The image would seem to be the obvious answer but I wonder if sharing isn’t an equally important component. Yes, you can take a photo and enjoy it without ever showing it to someone but that rarely happens. When photos were expensive and rare, we hung them on walls for all to see. As we accumulated more, we sat next to each other with an album in our lap, slowly turning pages. Or on the floor with a shoe box filled with “pictures.” I never cared much for carousels filled with 35mm slides. Trapped in a dark room, clicking through hundreds of photos of Old Faithful.
But now photos are cheap and easy. Like that girl in high school. We take thousands and dump them in the sky or cram them onto our phones drop them into a Facebook stream where they live for a few seconds then die. Marie Kondo asks, “Does this photo spark joy in your heart?” If not, give it away. I’ve done that with a life-time of prints. Feels good, like giving a dog you can’t care for to someone who lives on a farm.
There’s no way to share 10,000 photos.
Been a long time since I had so thoughtful a comment. Thanks for stopping by.
Digital technology really did change a lot about photography. It got a lot of people into photography that never would have if we stayed stuck on film.
In my specific case, it has changed a lot of things for the better. I take a good 30+ phone pictures each night in pinball league; at least one showing the scoreboard before each ball (unless it’s a game where I have to take short videos to get them), and at least one of the final scores. Usually, it’s two or three of each, to be sure I have at least one good shot. The final score pictures are often what we enter the results into the website from.
For the blog, of course, it winds up being whittled down to around five to eight worth including in that week’s post (with the occasional crowd shot or selfie thrown in). The essence of these, of course, is purely documentary, and it’s inevitable that some of them won’t make the cut (I only need one picture of each final score even if there are two good enough to be usable).
I could likely describe a year in my life using only, say, 48 to 72 pictures or so, the equivalent of two or three rolls of film. But yes, there probably had to be many hundreds, or even thousands, more pictures taken that will likely never see the light of day.