I had never carried a camera, despite my parents’ and Rosie’s urgings, arguing — self-importantly — that I wanted nothing to come between me and the ‘pure’ experience.
My precious, priceless experiences.
- from Maestro, by Peter Goldsworthy
This passage reminds me of a trip to Floriade — Canberra’s big flower festival — in which there grew a single red tulip in a vast field of yellow ones. My husband takes photographs on his SLR digital camera and uploads them to a stock photography site (if they’re any good). He makes a couple of bucks every now and then, and that red tulip has been a pretty popular photograph.
I mention this because as he was taking that shot, an old man walked past and made some sort of tut-tutting sound about people who are always taking photos and can’t just enjoy an experience.
There are a lot of jibes like that, or about people who insist on listening to iPods when they’re out in nature, or people who spend too much time on social media or RSS feeds or whatever.
Thing is, taking a photograph of something is one way to enjoy it. By ‘it’, I mean ‘life’. Framing the photo, cropping it, enhancing the colour of it, or even just noticing the object in the first place is an enjoyable thing to do if that’s what you like to do.
There is no single way to enjoy a thing. I wish people would keep their anti-camera/anti-tech views to themselves.
Do people have the same complaints about birdwatchers with their binoculars? Or is it only certain types of technology which is the target of derision?
