Picture Perfect

If you were born after the year 1995, your understanding of photography is "if I don't like this picture, I'll just take another one." Even for us born prior to that, it's become the norm.

In moving toward the digital age, we've created a culture that's centered around replaceability. All technology is responsible for this development, but cameras are by far the most prominent.

When cameras first came out, taking one picture was a feat, so people would prepare for that single "perfect" picture. As the technology improved and the price for film dropped, people began to take multiple pictures to capture a single event as a safety buffer.


Digital cameras became a household object around 2000. The technology became more affordable because the demand increased and the producers competed for market share.


With digital cameras, not only are we capable of taking new photos when we don't like the one we just took, but we replace our cameras often because the technology has become so cheap. Cameras have even become a stock in phones, making it even easier for you to capture life on the go.

Blackberry OS10 has a function that will allow you to scale back and forward seconds when a picture is taken to find the perfect picture. Scalado, a Swedish company, first invented the technology, but Blackberry is making it more prominent.

With the software developing this quickly, we no longer need to take multiple pictures and choose the one we like the most. We can edit our lives and create that "picture perfect" moment.

And the companies are telling you to replace their hardware every year because of their new technological advancements.

The two cameras were released only a year apart. Bigger is better. New is better.

This technology evolution has created cheaper, better products and software that make our lives "picture-perfect." However in doing so, we've come to view things as replaceable. If we don't like something, we get rid of it and find the "perfect" one. Or if we're interested in newer, we should go for newer. There is always better out there, and we deserve the best. It's a belief system that permeates into every facet of our beings.

When we took photos by film, there was a tangible aspect to it. We also could only take a limited amount of photos, so we had to choose what to immortalize. Even though people would interrupt and possibly ruin a photo, we kept the photos because they were valuable. We mounted them in frames and in albums and looked fondly upon them even when someone's eyes were closed.

Now, we've created an artificial world and life of constructed perfect moments. There already is a counter-culture movement of taking photos by film or candid digital photos. They're trying to capture a raw feeling and emotion attached to the picture.

Wedding photographers capture raw emotion through staged photographs. The photos are pretty, the locations are chosen, and the goal is to create a beautiful and intimate image. If the photographer is good, then the emotion is real. The couple's excited, and that shows through the photographs. But the photos are still artificial because the concept was predetermined.

In the years to come, the counter-culture will become a larger demographic. People are going to purposely use the Blackberry OS10 feature to create candid photos. The industry will have photographers whose businesses will be built upon capturing candid moments.

New technology will develop to help that trend, and the producers will market candid moments. The cultures will merge in creating a "picture perfect" candid moment. We will want to take the best real moment, something that's perfect in its emotive and candid quality. Replaceable will not change, but what we view as replaceable will.