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Post by josheikenberry on Nov 7, 2012 22:06:36 GMT -5
I see a lot of people raging at Instagram (and similar services) because, for all our advances in image fidelity, we make a billion-dollar company whose entire business plan is to add fake "defects" to a pristine digital image.
I personally think it's great. Digital photography is such now that even our cell phones have cameras that are "good enough" for snapshots. New advances in digital camera technology tend to be incremental upgrades to existing formats - more megapixels, faster sensors, etc. But that doesn't change what people want to take photos of - their kids, their pets, their day.
Instagram harkens back to a day when we all took film shots of our lives, and stuffed them away in shoeboxes. After a few decades we would yank them out of said shoeboxes, looking over the faded polaroids and reminiscing. Instagram is a digital shoebox. Is it fine art? I doubt it, but neither is most photography.
Instagram introduces flaws to what is arguably a "pristine" digital process, just like how humans introduce flaws to what are arguably pristine technologies.
So what do you think?
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Nov 7, 2012 22:23:23 GMT -5
I personally don't care for it. I want my pictures from my camera phone to be better, not look artificially worse.
I've used it, I've tried it, I really tried to accept it but I just don't. Maybe because I didn't shoot a bunch of film when I was younger(or care much for "photography" when I was shooting film) but it just isn't for me.
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ronwarren
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Post by ronwarren on Nov 7, 2012 22:35:04 GMT -5
I have mixed feelings. I dislike the ease of it, which is ridiculous, I guess. But I see the appeal of the retro look of the images. Maybe it's because I'm old enough to remember the wonky color casts of the 60's and 70's films. I bet a careful viewer of pictures could look at a batch of old prints and fairly accurately determine when they were taken just by the presiding color cast of the film and prints of the day. I sometimes (but not much) apply similar split-tones to images that I take for gigs. But pot-shots from my phone get the full monty of filters all the time.
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engineerd
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Post by engineerd on Nov 8, 2012 9:14:08 GMT -5
I use it for "fun", everyday pictures when I remember about it. It's not for art shots or anything I would want to hang on my wall, but for the everyday "hey look at this" shots it's fine.
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Post by rkarolak on Nov 8, 2012 10:44:14 GMT -5
It's a mix of a social network and a photography tool. People get different things out of it. Does it encourage behaviour we may not like? Maybe. But if people have fun using it and it gets more people thinking about taking pictures and getting creative, I don't have a problem with it. If it gets more people into thinking about photography as a way of communicating, and perhaps gets more people into moving up to more "serious" photography, I don't see a problem.
While the retro filters may not appeal to everyone, many people like it. Perhaps they'll move on, perhaps not. I've seen some impressive photos taken on instagram. I think it gets some people thinking about pushing their phone's camera limits, and that sort of train-of-thought I think is good.
There will always be the food photographers, and those people I don't think consider themselves master photographers, but rather just want to share what's going on in their life and they think that filters' aesthetics are cool. Oh well. Art is subjective. Let them have fun, I say.
I sometimes use Instagram, and sometimes use filters. I think that when I do use it, I think it adds to the mood I'm trying to portray. If it doesn't, I don't use it. I mostly use Instagram casually and for fun though.
A question to ponder: What makes an image "worse" with filters? Couldn't making an image from a DSLR in black-and-white, sepia, etc. be making it "worse" if we were speaking objectively? Perhaps the problem isn't filters, but really the use of them.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Nov 8, 2012 20:40:09 GMT -5
I downloaded it again. Going to give it another shot.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 5, 2012 22:10:55 GMT -5
Just saw this video, made me think of this thread
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