Wow! Your Camera Takes Such Great Pictures. It’s Amazing!
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If you’ve clicked on this headline, then you’ve probably heard this line before in some way or another. But the truth is that everyone else’s camera takes such crappy photos. With that said, I think camera manufacturers have a huge problem. Everyone is delighted with their mediocre photos because they don’t want to bring around a dedicated camera. Sure, folks who care about photography will buy a dedicated camera. But most people don’t need an excellent camera.
To be fair and honest, this was the case for many years. Growing up, my mom had an automatic Olympus SLR camera. It was broken and also a bit useless in some ways. She didn’t want to use her phone for pictures because she hated technology so much. So instead, she’d buy disposable cameras over and over again. She’d also often not get the film developed.
Sound familiar? Well, that’s the current roster of folks with their relationship to photography. They use their phones to take photos. And most of the photos they don’t even pay attention to. People shoot hundreds of thousands of photos. They’re too lazy to delete them all. And they’re not mindful enough to sit there and carefully get the image.
This is the mentality. And when someone says your camera takes great photos, they’re even more amazed that you can get it in a single shot.
I’ve always wondered where the disconnect happened. And I think the camera manufacturers only have themselves to blame. For decades, they worked to make things easier and easier. When Apple, Google, and Samsung came around, they did the same thing. And for the past decade, camera manufacturers have just blamed the smartphone. Further, they’ve only really chased the higher-end consumer and professional.
We can’t say they didn’t try to chase the everyday consumer. They did, but they did it wrong. They didn’t make the camera a thing that someone will genuinely want to bring with them everywhere. Read that carefully again, and notice the keyword there is want and not need. Let’s carefully consider this:
- They took a long time to make super small, web connected-cameras.
- They never made a camera that could fit into your wallet.
- They never made a camera that was small and could do things your phone can’t.
- They never spent enough time building a diverse array of apps and an environment that fosters it.
- They never truly adapted to the way that people take images currently.
Here’s the more insane thing that I think about at least once a week. Lots of folks like to say that the camera market and the photography market are dead. Yet despite things, people take more photos every day than they ever have in history.
Sometimes I truly wonder if those companies still care about the mass consumer market. And I wonder if they still miss being able to reach it.
Even more perplexing: why didn’t these manufacturers try to create apps that work on your phone to take better photos with the phone? In that case, they could’ve worked to have made a camera that took great pictures.