Thursday, February 2, 2012

Photobloggists

I was looking over some "successful" blogs today. They all seemed to have daily posts which were accompanied by photographs. When I think of blogs I think of the written word, but when I look at blogs it seems writers must also be photographers. I used to fancy myself a bit of an amateur photographer, but that was in the days of film and paper. I have gotten away from photography due to the move towards digital and my resistance to it. I enjoyed spending hours in my makeshift darkroom playing with exposure times and chemicals. I had the feeling of creating something from beginning to end, of fashioning it with my own hands. Photoshop programs are so intangible. There is no textile experience except that of ones hands against the hard plastic surface of a keyboard and or mouse.
We live in a culture of duplicity where people move forward with technology while many are also longing for a connection to the world. One that they can feel through their hands and smell with their nose (including the smell of manure). Photography seems to have fallen through the cracks of my straddled position, one foot online the other in the chicken coop. 
Maybe a digital camera is OK for me. Maybe I don't have to give up my visions of red lamps and developing trays. Maybe it all has a place and a purpose and adding one doesn't preclude embracing the other. Will those digital photos be real in the same way that my film prints are real to me? Is photoshoping, if that's a word, cheating? I want to capture the real world as I am seeing it, and not create an artificial one. I want to hold onto the vision of that moment because it will pass so quickly, all the while afraid of cheapening it with digital effects.

2 comments:

  1. As a Library Assistant, I understand completely the struggle that you are going through. We live in a world that is constantly moving towards a digital era, and I believe that the written word is slowly losing its value in the eyes of a new generation. I do believe that there can be a balance; the digitization of information, all medias included, can be a very enriching thing.
    For instance, you mentioned photoshopping could possibly be cheating, but when we think about it; our eyes are created to capture every possible detail in the world we see and sadly a camera, digital or non digital, is not able to capture the same detail. Some people make a living, my husband for example, by using these new technologies to help create and capture through digital means, the detail that we see with our eyes, that another device couldn't outright do.

    Another thought is that the digitization of information makes it much more accessible and desirable to the new generation. So many kids, and adults for that matter, are able to read far more with the use of an e-reader because it's tiny, you can read it at night and it holds hundreds of books, whereas the physical books are more difficult to take on trips. The same with smaller cameras.

    On the other hand, several articles have been published regarding this in that, people believe we are slowly losing our ability to absorb information at the slower pace of the written word. We are so used to Google giving us our information at a microsecond level that we are unable to focus long enough to take in it by holding a physical book, or photo. On some level, we are all developing ADD! When you think about it, it's a scary thought.

    All that being said, I still believe in the power of the written word, but I have come to appreciate the many advances we've made in this world technologically, and I try to embrace it with a grain of salt. I don't think that blogs with photos cheapen the content as long as the blogger is able to add photos in an enriching way. I used to belong to a group whose motto was that whatever they did, it must, on some level, enrich, entertain and edify. That is something I think we can all apply in our day to day lives, especially if we are in a position to blog our thoughts and perspectives to the world.

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    1. What thoughtful comments. I had never thought about photoshop in that way before.
      I totally agree that we should use our words and other creative works to enrich, entertain, and edify. What do you think about sharing our shortcomings and struggles though? Is there something enriching in that?

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