^ I often wonder the same thing.
As someone who once trained and worked as a photographer, I learned to keep all negatives for “just in case” scenarios. That habit replicated itself in the digital-photo world, where it is much easier to save the original digital photos than it was to save film negatives.
Photo editing – as in discarding photos that don’t meet a certain standard – is much harder, in my opinion, than photo taking, so I appreciate your challenge!
A complement to this is that it is always easier to edit someone else’s photos than it is to edit one’s own photos, especially when the subjects of the photos are not one’s friends or relatives.
I met the husband of a travel-agency owner who told me that he lost to theft all his expensive camera equipment on a tour some years earlier. He told me that he no longer traveled with a camera, preferring instead to absorb the scenery without all that intervening equipment.
I’m not ready for that, but, since ordering the Mudita Pure and hiding the camera app on my Android phone, I have become keenly aware of how many people use their smartphones to take photos.
I often wonder what percentage of cloud storage today is occupied by digital photos and digital videos.
I now wonder:
- Is digital photography to film photography as smartphones are to feature phones?
Digital photography and smartphones have given us undeniable benefits over film photography and feature phones, respectively, but at what costs? Your post challenged the conventional wisdom that digital photography gives us only benefits, so thank you for that!
…And expanding in developing countries. Asia 4.56b, Africa 1.22b, South America 422m ppl. That is a lot of phones AND data…
