The Power of Photos

/ bensbitterblog

My daughter recently went on a 3 day trip with a young women’s group to Southern Utah to go white water rafting. They weren’t allowed to bring their cell phones. Asking my daughter to do that is well, like asking me to do that. Even though I’m not a millennial, I still have trouble letting go of my phone. Since she couldn’t take her phone, but she still wanted to take pictures, we got her one of those disposable waterproof cameras. She was fascinated that you could have a camera that had actual film.

Remember back in the day when you only had cameras with film? Pictures were always terrible back then, because you would have this mystery role of film. Sometimes you would start the roll on a summer vacation, forget that you had some pictures left, and then finish in the winter. When you finally got around to developing the film, so pictures were just masses of bad color and you couldn’t even remember taking them.

Some were underexposed, other were overexposed and you were lucky to get one that actually looked like what you thought it would look like. And every picture counted. Now you take 50 selfies, delete 49 and the rest are just disposable.

Now, photos are valuable in another way. Yesterday, we got to sign up as a part of our companies Getty account and learned just how valuable photos are. If we weren’t a part of the corporate account, it showed us how much each photo would cost on its own. Incredibly, most of them with the highest resolution were $500 EACH!

I’ll take two Getty photos please.

I don’t know many millionaires that would even be able to affored a fraction of the photos on there.Ā  My next door cubicle mate commented about how much power he felt when he was able to download one photo as part of the group.

I was pretty excited about the ability to download one as well. They say pictures are worth a thousand words, but apparently they are worth $500 each if they are good too. And if pictures are worth a thousand words, imagine what video is worth.

Good video done by famous YouTuber’s are even more valuable. Consider this. People that have 9 million subscribers have more people watching their “shows” than a lot of TV shows on the CW. Think about that. No wonder my kids don’t watch much TV anymore. They just watch the YouTube’s.

They are always speaking in the secret language that I often need translated called the MEME language. Some popular YouTuber will do something, it will turn into a meme and then they will speak it to each other. Fascinating, and frustrating at the same time. I try to keep up with them, but with some many millions of YouTube channels, it is impossible to keep up.

Yeah it is.

And yet, here I am stuck with words that no kid will ever read, because they would rather see spend a thousand words on a picture, or 10,000 on a video. Guess I should start my own YouTube channel and just read my blogs to people. Then they would pay attention.

What do you think about the power of pictures? The power of video? Do you still have a camera with some film left that you need to process?

ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH

Bitter Videographic Memory Ben

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42 thoughts on “The Power of Photos”

  1. You’re onto something, BB! You would be wonderful on your own YouTube channel reading your blogs!!! I’d watch!!! šŸ™‚

    Photos and vids are wonderful! Especially the ones of my kids! I love those best-est!!! šŸ™‚

    We do still have a nice camera….but we don’t use it anymore and no film in it to process.

    Hope your daughter had a safe and fun trip!
    HUGS!!! šŸ™‚

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  3. Who are you trying to fool? You already have a YouTube channel… You just need to start recording the blog readings šŸ˜› #NoExcuse (Oops, we’re not on Twitter, here LOL)

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  4. Iā€™m actually felt a sense of loss by our access to pictures. Thereā€™s no longer a need to really think about what you want a picture of or how you want to frame it. But then again, very grateful for the capability to document all my good hair days now šŸ¤£

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  5. When I started my blog (that whole two months ago!) my daughter scoffed and said “Blogs are for old people.” Ouch, kid. I have to say, I do love the YouTubes. There’s admittedly a lot of crap on there but if you know what you’re looking for there are some really good channels. I stick with writing though. Doing videos is so.much.work. Heck, I even watched some “cleaning routine” videos recently and I have no idea how these people keep their houses clean because they have to be spending hours and hours editing!

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  6. I remember as a kid having a disposable camera to take on a trip and thinking that was the coolest thing ever, and now I just use my smartphone as though it’s no big deal. It’s crazy to see how technology has changed things! And I feel your pain; just when I think I’m catching up on the latest meme or trend, I find out that it’s out and been replaced by something else. šŸ˜›

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  7. Forget the words. If two pictures are worth a thousand dollars, I’m going to start selling all the terrible framing and composition I do with my overly-expensive high resolution camera. And nothing is getting deleted anymore.

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  8. Well, since you asked, photos are very cool except the selfie every single day!!!!!! Makes me bitter. I have photos that Iā€™m putting up today. I have a camera but I always use my phone camera cause Iā€™m a bit lazy.

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