Live it before you click it.

It was just after a trip. The temporary whatsApp group set up for the trip was still buzzing. People were uploading photo after photo. Edited colour corrected digital images. What were these meant to signify? I couldn’t help wonder.

Photos, I always thought, were supposed to preserve a part of your experience, with a moment or a place. And the word “part” is important. Because that is all photos can do. Record a part. Only one out of the five senses. Even sight, the sense that a photo is supposed to capture, is caught with limitations. Limitations the camera companies are working hard to erase.

Credit is to be given where it is due. The technology of image capturing has taken unbelievably huge strides. Both in software and hardware. It has become better and cheaper.

But the better and easier photo is, instead of preserving your experience, stifling it. Think back to the time when the kodak films used to reign. A roll had 36 films. Photos had to be rationed. You took in the world around you. Experienced it. And took a picture or two. Not like today, where every pretty tree stump and corner bench had to be clicked. Reach a place. Take an average 10 snaps. Move. It’s the same story in every functions. Get togethers. Parties. We are forgetting to live the moment in favour of recording it.

And what happens to these recordings?We browse through them once. A fraction of them surface in social media.Then these photos languish, sorted or unsortes, depending upon your digital house keeping policies, in the memory device of your choice. Perhaps it was the allure of am actual physical existence, but our old 36 photos used to fare loads better than these.