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When was the last time you took a clear, vivid image with your camera, and did not alter it?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
1816 was when the first successful was captured by a camera made by Nicéphore Niépcemade. Ever since then inventors have been perfecting the camera to make the pictures more clear than ever.
As the years continue to progress, the technology and knowledge of the camera kept on improving. The camera got smaller and the picture is more realistic. Pictures began to come out as clear as the actual image itself. Some lenses even allow over 50x showing microscopic images. These images look tangible and can be uploaded in seconds. But now the idea of a “good picture” has taken a complete 180.
People today are now taking photos with lesser quality, and the photos no longer appear clear or natural. This may be because in a picture, the photographer does not want to see reality through their lens, since they already see enough of it through their own eyes.
“I like to hide flaws… which is why I put a filter on my photos, “says junior Kelsey Attamante. Kelsey currently owns a cutting-edge camera, a Cannon SXX40, which can take high-quality images, but still decides to distort them. Kelsey is looking forward to taking a new photography class to be offered next year at Verona High School.
“Effects make pictures seem more dramatic,” says Kelsey. Like most photographers, she uses filters to distort pictures to distract the focus from the actual subject of the picture. The focus now is the coloring of the photo, and the effect you chose to put on it instead of the person, landscape or object. This distracts the viewers from the reality of the picture itself, and what is truly behind all of that editing and augmentation.
Should a picture be taken for artistic purposes or to capture memories?
An app available on the iPhone called, “Instagram” has accumulated 10 million users. These users take a clear, crisp photo on their iPhone which uploads to this app. Once it is uploaded they can pick from 17 different filters which changes the hue and appearance of the image. These filters range from black-and-white to an old, rustic 60’s photo look.
“I feel so cool uploading an artistic “Instagram” picture” says Michelle Yeager, a VHS junior. She explains that she is no longer satisfied with taking a simple picture, and that she feels the need to edit each and every one of her photos.
When Kodak introduced paper film in 1888, it allowed the cameras to capture 100 images. This began the trend of taking more pictures than necessary, and today we have the ability to take over a million photographs on one single contraption.
Today various numbers of people are trading in their tiny, digital camera for a large, old-fashioned film camera. It is no longer popular to carry along a camera the size of your palm, but to fashion a big camera around your neck.
It is almost as if the photography business has taken a time machine back in time because of how much people are currently going back to the “old-ways” in photography.
As soon as technology allowed us to take pictures of reality, we decided change the same image into a complete opposite picture to avoid the truths of life.
Strangely, once we grew accustomed to taking clear, vibrant pictures for granted we started to constantly distort them.