I've been out taking a lot of photographs lately, mostly obscure shots of bits of remote Underground stations. I had been expecting funny looks from the general public while I was out snapping but no, it seems I'm not alone (taking photos that is - I've not yet seen anyone else with a chronic Jubilee line fixation). Everybody's a photographer these days, pointing a lens at anything that moves and plenty of things that don't. We can take photos anywhere any time, and blimey we do. Look, a building (click). Look, a cloud (click click). Look, my dog (click click click click). Look, my new Jubilee line photo blog (click).
Taking photographs used to be slow and expensive. You bought a film, you attempted to load it into a clunky black plastic camera, you took the camera out with you sometimes, and you shot Christmas, birthdays and holidays. You took one photograph of everything, not several, because you were restrained by a limit of 36 exposures. You took photographs only of special things, because developing photographs onto paper cost money. And you had to wait to see how your photos turned out, assuming that the nice lady down at Boots didn't scratch or lose your negatives in the process. No longer. We now have handy digital cameras in various shades of silver and flash mobile phones with surreptitious shutters. Point, click, instant feedback. If a shot comes out wrong, take it again. And again and again and again because there are no longer any costs involved in developing. Just pick your favourite one from fifty when you get home.
And what do we do with all these additional photos? Some get printed, although quite frankly it's a lot of hassle and most people don't bother. Some get emailed to friends and family, a delightful way to share treasured memories across the miles. Some appear on websites, slowing download time to a crawl often for little eventual payback. But most just lie unseen clogging up our hard drive (I've got 1500 on mine, and that's just from the last six months), awaiting deletion or obsolescence. Who can say if even a fraction of the photos we take today will still exist in 20 years time, as technology continues to outpace storage. Pixels are so much harder to access than photographic paper, long term at least.
