Our images don’t look like they used to… Our photos are lies – Part 1

Have you noticed that when you look at images taken longer than a decade or so ago that they look very different from images we see now. I’m not talking about images you’ve taken for your job (if you were/are a photographer back then), I mean the everyday images that we take. The images that record our lives, the people around us and the places we go.

There was a time, before social media hit us hard, that we took images for ourselves, and ourselves only. We would snap a few shots off, and that was that. Editing wasn’t really the phenomenon it is now, phone cameras didn’t have AI to help with images and film rolls were picked up straight from the local shop after development and we got our 24 or 36 prints. If we posted anything online, it was just usually just the one snap, and we didn’t have gigabytes of images stored on our cameras and phones.

“Scrolling through endless sterile, soulless images”

And then suddenly from nowhere, social media erupted and suddenly sites like Instagram appeared and influencers and professional photographers started showing images that they perfectly curated. YouTube started pushing photography do’s and don’ts onto us. AI took hold of our everyday cameras (our mobile phones for most of us), and images were being processed as we pressed the button. Suddenly we had perfect exposures, portrait Bokeh, filters to make things happy and shiny, and we were talking images to impress everyone on social media. 

Gone were the single shot moments that captured life perfectly, and suddenly more and more people started curating multiple images from the dozens of images that they zapped just to get that perfect moment.

Looking through everyday images these days has become sterile. Technically solid images just feel like emotionally empty images. The perfect moment has been rehearsed a thousand times, images follow the rule of thirds, objects are removed or added to reality, lighting is changed to suit the perceived “mood” of the theme, trends come and trends go daily, horizons are perfectly straight, parallax is corrected, features are removed from people’s faces, you’ve chosen your background blur, you’ve flicked through a dozen edits to get the one you need to highlight a perfect moment… The list goes on. The lies grow with each photograph you take. 

“I’m just sitting here, reminiscing”

Pick up an old family photo album, look back at your social media from when your first started, look at your digital images before your started using Photoshop or other over indulgent editing programs. 

But don’t look at the quality of the image… It’s not about the resolution, it’s not about the rules or colours, it’s not about the crop ratio etc… Look at those images and see how different you seen the world back then. 

Sure, film was “developed” and even older cameras had processed files and basic colour options, but it was minimal, and necessary to sell you the product in the first place.

Look at the laughs, the smiles, the blurred photographs, the thumbs over the lens, the bad lighting, the wonky horizons, the in-your-face flash. Look how “real” everything was back in those days. It wasn’t sterile or manipulated in any way, it was full of emotion, full of feeling. You didn’t delete an image, because you only took an image when it mattered.

It will be hard to go back to those days, because we’ve been trained and brainwashed for a long time to only want perfection. To only want the reality that suits our needs. 

But you CAN change and start shooting reality again if you put your mind to it, because there are ways of doing it, and we will look at those ways to achieve this in the next article. 

Please leave your thoughts below, because they will be great to hear.