Thank you Digital Camera!

Digital Camera, especially cheaper digital cameras, have revolutionized the way junta takes photography. Earlier, it used to be on holidays & birthdays stuff, with very basic point-n-shoot film cameras. While albums from those days make great nostalgic items, it was really clumsy to get the negative developed & buy new films everytime, not to mention costly. With the advent of digital cameras & cell phone cameras photography is now almost a spend-once affair. Just buy the camera, click as many as you want and the battery allows, download on the computer, upload on the net, share with the world wide web!

This has given a new vent to the creativity of masses for whom serious photography was a too expensive hobby & films camera don't encourage them to experiment with their amateur skills. The result - the web is filled with all kind of amateurish, yet very interesting, experiments with the art. Take the website - http://www.photofriday.com/ - for example. It publishes a theme every week and accepts entries from anyone & everyone. Just check out the entries to see various interesting interpretations of the theme. Most of those pictures are taken by amateurs and are not really technical masterpieces, but they are interesting nonetheless.

The need for infinite web space to store this huge load of images was natural. Various websites came out offering free webspaces to the users but most of them died down under the enormity of the requirements. Flickr is one photo-sharing network (my flickr profile). For a free user it allow him to save upto 200 pictures as public (visible to anyone). Though the number of images aren't limited, a limit is there on the amount of upload that can be done in a month. The best feature about flickr is the concentration of photo-enthusiasts who are genuinely interested in reviewing & critiquing your work! The fact that you can link images from external websites/blogs is another big plus. Their professional membership at $24.99/year is a bit towards the costlier side, especially if you're paying in Rs. like me.

If you need to dump all of your photos on the web as a backup, Sony Imagestation is a great website for that. Be forewarned though, it doesn't allow linking to the images stored. They do have a limited free membership, but their basic Silver Membership costs a meagre $4.99/year. It is advisable to take the Silver membership, if not higher level of membership. You can order printouts or backup on DVDs, this feature is available with Flickr too.

Various online tools have come up recently to provide interesting options to the people who don't have the luxury of having PhotoShop or other highend photo editing softwares on their machines. Take FD's flickr tools - they have a captioner, a framer; you can make a movie poster or a magazine cover from your photo. The poster above is made using the motivator tool from the site.

Keep clicking, the future is bright!