Of all the social ills befalling
our society—and they are legion—I’d say the “selfie epidemic” is mostly a
non-problem.
Digital photography is a
miracle.
Like the
internet, which has allowed me to indulge my writing compulsion, digital
photography has given me the opportunity to cater to my photography bug to an
extent I never would have if the medium still consisted of 35mm SLRs, fragile
film, fade-prone paper images and brittle negatives.
I’ve always loved to take
pictures—bought my first SLR with my first tax refund in 1974. But I could never afford to acquire all the
paraphernalia and classes it would have taken to properly indulge my
fascination with photography…in the world in which I was raised, one did not “waste”
thousands of dollars on a hobby, and I knew I was not smitten enough with the
medium to develop it into a career. So I
invested in a string of bottom-of-the-line SLRs with inexpensive filters and
equipment, purchased countless rolls of film, and amassed boxes of thirty years
worth of prints and slides. Some of them
not too bad, given the bargain-basement gear with which I was working.
In 2003, I bought my first
digital camera—a primitive thing, by today’s standards. Can’t offhand recall how many megapixels it
was…if there was indeed an entire megapixel to be had in those first heavily pixilated
images. So, through a subsequent string
of ever-improving digital cameras, I’ve amassed a couple thousand digital
images. Again…some of them almost
creditable.
Yet in all those boxes, and
among all those megabytes, I might personally own less than a dozen pictures of
myself. When you’re typically the one behind the camera, if you want to
acquire a shot of yourself at family functions, weddings and vacations, you are
obligated to walk up to some other person, hand them your camera and say, “Here…take
a picture with ME in it, wouldya?” And
on the occasions when you actually screw up the courage to DO that, the
resulting image generally makes you wish you hadn’t. And you can hardly hand the camera back to
your draftee photographer and insist they keep shooting until they come up with
one you like.
The only recourse is the “selfie,”
and I’ve been taking them for years.
Ever since I discovered that my cameras came equipped with self-timers
that gave me the opportunity to be on both sides of the lens, so to speak. Set the camera down (it’s a real luxury if
you own a tripod), activate the little timer, click the shutter and run. If you’re lucky, you’ll have enough time to collect
yourself, pose and smile. Not enough
time, and you are reduced to a blur on the edge of the group…like a bit of
accidentally captured ectoplasm. Too
much time, and your pose begins to decay…you lose concentration, turn your
head, close your eyes, swat at a bee… Creating
the perfect selfie is a skill in its own right.
Which is why “delete” is my
favorite button on the camera, slightly edging out the self-timer. I can take dozens of atrocious pictures—and believe
me, I do—and with the touch of a couple buttons, *poof* they are gone
forever. Love, love LOVE!!!
My creativity knows no bounds when it comes to contriving to get myself into a picture...
So what harm does it do to lighten
up and let folks smile, instead of cringe, at pictures of themselves? There are way more important things to
complain about…
