What does photography need in the time of smartphones and social media?
In the time of smartphones, clicking pictures is so easy for everyone. I remember the family outings during my school time, just 15 years back, when we used to have camera rolls and used to click only selected photographs. In some family get-together when we had to click Pummy aunty posing in her new dress, we hit the flash and told her that it was clicked. It was an evil thing, but what could you do! You had to save it for important moments. Photography used to be an expensive affair and random clicks were out of the question. This made photography a more pleasurable art. People knew the purpose of clicks, lot of thoughts went in each frame. And that is why we still cherish those photographs. Every time you turn the pages of a photo album and all those moments come alive.
The one thing that makes me really happy is that photography has become truly democratic now. Everyone has smartphones with good camera and they use it all the time. But having said that do we truly connect with those pictures? If not all, some? We must cherish some of them. We click so many photos but we rarely look at them. There have never been so many photographs taken. Everyone is clicking. One study says: we are only taking pictures than living in the moment. It goes further suggesting that we don’t even remember the stuff we take picture of. Some of these pictures that we click every day find places on our social media.
It really startles me that we, the smartphone generation, share pictures without a single word about it. How come we don’t have anything to say about a picture that we just took? May be one or two pictures were clicked randomly. But we cannot be indifferent to all the pictures, to all the moments! We must express through our pictures.
Another study that talks about — the optimal length of a Facebook post for maximum engagement is 40 characters. Means engagement slowly wanes the longer you go. The optimal length of tweet — 71 to 100 characters. What about the optimal length of Google+ headline? — 60 characters.
Why am I telling all this? Social media invites our pictures and our written posts. However hard truth is, the pictures we post fail to convey our feelings, emotions or thoughts at times and the written posts are seldom read.
What if we could somehow make both these things really connect with each other?
When we combine both these things together, we get Captiongraphy — expression through clicks and words.
In captiongraphy, we add text to pictures. Now we have picture that literally speaks for itself. Whatever story or feeling you have towards the pictures, narrow it down to one sentence or may be less and add it over the picture and voilà, you have your first captiongraph!
Some might say, adding text will ruin the photographs. My answer to it — they might if you don't handle it delicately. Treat it as a part of your art — choose the typeface, fonts and its color carefully.
Captiongraphy comes into play when you’re posting pictures on social media. It will help you gain attention of your audience and allow you to highlight idea and story of your photographs.
Give it a try, you might fall in love with it! Don't forget to hashtag us (#captiongraphy).
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