It used to be the case that only the most prestigious of events were captured in photographs, such was the scarcity of the technology required. Today you can pick up cameras for pocket money and digital cameras enable a freedom to shoot with almost limitless abandon and minimal cost per shot.
As the availablity of photography increases, so does the frequency and mundane everyday-ness of the subject matter captured. This may seem like a bad thing but this quantitative boom and the associated degradation in the qualitative value of the subject matter compared with, say, the first flight of the Kittyhawk, itself captures our world in a greater degree of detail, resolution (not pixel) and complete-ness than ever before.
Well, basically, I'm seeing lots of intersecting curves on lots of graphs and alongside the debate about subjective quality over quantity, there's another significant issue emerging from all of this, namely the management of thousands of digital photographs we'll all end up with. I've been a moderate digital snapper for about 4 years now and I've easily managed to amass about 4,000 individual shots. In the absence of a better system I've devised my own archiving and numbering disciplines but I haven't categorised and sorted the images individually. In the future there will probably be facilities for automatically facially recognising family members and perhaps systems could be developed that would recognise landmarks in the background like Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower - perhaps in-camera GPS might offer a help in automatically categorising shots by placename or location but all of these possible methods bring with them significant inherent privacy conundrums too.
Which makes me all the more keen to hear what Dr Weinberger has to say about it all in his forthcoming article for Wired.
As the availablity of photography increases, so does the frequency and mundane everyday-ness of the subject matter captured. This may seem like a bad thing but this quantitative boom and the associated degradation in the qualitative value of the subject matter compared with, say, the first flight of the Kittyhawk, itself captures our world in a greater degree of detail, resolution (not pixel) and complete-ness than ever before.
Well, basically, I'm seeing lots of intersecting curves on lots of graphs and alongside the debate about subjective quality over quantity, there's another significant issue emerging from all of this, namely the management of thousands of digital photographs we'll all end up with. I've been a moderate digital snapper for about 4 years now and I've easily managed to amass about 4,000 individual shots. In the absence of a better system I've devised my own archiving and numbering disciplines but I haven't categorised and sorted the images individually. In the future there will probably be facilities for automatically facially recognising family members and perhaps systems could be developed that would recognise landmarks in the background like Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower - perhaps in-camera GPS might offer a help in automatically categorising shots by placename or location but all of these possible methods bring with them significant inherent privacy conundrums too.
Which makes me all the more keen to hear what Dr Weinberger has to say about it all in his forthcoming article for Wired.