To think that digital photos depreciate photography

[Sweetener12]

What do you think about digital photos that are everywhere nowadays? I remember myself doing pictures with my film camera and I was careful not to waste the film, thus only the important moments were captured. Now we have smartphones with cameras and can take as many photos as we want without thinking whether this moment is really worthy. Thus we have tons of pictures and videos we never print out or re-watch and even the stuff that we've posted n social media is never re-watched as well.
I think that digital cameras and digital photography had depreciated the photography in general (from the point of view of the ordinary person, not the professional photographer who makes money out of it). AIBU?

That ship has well and truly sailed. Digital has meant that almost everyone can take photos now, not just those who can afford the expensive equipment and materials, and that’s no bad thing.

I work for a photography company and those who want to spend time taking the best shots they're capable of still spend lots of time and money on the best kit they can. Just because everyone can now take photos of everything (and I'm one of those people and by no means a great photographer) doesn't mean the art has been lost.

The thing with film cameras was that I used to end up with so many unusable photos once they were developed - blurry, someone with their eyes closed, not realising it was too dark etc.

With digital it's easy to take a few and keep the best one or realise that something has happened and retake it.

I agree to an extent OP. I remember how excited I was about getting my photos back (even if some of them were rubbish), how I’d pore over them and spend time lovingly putting them in an album to show off to their best advantage, then get the album out to browse through from time to time. Especially holiday photos, the holiday was never really over until you’d seen the photos.

The ship sailed a long time ago, 20 or so years I would say, unless you were/are a hobbyist or a pro photographer.
Started when kodak created different film cartridges so new cameras needed to be bought and pushed single use cameras ... I was a film developer at the time and we lost a lot of day to day trade.

I think it is great that everyone can snap away on their phones without the cost. I try not to judge the 'photography' .

You probably should have started this thread in 2004 Op.....

Pro photographer here - and I think it's a good thing :)

For most people to be able to document their daily life is an amazing thing and not something I'd change - and people still book me because they recognise my skill - and that there is still, and always will be, a world of difference between a phone snap and a professionally taken & edited photo.

But I would agree not enough people print their photos these days, which does make me sad!

Even with analogue cameras, in the professional setting would use polaroid cameras to instantly check best angle etc.. before wasting the flim. There is still a massive difference between phone photography and those with dslrs. Would you want a wedding photography who uses only their phone, or a family session in a studio with a phone. Not to mention the fact that phones cant sync to lighting nor produce very high res images.
Im glad that photography is open to everyone, people being creative and having fun with their images. Its not as expensive as it used to be. Children are inspired to play with it. Yes we are flooded with images of random things and there is a theory of "proving" something happened. But i for one am glad that access to it is so easy i certainly dont feel that its lost value. If anything i think people appreciate the professional images more.

It depends on what value you attached to photos before there was digital photography tbh, and whether you really did take lots of care over when to take a photo because you were paying for the film. I didn't. For every special printed photo there were umpteen average or crap ones. There's nothing inherently magical about a printed photo.

There are many people working with film cameras but I see the thing you are talking about. Call me naive but I believe that all these pics show your mood and vision at certain periods of life, even if there is no much sense in this photos.
The problem is that we never rewatch the photos we took, I agree with you at this point. I also dont like having tons of photos on my PC since I never look through them once they are sorted to folders so I prefer making slide-shows via <a class="break-all" href="https://smartshow-software.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">SmartShow</a> or whatever slideshow program thus saving not 10 photos but 1 video. Good for a hopeless romantic like me, haha. So yeah, there is nothing bad in having lots of pictures just because you can do that, its like your diary that consists of images, not the words.

I love photography, it's my biggest hobby (though I've lost my mojo and haven't seen it for a while!) and digital has helped me get into it. If we were still back in the days of film and either developing them yourself, where you have little control over the final images, on developing them yourself in your own darkroom, I wouldn't have bothered getting into it because it seemed so laborious and expensive.

Now I can spend hours and hours setting up a shot, even if it's a simple scene on my dining room table, and then another few hours editing it in Photoshop, adding textures and creating a piece of (often rubbish) art.

I do send my images off to print. Photos of my family get put into a physical album and the dc and I often leaf through them and talk about the memories they bring. Photos of other things I have mounted and either put up on the walls at home, give them away to friends & family or enter them into camera club competitions.

Yabu. I am a Luddite in many ways but I don't think that camera phones havee ruined photography; those of us who take it more seriously or who have a lot of enthusiasm for it still do put a lot of effort into it.

I don't think photography has changed that much tbh.
The only printed 'pro' photos people mainly had on their walls when I was in the industry were (late 90s)
Newborn (remember the bounty hospital photos?) and maybe family studio photos.
Wedding photos
School photos

Holiday photos went in albums along with all the other 'everyday snaps'

Pretty much the same nowadays - people pay for Newborn, family and wedding photos. The rest is taken by phone and shoved on online albums like instagram.

I don't think photography has been deprecated, it's been democratised. Yes, people did limit the number of photos they took because of the cost of film, but that meant they probably didn't photograph things they would have liked to. And not all photos were of good quality, often they didn't come out properly, or there was a thumb in the frame, or the subjects were all blinking or gurning.

Now, we can take as many photos as we like and keep the best ones. There' still a place for professional photography but non-professionals aren't limited to 24 images that need to be sent off to the developers.

You still need the same amount of skill to capture a great image digitally.

I wouldn't say editing is easy either.

Digital has definitely democratised photography, that’s a good thing on the whole. There are still plenty of great creative professional photographers working though.

I disagree. I love digital photography. I have 1000s and 1000s of photos of my children. Some are printed and framed, I produce a photo book every year to document their lifes and we have a digital photo frame that cycles through 100s of photos of silly moments that would never have been captured even a decade ago - moments such as me wearing my sons pants on my head to make him laugh when he was poorly, my daughter stuck in deep mud in her wellies (indignant that we were taking a photo and not helping her), a blurry pic of my son scoring his first goal in a football match.

I have videos of snorkelling, skiing, football, dancing etc - although they are less viewed.

Many years ago I used to have a film DLR that went with me to Africa. I went through 3 films in a hour with mountain gorillas and only about 4 pictures were useable. A mobile or go pro would have given me so much more without distracting from the experience. Even my digital DLR would have allowed me to take 100s photos without having to keep changing film in the middle of the rainforest.

I think it's the other way around, in that most people were forced to invest in photos because the means of getting them was so difficult, when it's actually not that important to most people.

Though that has now been reversed by instagram, because people want their photos to be perfect!

Serious arty types are still serious and arty.

I love digital photography. Taking 4 or 5 pictures of a moment and choosing one to keep rather than only having one blurry dark one that costs money to print.

I love sitting and choosing the 50 or so pics that will go into a photobook for the year. We have done a photobook every year since my eldest was born (19 now) - the "kids" love to look through them. My parents are both dead now, so it is poignant looking through and seeing the best of them (not the blurry old pic, falling to bits that had 3 people with eyes closed, one smoking and one eating - the only photo my mum had from her childhood.). Thinking that in future, our kids will show their kids - this is grandma and grandpa (and great grandparents too) really brings it home. Digital photography has opened up a whole world of archiving of family history. I love it.

Digital photography and filming has levelled up the playing field.

I disagree too.
You can tell the difference a mile off.
It has created a shed load of shite photographers though who think they can charge people for pictures just because they own a ‘often beginners’ dslr.

OK, boomer.

(YABU. More people can more easily get into photography, for cheaper, and they are easier to store and find).