[dkarl]

I have to cop to being the philistine who welcomes this, while simultaneously feeling a little uncomfortable with it. I bought an entry-level DSLR many years ago, in the naive expectation that if I studied and practiced I would be able to capture something of the really amazing experiences I had traveling, camping, and watching my city change and grow. After a lot of frustration, reading, and talking with more experienced amateur photographers, I realized that's not what photography is about. Noticing that something looks amazing or beautiful to the human eye and noticing that there's an amazing or beautiful photograph to be taken are completely different things, and the best photograph will be different from what you see with the naked eye. Instead of naively trying to capture my experiences, I had to learn to "see like a camera" and see the possible images that could be created via lens choice, camera settings, and post-processing.

Not only that, it's hard work. After talking to some better photographers about their photos I realized the experience they were having when they captured a great photo was the experience of working hard at capturing that photo. That was the only real experience they ever captured, and they did not expect there to be any trace of it in the photograph itself. In other words, my dream of capturing my experiences was a naive fantasy, and there were only two rewards: loving the process, and occasionally creating a beautiful photograph.

Sounds a lot like programming, doesn't it! When I bought my DSLR I was basically like the guy who decides to write an app because it would be cool to have the app and cool to have written the app, without realizing that the experience of writing the app far outweighs whatever pleasure might come from the result. If you don't derive enjoyment and pride from the process, there's no way that any result will repay the effort.

And I was naive enough to think I could co-opt this hard artistic work to document the experiences I had as a non-photographer! That would be next level shit. I would have to be so good at noticing and capitalizing on the possibility of beautiful photographs that I could pick and choose the ones that happened to coincidentally reflect my non-photography-mediated experience. And that means I'd have to attend to the photographic possibilities at the same time that I was attending to my own experience that was somehow separate from photography even thought my photographic skill was actively engaged. Impossible, at least at the skill level I felt I could realistically aspire to.

But if the photographic expertise and cognition were in a piece of tech that I could carry with me, the whole idea would make sense again. My vacation photos would be like my wedding photos: a big stack of expertly shot images from which I could choose the ones that captured my experience best. Whoah. That's pretty much what I was looking for in the first place. I just wanted to share and remember.

Go ahead and embed this in my contact lenses, please! As long as I can adjust my preferences to get somewhat realistic images. I don't need ML giving me a chiseled jawline and making all my sunsets hot pink.

[yyyymmddhhmmss]

As a photographer for as long as I can remember and traveled the globe to so many exotic places in wild contexts, I just shed a tear reading your comment because it brought to realization something I have always had trouble understanding in my relations with others, and how they understand, or relate, with what I do.

I encourage you to question your app comparison idea. Programmers rarely come up with the best apps, and phtotographer who know every technical detail abut cameras are likewise not usually very good photographers. The product and the production are separate issues, and the job is in finding a poetry in them. Poetry is music with words. The music comes first, and the words give it a shape, like an orchestra. In the case of photography, your eye comes first. There is no experience; only sight. Only visual sight. and the camera gives it a shape.

I have never thought of it like you. For me, the photograph always begins in my mind, already as a photograph. In fact, for me, the camera is only in the way. The camera offers no benefit or opportunity; only problems to contend with. The photo exists before the camera comes out of the bag, and the only reason to use the camera is to share that photo with some one else.

I do not have experiences. There is no “experience”, as you say. There is only opportunities to create photographs, but until I have the photograph in my mind, there is nothing to shoot.

I have been in many situations with people in which they got upset with me for leaving my camera in my bag. Whatever their interest, they would not understand why I was not shooting photos in said situation. The opposite is also very common, in which they don’t understand why I would be. Reading your comment just clarified to me the problem. I can’t believe I never understood this before.

It’s funny to me how Instagram has popularized my way of experiencing the world, but in a social context. I spent half my life doing what these Instagrammers are doing and never felt bad for a second. Travel for the photos! Why not? I never felt a lick of shame. But I was building and creating photographs, not a social network. I guess that’s the difference.

[dkarl]

I think you have more internalized technical skill than you give yourself credit for. For me (and other more skilled amateurs that I talked to) there was a need to consciously think about what images are possible versus not. Otherwise I would spend all my time thinking about bad or impossible photos.

For example, I'm on a balcony right now, and I might notice a detail of a cloud behind a corner of a building three blocks away that would make an interesting composition if I had a telephoto lens with me. That's a waste of attention (and frustration) if the only camera I have with me is my iPhone. Or I might see an interesting building and see in my mind the dramatic photo that I'd get if I walked right up to it with a wide-angle lens, but if I don't have a wide angle lens with me, it's not going to happen. I might even have in mind an image that can't be captured at all, because I'm not yet a master of the equipment. As I got better at using the equipment, I learned to focus on the images that could be captured with my current skills and what I was carrying, and let everything else go.

Separate from the question of what's possible is what's good. I might see a photo, take the photo, and discover later that it has no impact, because I haven't learned the skill of knowing how the static image will feel when every other aspect of the experience has been removed. In photography, the golden hour is an oppressive reality. When I'm out backpacking, I can be thrilled and overwhelmed by an amazing vista any time of day, but no matter how amazing it is to see in person, if the light isn't right, the pictures are going to be boring. A more experienced friend tried to explain this to me, but I wasted hundreds of shots trying to prove him wrong before I gave up and followed his example. Well, I follow his example of not bothering shooting landscapes during the middle of the day, not his example of waking up at 4:30am so he can hike to the best position and set up to take advantage of the morning light.

It’s funny to me how Instagram has popularized my way of experiencing the world, but in a social context. I spent half my life doing what these Instagrammers are doing and never felt bad for a second.

That's a comparison that I've thought a lot about, in the context of Facebook. Communicating a person's experience is a core conceit of Facebook, just like my initial misconception of photography. Just like photography, when you try to get good at it, you find that the opportunity to create a post that communicates a certain experience coincides with actually having that experience much less often than you would expect. You can be having a great time and realize there's no way to share it in a way that makes sense to others. Likewise, you can be in a boring or unpleasant place and happen to find a perfect backdrop and some props for a selfie that makes it look like you're having a blast somewhere very chic. So that's what you do.

You would think that with over a billion active users of Facebook, many of them sincere people who find it hard to present themselves on Facebook, there would be guidance out there for people hoping to communicate authentically on social media. But if you look for tips on social media, you instead find advice for people trying to succeed at social media, either financially or according to the metrics of the medium. Like photography, if you take it seriously, you have to give up any naive notions of authenticity. If the situation is conducive to making a funny and relatable post about feeling a certain way, that's the post you make, no matter how you actually feel. If there's no funny and relatable thing to post, then you don't, no matter how much you long for people to understand how you feel in that moment, just like if the light isn't right you don't even bother looking through the viewfinder, no matter how much you're struck by the beauty of the scene in front of you.

Instagram seems to be a mix now of people using it to present themselves as represented by their lifestyles and people using it to present interesting photographs, often but not always of things that were designed to have visual interest in themselves, such as art, design, fashion, and architecture. Of course there's inherently an element of the former in the latter. I suppose I must sound very cynical saying that, but it's something I can't stop noticing, and I don't know how to feel about it.