- World Photography Day (August 19) celebrates the art, craft, science, and history of photography.
- Photography teaches us the valuable skills of composition, light, framing, timing, and intention that are applicable beyond taking pictures.
- Smartphones can make it more difficult to develop these skills, which enhance how we see and experience our environment.
A few years ago, I witnessed a scene that demonstrated how smartphones can significantly alter how we see and experience the world.
I was in a spot with tremendous natural beauty, and I saw a woman standing at the edge of a scenic overlook. She turned her back to the landscape, raised her phone so it captured both her face and the scenery, and tapped on the phone’s screen. She briefly glanced at the screen, smiled, tapped again, and then slipped the phone back into her pocket. The whole transaction took about eleven seconds.
A few feet to her left, there was a man in his sixties experiencing his environment in a completely different way. He stood still for several minutes, holding a camera in his hands. He wasn’t looking at or through the camera; he was looking at the light. It was the “golden hour”—that time before sunset when, on certain days, the world is temporarily bathed in a golden hue. He was waiting for the perfect moment, when that golden tone would reach the rock face across from his location. When the time was just right, he brought the camera up to his eye, exhaled, and pressed the shutter.
I think about that moment fairly often. And I’m thinking about it again today, on World Photography Day. This informal holiday commemorates the day (August 19, 1839) when the French government purchased the rights to the Daguerreotype photographic process and enabled anyone to use it for free. It was a “free gift” that significantly accelerated the progression of photography and photographic innovation.
We should definitely celebrate the day—and all the advances over the years that have let us capture vivid scenes, pursue new avenues for artistic expression, and enhance our memories of particular moments. But today, I’m also contemplating a difficult question: With the introduction of smartphones, which dramatically simplify photography, what have we gained and what have we traded away?
Five Skills Photography Teaches Us
Photography has always required some skills. But the skills required to take snaps with your mobile device today are pretty minimal. For basic photos, you just have to know how to open the camera app and tap on the screen.
Still, even with simple point-and-click cameras, photography opens opportunities for developing new skills—not exclusively photography skills, but visual skills. Using a camera of almost any sort enables us to learn at least five skills that can enhance how we see and experience the world. The question is whether smartphones rob us of those skill-development opportunities.
- Composition: When we compose an image for a photograph, we are thinking about how to arrange the visual images within a frame. How we compose that image involves multiple decisions. We can decide what to include, what to leave out, how close subjects should be to the edge, what subjects should be in the center, and more.
These types of decisions are certainly not limited to photography. As a graphic designer, I am often thinking about what to include and—more importantly—what to leave out as I create visual stories for brands.
Smartphones, however, might deprive us of compositional decisions. When your phone automatically widens the field to fit everything in, for example, it is making a compositional decision for you, and it almost always includes too much.
- Light: Photography is really all about light. Beyond adjusting how much light a camera allows in, photographers are continuously thinking about how the direction, strength, and hue of light affect an image. Through photography, we learn that hard light coming from the side creates drama and tension. Soft, diffuse light creates warmth and intimacy. Even when we’re not taking pictures, we can use this knowledge about light to change and optimize our environment.
The auto-exposure capabilities of smartphones (and other cameras) eliminate light decisions. These devices read the scene and find a technically acceptable middle ground. In doing so, they make it too easy to avoid decisions that could enhance the story you want to tell.
- Framing: When you point a camera at a scene, you can use elements within that scene to frame your primary subject. For example, you might use a wall, a tree, or the edges of a mirror to draw attention to your subject. Framing might require moving yourself or at least repositioning the camera so the subject and the frame show up where you want them.
Framing teaches us to contemplate the relationships between subjects and their surroundings. As we move in our environment, our perspective of those relationships changes.
With smartphones, we might move less. In particular, smartphone selfies are often taken from the same distance and a similar angle—the distance of an outstretched arm, maybe angled slightly to highlight our best features. We lose the practice of changing our perspective and creating new frames.
- Timing: The timing of pressing a camera’s shutter can significantly alter an image. There might only be a fraction of a second when everything in the frame is in our preferred relationship to everything else. Photography reminds us that the world is in motion, and we must be ready to act at exactly the right instant, because any given moment is unlikely to repeat itself.
Smartphone cameras—and some other digital cameras—eliminate the need to hone our timing. If we use burst mode and generate a bunch of photos in sequence, we’ll probably catch something usable. Of course, “usable” is not the same as “intentional.”
- Intention: Photography can teach us how to be intentional in our actions. Before we raise the camera to an eye, we might ask, What is this image for? What does this scene say to me, and what do I want to express to others? For some photographers, intention is what differentiates “taking pictures” from “making photographs.” You are not just recording some visual elements but instead producing a visual statement.
Smartphones do not prevent us from being intentional or artistic. But the ease with which we can snap numerous pictures at any given moment does make us less likely to fully consider our intent for each one.
Back to the Scenic Overlook
The woman I saw at the scenic overlook accomplished her goal. She created a record that she was there and (likely) shared that moment, instantly, with her friends and family. As long as she decides to keep that image, she’ll have a way to augment her personal memory of that experience.
The man who waited a few minutes for the light to change made something different with his camera. Through a series of deliberate decisions about composition, light, framing, and timing, he created something intentional.
Whether his resulting image is any better than the woman’s is completely subjective. But he used skills that he probably learned through photography and that are transferable to many other aspects of life. Those of us who rely on smartphones alone for photography might have to work harder to develop those skills, since smartphones, for better or worse, do not require us to make several key photographic decisions.
In any case, on this World Photography Day, we should celebrate the ability for just about anyone to create images, whether their goal is to document moments, share experiences, or produce art. And we should celebrate everything that photography can teach us about seeing and experiencing our environment.
A: World Photography Day (August 19) celebrates the art, craft, science, and history of photography. It commemorates the day in 1839 when the French government purchased the rights to the Daguerreotype photographic process and enabled anyone to use it for free. That act helped spark interest in photography and accelerated photographic innovation.
A: By using cameras to produce images, we can learn about composition, light, framing, timing, and intention. These skills are not limited to photography. They can help us see and experience our environment in new ways.
A: Smartphone cameras make it easy for just about anyone to take pictures. But by removing the need for some key photographic decisions (such as how to use light and when to press the virtual shutter), they might make it more difficult for people to acquire visual thinking skills that photography has traditionally helped cultivate.
