Constant Photography

The era of after-the-fact photography and its impact on the nature of capturing experiences.

Really interesting post on the changing nature of photography from Kottke. He pulls together a few different thoughts on photography and basically lands at the idea that we're moving to a future of after-the-fact photography:

In order to get the jaw-dropping slow-motion footage of great white sharks jumping out of the ocean, the filmmakers for Planet Earth used a high-speed camera with continuous buffering...that is, the camera only kept a few seconds of video at a time and dumped the rest. When the shark jumped, the cameraman would push a button to save the buffer.

Makes me wonder where this new photography will land on the memory versus experience spectrum (an idea from Daniel Kahneman that we basically optimize our experiences for memory rather than experience, which is why we take photos instead of actually paying attention to what's going on around us). I wonder if this doesn't flip that notion.