It’s high school graduation season. I’m at that age where friends, family, and colleagues are celebrating. There’s a timelessness to graduations. At every ceremony I’m reminded of my graduation. Look in the face of any kid in cap and gown and you’ll see your friends’ faces from years ago. But look down a few inches and there’s something new – the phone. It’s the all-consuming device. Kids don’t have conversations any more. They simply get together and use their phones in the same physical location.
The data streams they create and process are simply amazing. Thousands of text messages and hundreds of images per month, and perhaps dozens of videos. Like our grandparents with their Polaroid cameras, most of the images receive no further processing – point, shoot, share. No Photoshop, no iMovie. Just send. And this is where it gets interesting because now we see the rise of apps such as Hipstamatic. Many have mused that just as the cameras in our phones became capable of producing decent images, a generation of tools specializing in degrading those images emerges. Seems crazy.
Hipstamatic allowed me to set the eery mood of this swamp in the field rather than having to load it on my Mac and tweak it in Photoshop.
As a software designer for today’s content creators and an instructor to the next next generation of creators, I look at it differently. There are now creative tools that allow the artist to look at an image and decide the look to apply at the moment of capture. It’s understood that the Hipstamatic or Instagram shooter has forfeited access to a raw file to process in Photoshop, but that’s not much of a forfeiture when the image was unlikely to be processed anyway.
These tools add a degree of creativity back into the photographic process that was lost in the era of one button to Facebook simplicity. Personally, I’m enjoying these gimmicky tools, and I’m finding they often do a pretty damn good job helping me realize my vision.
Of course, market capitalization represents Wall Street’s take on which company is more valuable. And it can be argued that neither company is worth nearly $220 billion. Remember the free market is only accurate over the long haul. The less accurate it is over time, the longer the long haul gets as defined by the experts. It’s the closest we have come as a society to perfecting the perpetual motion machine. The less accurate analysts and forecasters are, the more they are able to convince us of their importance. But I digress and would be remiss if I failed to note that the contrarians have come out in droves. A sampling from 