Continuing my previous post, in 2013 I picked up a Sony DSC-WX100 second hand. It was love at first sight. The outright cuteness of this camera was impossible to resist, and the pictures it took were fantastic to my untrained eye. It also featured some artistic effects, and I just couldn’t get enough of it: Toy Camera, Miniatures, B&W HDR – they made you feel like a proper artist!
During that first vacation with the Sony I became what most amateur photographers become first – the self-conscious travel documentarian, who think they have an eye for photography. Throughout the roadtrip I was constantly on the hunt for good frames. Overall to limited success, but it gave me that dopamine-boost we feel when looking at our own photography. And it really was a turning point – up until then, photographs were plain artefacts of my life record. But now I had the power to take images with aesthetic value – at least to me. I overdid it to a large extent – took 3,000+ snapshots, out of which maybe 10% was about me or my girlfriend. The rest were supposed to be “photography photographs”, despite having no clue about photography as a developed hobby or a form of art. I definitely got the bug.
The best thing about shooting while knowing nothing about photography is that sense of freedom – free from framing rules, technical considerations, or influences from your studies or other amateurs. You can probably get to mastery and regain that independent, carefree attitude, but walking around with a compact, hunting for aesthetic pleasure for the first time is similar to a child dancing – no rules, no sense of shame, just the joy of doing it. Contrast that with learning salsa as an adult – you are told the steps, the rules, and it all adds up, but it’ll take you plenty of failures and effort to get comfortable with it. And you simply can’t escape that sense of “I’m not good at this” while getting there.
Ideally, my adventures with the WX100 should have set me up for growing into proper picture taking, but it didn’t happen that way. I used the Sony extensively from 2013 till around 2017, then the flame met its demise thanks to something that probably killed generations of good photographers: Instagram. I started using the platform in 2016, and was a full-on instagrammer by 2017. The simplicity combined with that all-so-familiar instant gratification loop of social media led me to put the Sony on the shelf – and leaving it there ever since.
Fast forward to 2019 when a painful breakup rendered my Instagram feed into a visual orbituary of a happy relationship. Instead of cleaning up the feed by removing the “girlfriend photos”, I decided to ditch the whole thing. There was a very real problem though – all my photos were taken with Instagram for two super eventful years, and now I was left with a bunch of 1080 by 1080 squares taken with smartphones. I had to spend considerable time reorganizing those photographs into albums – my platform of choise was Google Photos this time – and browsing through hundreds of images, I had a strong sense of loss not just for the relationship, but also for the opportunities to record my memories the proper way – the images were mostly funny, but overall showed an egocentric, indistinguished, visually poor recollection of years gone by. The pictures simply lost their charm even from a year’s distance, and there was no “me” in those images – even with my face in the frame at times.
This sobering realization reignited my passion for taking “proper photographs”, and I ended up doing what I contemplated throughout my time with the Sony compact – buying my first DSLR in March 2020.