Impetus: Instagram losers start community dedicated to photos taken with older digital cameras, claiming they’re cool again; but the question is, were they ever uncool in the first place?
It’s articles like this disenchant me from photography. Some arrogant photography snobs on the internet dictate on what’s cool and what’s not, and thousands of idiot sheep with no capability of independent thought buy in, and because perception is reality, it perpetuates this cycle where others fall in place, and suddenly things are cool, and things are uncool at the drop of a hat.
For lack of a better term in context of the related link, I’ll go ahead and call them digicams: portable, brick-sized-or-less, point-and-shoot cameras. Not DSLRs, the big, clunky cameras with detachable lenses that cost more than car payments, or any other cameras that act like Polaroids without actually being called Polaroids.
But anyway, there’s apparently an Instagram community dedicated to photography shot on old digicams, and how they’re declaring that they’re cool again. Leading me to beg the question, when were they ever uncool in the first place?
Frankly, digicams were never uncool; they just became a little outdated in the changing acceptance of what constituted popular photography, and fell behind in technology in being able to capture said popular photography. Everyone became obsessed with bokeh portrait photography, which wasn’t as possible with digicams due to the sizes of the sensors and limitations of built-in lenses. And when more cost-effective options started emerging among DSLRs, digicams kind of did fall to the wayside, and went into the metaphorical and literal drawers that these hipster doofuses declared they did.
And personally, I too appreciated the pursuit of bokeh, and went in the direction of getting myself my first DSLR, and then my second, as well as several lenses that I’ve shelled way more money than I probably should have for a fleeting hobby. But the thing is, I never discounted the digicam as uncool, because I still have several of my old ones, and in the spirit of writing this post, struggled and tried to locate the specs and pictures of my very first digital camera,* that I remember getting at a Wal-Mart using money that I got from my insurance company for a fender bender that should’ve gone to repairing the bumper to my first car but didn’t.
*and holy shit, it was the Polaroid PDC-640 that had a whopping 0.31 megapixels, and had a maximum resolution of 640×480 and an aperture range of 5.6f… and it was also the literal size of a brick
I’ve gone through six digicams in my life, and I technically still have two of them in my possession. My first one, I don’t know what happened to it, although I suspect I gave it to my sister a long time ago. The last two I ever had were Canon PowerShots that I eventually deemed expendable and sold on eBay while they still had some value to them. But I still have my Sony PowerShot that has taken over 10,000 photos on it, and the Olympus before that, that had its own share of photos taken on it.
Both still work, and I could realistically be like these hipsters and go out and take “artful” “photography” with them, but the reality for me is that I don’t like to have too much of any things on my person, and I have an iPhone to take point-and-shoot photos if I need to.
What I really find obnoxious are the bullshit words said by these hipsters who claim that it’s any sort of challenge shooting with a digicam, because frankly there’s little different shooting with a digicam than shooting on the DSLR in automatic mode; all risks of something artistic are stripped out in order to get a clear photograph of what you see is what you get, which ultimately is often the point of taking a picture in the first place.
The things these hipsters say to justify overly-sharp images where everything is in focus makes me roll my eyes and scrunch my brow at the way hipsters tend to ruin everything when they’re trying to make it seem remotely artistic and more complicated than it really is in order to make themselves sound like experts or revolutionaries. They’re pointing and shooting point-and-shoot cameras, and getting some pretty basic but concise photography in the process.
It was never uncool in the first place. It just took a backseat to a more popular trend, but it’s never not been important to have point and shoot photography capable in the world of trying to document things.
