Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about prints vs digital, and the dark side of social media again.
I love my digital cameras just as much as my film ones, and for client work and experimental personal work there’s nothing to beat them, really – especially as I’ve never actually used a darkroom, so with digital I can edit to my own style.
But… there’s something about the ease of clicking, whether it’s on my pro cameras, my little point and shoot, or just my phone, which means that I take literally thousands upon thousands of photos every year which never see the light of day.
There are, obviously, my various blogs, businesses & eight Instagram accounts… but those are curated too, to varying extents, but not every single image I take makes it onto one. Social media tends to be the highlights, the best images, not the blurry-but-still-lovely ones, or the tipsy selfies at weddings with my best friends. Somehow, the culture of sharing our best images (and probably some subconscious “shoulds” from being a professional photographer) mean I overlook some photos which are technically terrible but emotionally wonderful.
Look how much happiness is in this photo!
I’m not sure when that pattern started, but I would like to reverse it – emotion is the most important element of any photo, for me.
And… some of my favourite photos of Dad, which emerged when we were looking for photos to display at his wake, were ones I had genuinely forgotten I’d taken.
As is often the way these days, I have been pondering this, and then today found this post by Emmylou of Chiascuro which resonated.
I’d like to try & follow her example of spending a little bit of time each week sorting through my digital archive (which isn’t very archived, for an ex-librarian), sharing & printing the best photos, and making sure they’re all easily findable and backed up.
So I’m off to spend some quality time with my diary and a hard drive… the glam life of a photographer…!
