Looking Back … …

Last year was a big year for digital photography, not so much an obvious big fanfare, most of the changes were small incremental adjustments. Three things that have been around for a while but have come into popular view last year.

1. First there is the death of the “mine is bigger than yours” paradigm.Hardware, gear envy and megapixel concerns should be a thing of the distant past. Most camera, from smartphones, point and shoot, through mirror less to the big DSLR are all pretty good. The camera you have is probably the best one to use right now. Go take lots of photos rather than worry about new camera hardware.  The obvious camera for you, will make itself obvious when you get to about 10,000 photos. It may well be the one you already have.
2. On-line storage, This has seen some strong competition with really large amounts of disk space offered for free, most are connected with social network style groups of services. Flickr, Google+ are two I am familiar with, and I have tried out a few like Everpix (now defunked), Photofeed (I’m still persevering) and Picturelife (given up with its slowness). but honestly I have been underwhelmed and I still use the dropbox facility which has been around for a while now. This just synchs my phones via available WiFi, if and when it is available to a place both on the net and on my harddrive. Sending all your images to “free storage” on the net has a dark side it will use up a lot of your precious bandwidth (and from a smart phone that could become expensive) and if you are not careful this may expose more than you might want to the world. That 10,000 photos equal 1.6 terra bytes if they are RAW 16 megapixels images, that might be several months of your bandwidth!
3. Photo Filters and Photo Apps, the zannier the better! This unfortunately is not a good trend in my view, because they get overused and instead of creating something new and exciting, they are just really boring, after you’ve seen the same effect for the third image in a row. It could have been a great trend but it really requires some user constraint and a lot less “copycat”,”look at me”, fashionista social media self promotion. Perhaps I am being a bit judgemental?