Digital Pictures Are Pictures Too

The CEO of our store chain, a descendent of the founder (so his last name is the name of the store), is on a bunch of posters around the store, with short “quotes” that make customers feel that the chain is owned by a regular person who sees things the way you and I do, who wants you to have a pleasant experience while doing business with him. Like the stuff you see around a Jack In The Box, but supposedly not as fictitious. The more likely truth, of course, is that our CEO probably spends most of his time on his yacht or playing golf, and that the company wants money first and customer satisfaction second (or fifth).

Here’s an example: One sign says you get 15 free prints when you buy a digital camera (which is true), with Mr regular-joe pastel-polo-shirt-tucked-into-khakis CEO holding an SLR and saying “It’s not a picture until you hold it in your hand”.

That is such bullshit! Only 60-year-olds who ask me for help getting the memory card out of their cameras could believe in something like that. A picture is an image, it’s visual information, not necessarily an object. Sure, you could argue it’s not a “picture” when it’s a negative or a memory card, because at that point you cannot take in or appreciate the visual information of the image, but if it’s on a screen, it’s a picture! Say I show you a digital image, and later on it gets published in a book or magazine and I show you THAT. Wouldn’t you say it’s the same picture? Of course you would! Is an essay not an essay until the printer spits it out?

I’ll even go further and say it’s LESS of a picture once it’s printed, because information is lost in the printing process, and the print also decays with time. So the print starts its life as an imperfect representation of the “ideal” image (the information on the negatives or digital file), and goes downhill from there.

I know I’m being overly nitpicky about, well, how one defines “picture”, and of course you can have your own personal definition of “picture” and it’s none of my business (if you want to define “picture” as “a print”, knock yourself out). But I’m sick and tired of people saying “I need something physical”, “I like hard copies”, “I want something I can hold in my hand”. And to see our company encourage this irrational need for prints… makes good business sense, ok, but I still don’t see how having a handful of 4x6s which are too dark and have fingerprints all over them and have to be stored in huge albums or boxes and will look all purple in 10 years is better than admiring your pictures on a 14” monitor and storing thousands of them on your HD or some optical disk. It just doesn’t make sense.

Unless you’re a professional photographer. I’ll give you that. If your pictures are so sharp and so filled with small, subtle details that a computer screen can’t do it justice, then you need an 8x10 to really see what you’ve got. But then again, a 4x6 isn’t going to do that kind of picture justice either. So an 8x10 is better than a computer screen for looking at, but a computer screen is better than 4x6. In any case, it’s a picture, and the digital picture always holds more information and lasts longer, and you have more control over it. The print is a short-lived, fragile, imperfect, dirty, clumsy, and impractical representation of the digital ideal image. So if you think a picture is a print, and a file is not a picture, then you're missing out.

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