Back in the day, when a fellow had to perhaps botch completely the development of a roll or two while learning to put a roll of 35mm film on a Nikon reel, it took time to learn all the factors that go into a good picture, and since film and processing were expensive, it was a good idea to hesitate a moment and pre-visualize the image that was about to be captured. Now, the digital cameras make all the creative decisions and give the shooter the option of manually doing an override. So the digital beatniks can aim, shoot, and scoot in the time it used to take to focus with a Nikon F and the quality level of the image suffers in a proportional way. The quicker a facebook shot is taken the lower its esthetic level will be.
It used to be that the Associated Press rarely gave a photo credit to one of its staff for doing their job. Every once in awhile, one of them would take a remarkable photo, such as the one Eddie Adams got of the Saigon chief of police shooting a guy in the head, and then the editors would figure that the photographer's name would be attached to that picture when it would inevitable (as it did) win a Pulitzer Prize, so they would figure "why wait and put it in the caption when it first moved on the wire.
Perhaps, because just about the only time we've seen real "facebook photos is when they are posted on other sites after the subject has become a person of interest in a notorious crime, we've completely misjudged the quality of that site's photojournalism?
Then again, we did see a lot of the "let's upstage the scenery type shots in the various Australian hostels. There were exceptions to the rule, as we have noted, but we'll go with the statistical majority.
These days, it seems, even images from a stock shot source include the photographer's name in the photo credit line. Shouldn't bloggers emulate the egomaniac level of self-promotion style of folks such as Thomas Pynchon, J. D. Salinger, (Banksy?) and B. Traven?
Facebook reminds us of the old Groucho Marx line: "I wouldn't want to belong to a club that would have me as a member. That doesn't mean, however, that we wouldn't be thrilled to start cross-posting some of our columns on Digihitch.
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