Week 11 Lectorial – Mediums and Technologies

‘Mediums and Technologies’ is my gourp’s PB4 theme.

So i will discuss this topic with our PB4 idea which is based on our phone camera.

Today, the phone has become a necessary, everyday item. This handy piece of technology instantly connects us to our friends, emergency hotlines, the web, the world. We keep up-to-date with news and trending events through our phones and especially through social media.

Among the many social media apps, Instagram seems to be the most popular choice for businesses and market influencers. As a photo and sharing service app, its simple and user-friendly interface has garnered more than 400 million users with 80 million photos uploaded each day. Coupled with our high tech phone cameras, it is a breeze to produce and share user-created content. The phone’s screenshot function also allows content from instagram to be uploaded and circulated on other media platforms. Communication between producers and consumers is also easily set up with the like button and comment section. In this way, businesses can analyse their product’s reception as well.Instagram has definitely contributed to our modern photo-taking culture. The app encourages us to share pictures with the world while advanced phone camera functions has spurred our instant-shoot-and-upload culture.

And some people hate that. Some camera lovers prefer to experience the slower processes of photography. They may say that taking time to work with natural lighting, tweaking focus and aperture to compose a well-proportioned image; that playing with the many knobs and buttons on the camera is what’s most important in photography.

Why go through the trouble of studying photography process when we can take advantage of our smartphone’s auto-adjust technology? The latest iPhone 6s Plus has a 12-megapixel camera and Apple says it has added a “state-of-the-art sensor, new image signal processor, advanced pixel technology, Focus Pixels, improved local tone mapping and optical image stabilization”. One may not understand what these jargons mean but one knows it means good quality. Apple even launched a photo competition upon releasing their iPhone 6 series to prove their point.

Even before the popularity of phone cameras, DSLRs had always been expensive. Its price tag and many functions to study, made photography an elitist affair. Comparatively, phone photography is accessible, easy, instant and mainstream.

Rather than being labelled a “dying art form”, use of digital or film cameras have become a high-end niche activity. Where there is time to appreciate the photo-taking process, these chunkier tools are superior to phone cameras. Because DSLRs allow users to change lenses, this function allows a wider range of aesthetics and quality that the phone camera and editing apps cannot achieve – at least not yet. Today, many business and public event photographers still use DSLRs.

Ultimately, businesses need to be social-media-savvy to establish brand presence and promote their services. And if you want a consistent global audience to follow your advertisements, well Instagram is a great place to start!