. I remember reading that photographers for National Geographic would typically shoot something like 40 rolls for a job, and that ends up being maybe 4 pictures in print.
I disagree - I relate very much to the quoted text. I have so many photos that the good is lost with the mediocre.
Previously your average photographer (not talking for professionals, just me) would ave to consider the value of shooting, as opposed to being snap happy at every moment and defer review to later.
We work differently then. Personally, I think things are a lot better now.
I've shot a fair number of pictures (about 17,000 is the current Lightroom count) and I've just gone through and scanned all my film shots from pre-digital days. My strategy then was to shoot a bunch of exposures, painstakingly writing down the shoot setup (aperture, exposure times, etc.) After developing, I'd have to go back over my notes, compare the results against my notes and try to learn from it. It was an extremely offline way of learning.
Compare that to how easy it is now: I get immediate feedback and can change the shot until I'm happy with the result. I may take more pictures now, but overall they are a lot better than my old film ones.
With current technology you can get a lot more experience shooting. When the opportunity comes, when you happen to be in the right place at the right time, you have a much better change of not botching the shot.
"In our attempts to imbue that nostalgic warmth, we miss the real reason we treasure our old photos: they’re artefacts, hard-copy memories of our lives. Their true value is in the way they make us feel — a good photo can take us back to the place it was taken, and invoke in us the feeling we had at the time. That’s something no filter, no matter how brilliantly implemented, can ever recreate for us."
Which is it? Are photos meant to be hard-copy memories (which I mean to read faithful reproductions of the place/time) or is their true value the way they make us feel? If it's the latter, than the hard-copy memory part is bullshit. If the vignette+cross-process filter helps me remember the depression of that rainy day better, isn't that valuable? If the high-key filter makes me better remember just how glorious that summer day was, isn't that a great thing?
If you're a photojournalist, I don't want you photoshopping in some extra smoke in your shots of Gaza. I do want as accurate a representation of the real scene as I can get with a 2d medium. But if you're 99.99% of the population who isn't a photojournalist shooting for a news outlet, I want to know how the situation felt. If that requires some filters or some photoshopping, fine.
i take hundereds of pics a month. most with my slr, some with a point and shoot, and fewer with my phone. I love vingnette on my phone, the filters and effects open up a whole new realm of creativity with shooting photos. im not usually trying to go all photojournilistic and document things as much as im trying to convey a feeling or state of mind. also, my phone camera may be 8 mp, but that doesent mean jack without good glass, the lens is crap on my phone, its just the modern replacement for polaroids. so why not tack on some effects to make it more "human" and try to convey the feeling u may have had at that time. Also, if u take thousands of photos, and dont take the time to swlect a few "winners" every so often, then your just lazy. it takes supprisingly little time to pick out whats good, u know as soon as u see it. This article just sounds like an old "get off my lawn", yellin at kids for trying to recreate a place they romamticize about but will never be (the past)
While I generally agree with the sentiment presented here, it's a bit like arguing against the "violin" setting on your Casio keyboard.
The keyboard plays like a piano, and should probably sound like a piano, but sometimes you want a violin and you don't have a real one at your disposal.
I think people dont know how to react when something becomes a few orders of magnitude more common in a few years. Mind you with photography this has happened a few times, with the box brownie and mass production of 35mm colour film.
A valid criticism, but a little harsh and unnecessary only because Instagram is not forced on anyone who does not want to use it. Sure, it's gimmicky and trivial, as is most social media. Photography as an art form is not threatened by fashionable little gadget applications like Instagram. I don't use Instagram, and wouldn't bother signing up to yet another social network. I also wouldn't apply ready-made filters to my photos using Photoshop or other tools. But if people without much photography skills enjoy doing this, then it's barely worth the criticism.
Instagram gives non-experts the ability to modify pictures they take to closely match the subjective experience that the (already inherently representational) raw photograph captured imperfectly.
Sure, this could paper over a shitty, meaningless life.
It could also enhance a wonderful, meaningful life.
I think your take on it might depend on which of those two you find yourself in. (Aaaah, that's offsides...)
"This is not an artefact, or a record, or a representation of a real moment"
Wow. So the Mona Lisa is phony because it's not a real moment or artifact? It certainly lacks authenticity. Real, professional (and good ;) photographers are using Instagram, http://www.flickr.com/photos/exoskeletoncabaret/sets/7215762... so there must be some redeeming property? Ah, here it is:
"algorithmically applying strange flaws that are common in photos of our parents when they were young"
Those "flaws" give the image a particular feel, so now if and when you want that feeling in a picture, you can just push a button and bam! http://vonslatt.tumblr.com/page/2 It's democratizing a visual language.
"and the burden of cataloguing and sorting them increases exponentially."
No, it increases linearly. As for the rest of the tone:
I've taken something like 45,000 photos since I started on digital in 2003. This is probably around ten times as many photos as my parents have ever taken. However, my photos are all imported into Lightroom, dated, and most are at tagged with at least basic information. I may be two years behind on disseminating my photos, but they're ready when free time and desire coincide.
By comparison, my mother had to pay to have photos processed. She would then flip each over and write notes by hand, lest context be forgotten. After a few years, she might take a few out and mount them in an album.
Personal photography is just plain better than ever before. It's easier and cheaper to take, document, and shore photos than ever in the past. This does not detract from the value of our photos or memories. Romanticizing the more primitive, less available photography of the past is no better than pursuing the superficial duplication of its style.
Yeah, well digital photos aren't real either. They're just zeros and ones representing photos. Furthermore, photos aren't real things, they're just pictures of the things themselves. While we're at it, the things you look with your eyes at aren't really the things themselves, they're just light that's been reflected off them, and the appearance of an "image" of the scene is a mere illusion!
Finally, the way you compare a picture with your remembrance of a scene is utterly artificial. Your memory is fallible, mostly reconstituted from broad sketches and details filled in from similar pictures. Everything is fake! Get over it.
(Except for touch, taste, and smell. Which is why you should download my new app, OlfactoGustaKinetogram, exclusively on Android.)
"The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start."