Recently I attended a graduation for a small class of registered nurses. There were twenty graduates, sixty invited guests and two-thousand digital cameras. If sasquatch had shambled through the auditorium we’d have had definitive photographic evidence of his existence….along with his hair color (brown), eye color (brown), and shoe-size (fifty-one triple-wide).
Each time a graduate crossed the stage, a handful of audience members popped up like meerkats emerging from their burrows — except (outside of Disney cartoons) meerkats generally don’t engage in flash photography. When the next graduate walked, an entirely different set of people popped up. The whole thing felt more like a runway session at a Milan fashion show than a commencement ceremony. All that was missing was the bass-heavy music and the lame announcer saying, “Angie is wearing a black gown with a mortarboard hat. Perfect attire for the new graduate! Steve has chosen to accent his outfit with honor cords! Here comes Harry with a daring, backless number and the words ‘Hi Mom’ emblazoned in masking tape on his hat!”
To be fair, at least the guests stayed more-or-less in their seats. If you’ve been to any kind of public event featuring small children lately you’ve probably noticed that the digital dads all fancy themselves linebackers.
You’ll have a dozen or so kids on a stage trying to remember the words to “America the Beautiful” — Oh beautiful for spacesuit guys and amherst whales and rain. And peppered mountains major suit along the fat-free train!” – while the moms and grandmas sit nervously while the dads rush the stage. I don’t know if they’re fulfilling a latent paparazzi fantasy or just completely clueless that they’re trampling other people in their quest for the perfect shot. Further scientific study is definitely indicated, but good luck finding a scientist willing to put themselves in that kind of danger. Looking for lost tribes in the Amazon or working with exotic diseases is simple and safe compared to getting between digital dads and their offspring.
Another part of this phenomenon that deserves study is the sheer variety of equipment these guys possess. If you hid at the back of the stage behind the kids (probably the safest spot in the auditorium) you’d see cameras ranging from the obscenely expensive and complicated (the Pro-Journalist XJQ55ZZZY – now with go-faster stripes) to snapshot cameras (the HomePhoto 25 – featuring a six color LCD screen and a full byte of memory) to the one poor guy who always forgets his camera and whips out his flip-phone.
The actual cost of the camera is usually an indicator of how tough it is to use. Mr. Flip-phone presses a button and click he’s got a picture.
HomePhoto guy has to wait for his camera to boot up. (Something that your famous photographers like Ansel Adams, Richard Abadon never had to worry about. Instead, they were concerned with trivial matters like lighting and mood and composition.)
For professional photo dude, taking a picture is more complicated than operating most modern weapon systems. With all of the meters, gages, interlocks, bypasses and settings on his camera, it would probably be easier (and faster) for him to sketch the image than it is to take a picture.
If there were a locker room where these guys met before the concert, you just know they’d be slyly checking out everybody else’s equipment and commenting on it.
“Hey,” the guy with the professional rig would sneer at HomePhoto guy, “Nice camera. Does it come with a matching purse?”
Flip-phone guy would probably sit quietly in a corner and hope nobody noticed him.
The funny thing is, in the dim light of the auditorium, these cameras probably all produce equally lousy pictures. That’s okay, though, because for the Digital Dads it’s not about the pictures, it’s about being in the best spot.
For the poor kids, it’s a lesson in what it must be like to be a celebrity. Maybe some good will come from this after all. If the kids are traumatized enough, they’ll do anything – including actual work – to avoid becoming a Paris Hilton famous-for-being-famous clone.
Unfortunately, the rotten quality of the pictures is inversely proportional to the quantity taken. With no film to buy or develop, the Digital Dads are free to shoot dozens (or even thousands) of photos without worrying about the cost. Which would be fine if they didn’t feel compelled to share the pictures with the rest of us.
In the “old days” (pre-digital) if someone wanted to bore you with their photos, they had to invite you over to their house so they could sit beside you on the couch and force you to go through their albums a page at a time. Or, going back even farther, they’d bring out a carousel slide-projector and you’d get to sit through a hiney-numbing six hours of vacation photos of pay toilets from around the world.
Now the photographer can skip human contact and just post the pictures to an album on the internet. Then they send you a personalized, automated message which reads:
Dear Friend—I’ve posted some new pictures to my internet album. I sure hope you like them. Your friend, the photographer.
When you click on the link in the e-mail you’re automatically taken to a website where you can see the hundreds of low-quality pictures they took. The only upside is that since you’re home alone, the photographer doesn’t actually know if you’ve looked at the pictures or not.
The other thing you have to remember about digital pictures is that you can’t actually believe what you see. Once upon a time, modifying a photo took expensive equipment and highly specialized skills. Now modifying a photo takes an expensive computer and highly specialized skills. Only, more people seem to be willing to develop the skills on a computer. A few minutes with a program like Adobe Photoshop or the GIMP, and the Digital Dad can vastly improve the photo by removing people he doesn’t like (mothers-in-law are favorite targets for this treatment), adding people he does (swimsuit models), fixing quality issues (substituting a swimsuit model for his mother-in-law) or helping to set a particular mood (substituting swimsuit models for everyone in the picture).
Even the press has fallen victim to digital guys manipulating pictures. Not to name names, but the initials of the service involved are “Reuters”. In a recent famous case, a news photo of an Israeli plane dropping one flare modified to show the plane dropping a swimsuit model. No, I’m kidding. It was shown dropping three flares. But don’t you think the whole thing would have gotten more attention if it had been dropping a swimsuit model?
We might as well get used to this. The Digital Dads are here to stay. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some photos of my mother-in-law that I need to work on.
