HUMOUR
Shooting pains
INDU BALACHANDRAN
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The negative side of photography.
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Illustration: Surendra
The other day, I read that somewhere in Japan, there’s a dog that can take photographs. Apparently, its owner has trained it to wait till the smiling family assembles together (“Ready, Yoko!”) and then the smart dog raises its paw,
and gently presses down the button of the propped up camera. Click!
While this story may have delighted dog lovers everywhere, I was worried that this would lead to a crazy fad of dogs all over the world taking up photography as a hobby. And then before you know it, we’ll be opening our email inbox to see “Fluffy (or Spotty or Goldie) would like to share her album with you!”
And heaven help us when Fluffy has babies, or when the babies open their eyes, or start going to obedience school. Fluffy’s paws are never going to get off that click button.
As it is, we arrive every morning at work, open our computers, ready to respond to urgent business decisions such as seeing whether the Dusseldorf office had approved the three billion dollar merger plan, and instead we see “Your cousin Jojo would like to share Alankrita’s first birthday album with you!” Dusseldorf will have to wait, till we plough through 36 adorable pictures of the Barbie-themed party that proud cousin Jojo and his wife have so painstakingly organised for their baby…
Use that finger!
Back in the stone age of photography, i.e. the 1980s, we had a camera that was all the rage called Hot Shot that opened up photography from the hallowed circle of the Raghu Rais and G.K. Vales, and told us we too could take great pictures, as long as we had a finger.
This led to a boost in tourism, as trigger happy middle class families began rushing off to mountains and beaches and monuments to test out their new skill: “Just aim. And shoot!” And when the roll was processed, excited families would gather around and use the one and only method the entire world uses to judge whether or not a photograph has come out well: look only at his or her own self in an entire group of people, and then declare “Terrific picture”!” or “The camera is awful!” — depending entirely of course on whether the photo accidentally made them look terrific or caught their most peculiar angle.
Anyway, after carefully choosing only those pictures from the bunch where one imagines one looks faintly like Madhuri Dixit or Aamir Khan (even if the rest of the group is blurred and out of focus), these favourites all end up in a public picture viewing gallery — the soft board at the cabin in the office. Now, undoubtedly, the Management invested in these soft boards in your room to put up urgent meeting schedules, forthcoming targets, and even profoundly worded posters like “Today is the first day of the rest of your life”… Instead we are treated to photographs of your family holiday in Ooty, all identically squirming in the sun; an ecstatic reunion of your Class of 97, where everyone looks like they’ve just been released from an asylum; an extreme close-up of your darling Alsatian, with eyes that seem like he’s the devil’s own hound; and also a Polaroid of a tiny pink pig —which it turns out, is actually your brother’s newborn baby in Dallas, when it was just five minutes old.
Oh, there’s one more statutory photograph on every soft board displaying people having a good time — and that is the Restaurant Photograph. Even as these words are being writ, I’ll bet all over the world, gangs of people sitting around restaurant dining tables must be suddenly feeling that this event must be immortalised in a picture forever … and so they will crane their necks from all corners and simultaneously grin to get into frame.
And I’m sure on the first day of every hoteliering training school, they are taught the most important lesson in being a great waiter: how to take a picture fitting in at least eight grinning diners, without walking backwards and falling into someone’s soup at the table just behind.
Not funny
And while we are on the topic of shooting group pictures — I would like to personally track down and shoot at sight (I mean with my gun, of course) the person who first thought it was a cute idea to hold up two fingers exactly behind the head of an unsuspecting person standing in front …making him or her look like a guess what? A bunny rabbit. (I challenge you to walk around this very day around an office, any office; you will see at least one of these bunny-rabbited people in a group picture.)
Meanwhile, everyone has flung away their regular mechanical cameras, and what we see nowadays are super-cool techy things, little bigger than Chiclets which allow you to see exactly how badly you shot the last picture (or exactly how hopeless you look in left profile) and allow you to delete it out of existence at once, and re-click away till you get it right. And the battery industry is laughing all the way to the bank.
And so also the Internet service providers — as we wait forever staring at a slow-moving green bar to view the latest wedding album or birthday album or holiday album of yet another ecstatic relative far away. Often followed up with a trans-continental sms so that we don’t forget. “Were you able to open up my attachment?” enquired my happy cousin Latha after her recent engagement ceremony to an American guy Sam. Err, still trying too…I replied nervously. Considering Sam was the one she was “attached” to, it seemed a peculiar choice of words, that…
Recognise them?
But the industry that is probably not at all amused is the album manufacturing industry. The makers of those colourful plastic-covered books with “Sweet Memories” written in Times Roman Italics on the cover. Because no one seems to have the patience to order prints and place them inside those transparent rectangles any more.
Meanwhile, our mail box folders will continue to burst with the digitally recorded lives and times of every single holiday, graduation day, engagement, wedding, birthday, school opening day, apple-picking day, Halloween day, Thanksgiving day, India Night day…of every single digital camera owning friend or relative we know.
Not to mention, their talented dogs.
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