Paris - Notes on photography

This picture was taken at a gallery near Montorgrueil, on the way when I was looking for a snail restaurant in this neighborhood. It's accidentally blurry, but somehow I like how it turned out and convey the sense of that place: a warm, classic gallery-way of Paris that contain cultural knick knacks for the unusual shopper. The place contains vintage door handles, Kenyan soapstone works, iron locks, ivory seed keychains, handmade soaps from Marseilles, etc. I found a blue stone bowl for myself. It's nice and quiet here because they're mostly closed (July is the traditional holiday month for the French).

The way red lanterns hang here reminded me of this illustration that I nabbed from the internet, but don't know who to attribute it to:


After the days in Rome, I have switched from a Nikon D40 SLR to a small Sony point and shoot pocket camera... you can say that it is a downgrade, but do you notice the difference? Maybe there is some difference in the field of depths, but other than that, probably not. After using some of my friends more powerful and heavy cameras (D80 and D90 in particular, especially matched with that gorgeous 50mm) it seems that the lesser Nikons are not very expressive at all. And expressive here, is the keyword, because I feel that taking pictures should not be just fact-notetaking or for extended memory storage (what to do with all those travel pictures anyway after you show them back to your friends and family?).

However, digital memory is so cheap, that all the tourists (including me) take so many pictures of everything that we think is worth taking notes of. We have spent so much money getting here, why not take all the pictures we can get?

But taking so many pictures reduce the meaning of each pictures.

I wonder what will happen to this data mountain of thousands and millions of pictures that we produce everyday, everywhere.


All that images,
that information,
that binary codes of 010110,

Is it going to disappear?


Or perhaps a day will come when what we can visually recognize now no longer exists, and somebody is going to mine them in the future to extrapolate what life was like when we took these pictures... like the way they do in the Pale Cocoon movie?

I miss film cameras... oh
how precious were pictures made by films then.