If you know me even a little, the first take away you might have is that I absolutely love photography. And you would be right. I have been involved in photography for as long as I can remember, from my youthful days back in Trinidad being the designated camera operator for every camera that passed through the house. My first memory was that of an old Polaroid Land Camera. I remember being so intrigued by it. The damn thing just looked cool.
Am I lying? Look at that work of art.
I then remember my uncle who by then was living here in the states sending us a Yashica 35mm camera. Not sure exactly when that was, but this was a whole different camera experience for me. No more instant images and fanning of film waiting for the image to reveal itself. Gone was that smell so indicative of Polaroid film, now replaced by a shiny new 35mm camera with manual controls and film that had to be developed.
From then on there have been so many cameras in my life and as would be expected loads of images taken over the years. Many rolls of film still left undeveloped, but thousands and thousands of shots taken. Interestingly enough though, I do not believe my experience is at all unique. Maybe the types of cameras I used might have been to some extent, but this general love for capturing moments and almost everything else in our lives seem more to be a human characteristic than something unique to a few. And that characteristic is what inspired this post.
Like I said, I have been shooting and playing with cameras since my childhood, but all of those pictures reside in albums and envelopes, tucked away in boxes and such. The world rarely got to see all the shenanigans captured by so many others like myself, until now. And by now I mean, maybe the last 20 years or so.
Snapfish was one of the first, if not the first photo sharing site out there, launched in 2000 and simply revolutionized our ability to now share our moments. We have always been photographers, seeking a way to let the world experience what we experience, and now we had it. Check out this blog post from Kissmetrics after you read my post of course. 🙂
The History of Photo Sharing,
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/
The share number of photo sharing sites that have since been birthed is mind-boggling, but also equally telling. We love to share our photos. It’s that simple. The reason? I’m not a psychologist, so I leave that level of pontificating to bigger minds.
Wikipedia has a list. A non-exhaustive one, to use the author’s words. But one worthy of a look, real quickly, then get back to reading my post.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/
Like many others I found a way to now allow the others to see what I have been shooting. And I dove into this head on, posting almost any and everything that I felt was a great image. Flickr became my friend very early. But with that also came the ability to see what others were shooting, and there is where my predicament began…