Trigger Happy Folks

From Pagenation

There are an estimated 100 million digital cameras in people hands. It has been thought that about 35 billion images taken of which a quater (25%) of all digital images captured by are deleted. That still leaves a lot of images captured as 28 billions. Of these only 13% of digital images captured ever end up on paper. By contrast, an estimated 98% of film images captured eventually were printed. Instead, most digital photos are stored on computer hard drives. PicturesMatter.com, a Web site set up by the digital processing industry to promote picture printing is educating people about how fragile these digital images are. Sooner or later computers are going to crash, and these images have a chance of being lost forever.

Online photo archiving and sharing has exploded. One of the largest sites, Webshots.com, has nearly 120 million archived photos available for view and gets about 15 million visitors a month. Every day, people upload more than 500,000 photos to the site; to date, more than 5 billion photos have been downloaded. New player, Flickr.com which opened for business summer 2004, already have half a million people plunked in 8.2 million pictures.

Side story: Children, says child psychologist Kenneth Condrell of Buffalo, actually need photographs they can hold to foster a sense of emotional well-being. In other words, all those family slide shows your parents made you sit through were actually good for you. Condrell is so convinced of this that he has been hired by the digital processors for a media tour of the country to promote the printing of family photos. "Pictures that show kids with loved ones add to their sense of feeling secure and loved," Condrell says. "Children love to go back and see themselves as babies and toddlers and how important they were to everybody. It helps develop a memory bank and an identity as a family member."

Some compared mushrooming digital photography to a map of the world that grows in detail "until every point in reality has a counterpoint on paper" the twist being that such a map is at once ideally accurate and entirely useless, since it's the same size as the thing it's meant to represent.

With the glud of digital photos, people just have to get used to a new way of interacting with photographs. The digital deluge may make it harder for single images to stand out of the dense crowd, but it also offers greater intimacy with friends and family and a new means of communication among strangers.

The digital shooting spree is only expected to accelerate as a growing number of camera-phone shutterbugs join the ranks of those reveling in pictures immediately available and easily shared.

Also if life gets recorded in real time, it hardly counts as a record at all. In the end, photo must be channelled to the right audience.