
"Take a Photo; It’ll Last Longer" - superchink
http://koralatov.com/post/3603212545/photos
======
thentic
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."

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zasz
Wow, that was a really uptight article.

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.

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Timothee
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.

~~~
yid
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.

~~~
mpakes
FYI — You can enable a setting in Instagram to save originals to your photo
library.

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pealco
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.

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tptacek
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.

~~~
arepb
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.

~~~
oasisbob
> Photography itself is an attempt to create something that is inherently
> artificial.

Many photographers would disagree with this statement, and it papers over
historical differences of opinion that have existed for over a century.

Compare Group f/64 with Pictorialism, for example.

~~~
derefr
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.

~~~
m0nastic
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.

[1] <http://www.laurengreenfield.com/>

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mpakes
The author misses the point of Instagram, and it's no surprise, given that he
self-admittedly has only posted one photo.

Instagram is about the community, not the filters, and not curation. The
filters are just a fun way to stylize a photo as you post it.

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bryanh
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.

Get off my lawn.

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scott_s
_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.

~~~
mono
You miss a point: When you take an image in the way of preview and shot, your
image is like you felt it should be (or not).

Paste it over by a click and this feeling is disassociated from your pic (or
as the author states: not real).

~~~
scott_s
And my point is that the preview of it never feels real, either.

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akamaka
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.

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jerf
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.)

~~~
antiterra
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.

~~~
jerf
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.

~~~
antiterra
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.

~~~
jerf
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.

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lutorm
_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.

~~~
donohoe
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.

~~~
lutorm
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.

------
ajkessler
"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.

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sboak
I just take a standard photo with the iPhone camera and add the image to
Instagram from my library when I care about preserving the original.

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evanwalsh
I don't think the author is aware that you can post a photo without a filter.

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ImprovedSilence
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)

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jasongullickson
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.

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justincormack
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.

The photo fads are pretty boring though...

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BillPosters
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.

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carsongross
One word for this guy: Holga.

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...)

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antidaily
BTW, it's easy to save the original - just toggle it in the settings:
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/antidaily/5686046414/in/photost...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/antidaily/5686046414/in/photostream)

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sp332
"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...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/exoskeletoncabaret/sets/72157625755745262/with/5663772906/)
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.

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mono
Simply ask yourself:

What did you feel in the last time when you followed a link and the result was
one of these filtered images?

Evolution will overcome this. We still drink water.

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georgieporgie
"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.

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matthewcieplak
Fake polaroid photos aren't real!

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.)

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simonjoe
Cool story, bro.

