With no travel to new places for work and a lot of work at home, I haven't taken many photos of late, so I sometimes look back at some of my older stuff and see if I can play around with it a bit. I have been editing on my phone using Lightroom mobile, which is limited, but pretty good considering.
Supposedly, pictures of people are more attractive than of other things, but I don't have that many "random" pictures of strangers. I do have a few of my family however and I like using pictures of them in my posts in the same way I like to use my own photos - it makes my posts more mine, more personal. Start to finish, no one else can offer quite the same perspective of the world, the same impression of life - the art of my experience.
These are of my wife and were taken a little over two years ago. I am definitely not a skilled portrait photographer and I have no idea how to use a flash properly, but I do enjoy trying - without putting too much effort into the technical learning part and just kind of bumbling along. It is good fun to bumble.
I am a bit jealous of people in photos, as there really aren't many of me floating about, as I am generally behind the camera or, no one thinks of putting me in front of it. Perhaps I should take the hint. I guess it isn't the end of the world, but it would be nice to you know, have a decent photo of myself of some kind - especially as time marches on. The problem is, my wife isn't interested in learning how to use the camera even at the basic level and after 5 years of the same Olympus (upgraded model now but pretty much identical in functionality), I am not expecting she will learn any time soon.
Of course, I am not the prettiest in the family by a long shot, which I think affects the desire to preserve my looks for posterity anyway. Some things are better left unsaid, some people are better left unseen. I am not from the selfie generation, where people spend thousands of photos perfecting the right angle and pout for an image and then littering the social media feeds with pictures of themselves in the same pose for likes, as if people actually care about the face. The vast majority of selfies are soulless - there is no heart in the composition, no feeling, just a robotic response to the lens in their face, as they have done a million times before.
While some people see it as self-absorption, I think that the "selfie movement" is a cultural cry for help, from people who are feeling that invisible to the world they feel they must advertise themselves to gain relevance. Picture after curated picture, in an attempt to be noticed by anyone at all. I feel that a lot of the depression that so many who do this feel, isn't because of trying to keep up with unreal body image or expectation, it is due to the feeling of unimportance in general, social disconnection and a lack of supportive relationships, no matter the pose.
I think that my wife is beautiful. It doesn't matter what other people think of her in my eyes at all, though she herself might care. I think that this is what a lot of the young people and those pandering for an audience on their looks are missing - that the opinion of strangers don't matter, that teems of adoring fans are no match for an adoring lover, someone who sees the beauty regardless of the bad days and what changes with age.
The people who build their identity and sense of self through the opinions of strangers on who they are today, are going to find themselves replaced tomorrow. Consumers like new and with the amount of choice globally, there is always a new face to look upon, to consume until it is drained of what made it interesting and attractive, until it no longer pulls attention. The irony is that while we look at the slivers of lives of strangers, we fail to see that each day, the people next to us, the people we have known for years, are new too.
Every day, we are presented the face of a stranger and the uncertainty of their next move, we just assume they are the person we knew of yesterday. We fall into the habit of thinking we know them, are blind to the changes they go through and then one day, wake up and realize, the person we have known is gone - and all that remains is a memory fading into the darkened shadows of the unfamiliar.
It may be us who have changed.
Taraz
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