Now with pictures

A rant about photography and technology

This is a cathartic post and contains no interesting or relevant information or experiences.

Long story short: I eventually worked out how to add some pictures to the blog, ignore the incoherent rant below.

Thanks to digital photography, between us we’ve taken thousands of pictures, and we’ve not even been here three weeks yet.  There’s a relevant xkcd comic (which I would find out how to link to if I had more time) ----- (edit: here it is!)--- about how an experience may, or may not, be diminished or altered when viewed through a camera lens (viewfinder) compared with when we fully engage with it. I'm undecided.

As a rule, I am extremely suspicious of new technology. I fear that machines complicate and continually encroach upon our lives. We become less and less aware of the real world, until the logical conclusion where we are no longer able to function alone and the robots have won. In some ways it has been refreshing being detoxed from the internet for the past week, though admittedly my link with technology continued with this laptop which I have been hammering away at for future blog uploading.

My most recent frustration is that my digital picture taking equipment has not functioned optimally and so my technology over-reliance has negatively affected my mood. I am aware that the blog had, until recently, consisted only of a wall of dry text, and I had wanted to illustrate it with some photographs. Unfortunately I had forgotten the cable that links my camera to the computer and my camera uses the selfish and inconvenient XD card format that seems impossible to connect with anything. I remembered that my ridiculous smartphone took pictures also, and since I had that cable I expected that to fulfill the need. This evening I learnt that apple have selfishly and inconveniently prevented me from accessing my marvelous photography on the computer as I lack the correct software or some such. And to add insult to (very minor) injury, my laptop refused to connect to the internet and then froze after a sweaty 80 minute daladala trip to the internet café.

Upon reflection (Gibb’s cycle: check, take that University of Birmingham) I realised that the vast quantities of pictures taken do not do justice to our experiences. I’ve taken some very mediocre pictures of fantastic sunsets in the rainforest, which reduce a glorious moment to a few awkward and blurred pixels. Part of the mediocrity is my point and shoot camera and attitude, but no camera can record the sweating and the heaviness of the air, and no photographer can capture the vibrant sounds and exotic smells (though for the latter one could make an adequate aromatherapy substitute with the happy cocktail of suncream and insect repellent). So at this point I felt a bit better about the lack of pictures, but, hypocritically, still pressed forward to break up the words with some colour.

So onto plan C, obtain pictures from other people’s more compatible cameras, and plagiarise them onto my blog. This took a mammoth effort due to various compatibility and storage issues, malfunctions at every step of the process, but eventually I managed to obtain a very few pictures from Mary and Johan’s cameras, found out how to compress them to African bandwidth-friendly size, and now I've inserted into some of the previous posts, which you can go and find if you like.

These are giraffes at the shore of Lake Manyara