You know what? I fucking hate selfies.
Don't get me wrong, the occasional arms-length snap with your phone when you're out with your mates is fine, but that's more about the occasion than just taking a picture of yourself. I'm talking about the people who seem to be addicted to taking pictures of their own face.
If you go onto flickr or instagram, you'll find people who post nothing but literally thousands of pictures of their own face. Why? Why does anyone need that many pictures of themselves? Here's my face when I've just woken up. Here's my face while I get ready for work. Here's my face while I'm sitting at my desk. Here's me in the bathroom mirror.
Oh, and don't forget: "Here's half my face so I can fill 3/4's of the frame with my tits. I've tagged it #allnatural #nofilters so you know that my skin really is poreless plastic and my eyes really are purple and look like they're glowing. SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME I'M PRETTY! I'VE EVEN COMMENTED HOW UGLY I AM SO EVERYONE WILL TELL ME I'M GORGEOUS!"
(Hint, Instagram sluts...no one who thinks they're ugly takes a hundred pictures of themselves every hour. But if you have such low self esteem you base your whole self worth on fishing for compliments by posting pictures of your tits, have at it.)
It nearly blew my mind when I found that the dedicated selfie-camera is actually a thing.
The Casio EX-TR35 actually makes me angry. It's basically a camera with the lens on the wrong side. Yep, the screen and all the controls are on the same side as the lens. It's literally built for taking arms-length selfies...complete with built in filters and 'makeup mode'. I wouldn't even mind so much if this was a cheap toy, the kind of thing you buy as a gag gift or buy for your 13 year old daughter... but this is a £900 camera (roughly $1300 USD)
Are you fucking kidding me? You can buy a Canon 7D for that...and the worst part is, this is actually fucking selling. It's popular. People are dropping pro-DSLR money on a camera that only takes pictures of your own face...sure you can use it as a regular camera, but as it's a fixed focus, wide angle lens, it's designed solely around selfies...so you're not just spending £900 on a selfie camera, you're spending $900 on a shit selfie camera.
So, by this point, you're probably asking yourself why I hate selfies so much. Why it makes my blood boil. Well, I can sum it up like this:
You have a camera in your hands. For the first time in history we can easily and cheaply capture high quality images and share them instantly with the world, and we can store them indefinitely without them ever fading or degrading over time. Jesus Christ. What an opportunity. What a responsibility.
Imagine if this technology existed 500 years ago. Imagine having access to a vast library of pictures from the 1500's to the present. Imagine everything we could learn, from what the Napoleonic wars looked like, to what average, everyday life was like in that period. You could truly get to know what the people were like back then.
Think of what the most interesting pictures are. Most of the time, it's not the well known, historical pictures that capture the imagination. It's not really even the professional, posed family portraits. It's seeing a snap of what your home town looked like a hundred years ago. The candid shots. Your dad as a teenager rocking those bell bottoms.
We literally have an entire world of possibilites to capture. What are we taking pictures of?
hERe's My faCe, LOL!
If you think I'm being overly dramatic, you're right, I probably am...but I just think it says a lot about us as a culture that when the average person is faced with an entire world to photograph, the one thing they choose to photograph is themselves.
Really. Just how self centered are we?
Don't get me wrong, the occasional arms-length snap with your phone when you're out with your mates is fine, but that's more about the occasion than just taking a picture of yourself. I'm talking about the people who seem to be addicted to taking pictures of their own face.
If you go onto flickr or instagram, you'll find people who post nothing but literally thousands of pictures of their own face. Why? Why does anyone need that many pictures of themselves? Here's my face when I've just woken up. Here's my face while I get ready for work. Here's my face while I'm sitting at my desk. Here's me in the bathroom mirror.
Oh, and don't forget: "Here's half my face so I can fill 3/4's of the frame with my tits. I've tagged it #allnatural #nofilters so you know that my skin really is poreless plastic and my eyes really are purple and look like they're glowing. SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME I'M PRETTY! I'VE EVEN COMMENTED HOW UGLY I AM SO EVERYONE WILL TELL ME I'M GORGEOUS!"
(Hint, Instagram sluts...no one who thinks they're ugly takes a hundred pictures of themselves every hour. But if you have such low self esteem you base your whole self worth on fishing for compliments by posting pictures of your tits, have at it.)
It nearly blew my mind when I found that the dedicated selfie-camera is actually a thing.
The Casio EX-TR35 actually makes me angry. It's basically a camera with the lens on the wrong side. Yep, the screen and all the controls are on the same side as the lens. It's literally built for taking arms-length selfies...complete with built in filters and 'makeup mode'. I wouldn't even mind so much if this was a cheap toy, the kind of thing you buy as a gag gift or buy for your 13 year old daughter... but this is a £900 camera (roughly $1300 USD)
Are you fucking kidding me? You can buy a Canon 7D for that...and the worst part is, this is actually fucking selling. It's popular. People are dropping pro-DSLR money on a camera that only takes pictures of your own face...sure you can use it as a regular camera, but as it's a fixed focus, wide angle lens, it's designed solely around selfies...so you're not just spending £900 on a selfie camera, you're spending $900 on a shit selfie camera.
So, by this point, you're probably asking yourself why I hate selfies so much. Why it makes my blood boil. Well, I can sum it up like this:
You have a camera in your hands. For the first time in history we can easily and cheaply capture high quality images and share them instantly with the world, and we can store them indefinitely without them ever fading or degrading over time. Jesus Christ. What an opportunity. What a responsibility.
Imagine if this technology existed 500 years ago. Imagine having access to a vast library of pictures from the 1500's to the present. Imagine everything we could learn, from what the Napoleonic wars looked like, to what average, everyday life was like in that period. You could truly get to know what the people were like back then.
Think of what the most interesting pictures are. Most of the time, it's not the well known, historical pictures that capture the imagination. It's not really even the professional, posed family portraits. It's seeing a snap of what your home town looked like a hundred years ago. The candid shots. Your dad as a teenager rocking those bell bottoms.
We literally have an entire world of possibilites to capture. What are we taking pictures of?
hERe's My faCe, LOL!
If you think I'm being overly dramatic, you're right, I probably am...but I just think it says a lot about us as a culture that when the average person is faced with an entire world to photograph, the one thing they choose to photograph is themselves.
Really. Just how self centered are we?
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