If half of the world population has a phone with a built in camera and every one of them takes around ten pictures a day, then this adds up to more than 10 trillion photos every year, reported Worldwide Image Capture Forecast. The challenge is to transform this huge mass of pictures in useful, uplifting and inspiring ways.
“I take pictures of anything that is inspiring,” said Alicia Tiffany, a junior majoring in English from Japan, “and when I am with family and friends. Here there are a lot of beautiful places, things you usually don’t see, like the mountains and the ocean together. [In Tokyo] you can be inspired in different ways. The environment here is more relaxed. Back home everything is busy.”
“I take pictures,” said Stetson Richey, a freshman majoring in business from Utah, “when I am at the Polynesian Culture Center with the tour group that I take, with friends I meet, cool experiences and activities.”
Sharing memories is Tiffany’s primary reason to take and share pictures, whereas other people use it more as a form of communication. “I’ll either send pictures to my brothers and my parents. If I feel like it I post them on Instagram, but usually I just send them through messages.”
She mentioned Instagram as one of her preferred platforms for pictures. “Sometimes when I see a quote that I really like, I put it with a picture. I like that they let you post videos now [too].”
Jocelyn Carpenter, a sophomore and undeclared major from Missouri, commented on her preference of printed pictures due to their tangibility. “You can keep them on your phone and computer as long as they don’t get randomly deleted. Sometimes when I get bored I go over old pictures of soccer games or trips on vacations to different places again.”
She continued, “I usually just save [my pictures]. If I like them I post them, but that is not that often. Before I have printed them off and put them in picture frames for people.” She remembered doing so for her aunt before she left to Hawaii.
Richey said, “I don’t usually use Instagram or Facebook. I mostly send them as text messages, download them on my computer or print them of and send them in a letter to a family member.”
“I have seen people make collages and cards.” Tiffany said. It becomes a challenge to creativity and art to do something lasting with the pictures we take.
Carpenter said, “My roommate printed out a ton of [pictures], cut them out and made a huge collage on her board. There is a thousand faces on there. People look at it and say, ‘There are thousands of eyes!”
Richey stated, “If I really like a picture I make a poster of it and put it in my room. I have seen people put them on their phone case.”
Carpenter continued, “I’d like to be able to keep them in a centralized location where I know they won’t be deleted or lost,” she said, much like when you lose your phone and with it a thousand of your pictures.
“Eventually I want to do this, but it’s not on top of my to-do-list.” Tiffany concluded,
“It is really easy to take pictures nowadays, but because of that there is so many that they kind of lose their meaning a bit.”