But the important thing is being there in the right place at the right time with a camera. We all have a camera with us these days, and it's often capable of getting the shot.
Anyone who knows Murphy can probably hear this iPhone snapshot...
Your phone may already contain a masterpiece, writes Mike Johnston in an article for The New Yorker. The trick is finding them...
Today, of course, we’re in the age of digital photography. Back in the eighties, I remember reading that six billion photographs were taken each year, a number that seemed as big as the ocean; currently, although exact numbers can’t be known, the world probably collects that many images every three and a half days. There’s a new way in which we can miss out on great photographs: they can be buried forever in the digital tsunami.It's a great piece and you should go read the whole thing.
Many of us are now like those National Geographic photographers. Almost without trying, we can find ourselves with twenty-three thousand pictures on our camera rolls. Unfortunately, we don’t have picture editors to do the work of sifting and culling and considering. No one helps us discover which shots “have legs” and stay interesting the more we look at them; no one shows us which photographs say what we mean to say; and no one tells us how to identify the best and leave aside the rest. Many of us have also stopped printing our photos. It used to be that we were constrained by our physical photo albums, that we had to choose which pictures to keep and which to leave out. “Redaction is what transforms a quantity of images from a heap to a whole,” the photography critic A. D. Coleman once wrote, referring to the process of culling. The cloud is big, so we don’t redact. We live with our heaps.
Redacting takes time. You can’t edit pictures by thinking; you have to do it by looking. The more pictures you have, the more you have to look.
And then get to curatin'...
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