Why do you do that?

Why do you do that? Why do you enjoy photography? What is it about photography that attracts you?

For me, I like to record the things I have seen; not just to show other people but so that I can revisit the memories and the experiences years later. Certainly it's possible to do this with video but it's so much quicker to review still photos than to review videos as videos have to be viewed sequentially. There is a cross between still and video that's becoming ever more popular and that's animated photographs where 5 - 10 photographs are combined in a single GIF image. These are a heck of a lot of fun to view but require steady camera work. This is perhaps where a stabilised lens comes in very handy.

Clearly all the images have to be taken with the same focus point and the same angle etc but they are so much fun to watch. This is perhaps a new thing to play with although GIFs have been around for many years.

Some people like to compete with others to produce the "best" image they can. Personally, while I have entered competitions, I win only rarely. In fact I really haven't bothered much with competitions in ages. I usually find they require me to head out, find a subject and photograph it rather than for me to submit a photo that I already have that fits the bill. With the requirement these days to submit the exif with the photo when I've entered competitions I usually have to edit the exif to make it look as though the photograph was recent and taken with a current camera model. It's not really my cup of tea. I take photographs for my own enjoyment.

One of the things I dislike the most is gratuitous abuse. If I post a photo on a forum (this is what drove me away from forums and clubs) then I will get a chorus of people willing to say how awful they think a photograph is, how awful I am for taking such a photograph, how dreadful my camera and my lens must be, how I should sell it all and give up photography because I'm so bad at it etc. Very few people have the intelligence to come up with anything sensible to say. My mother always said that they'd say things like that because they were jealous. I think it's more that there are a lot of people who're quite miserable in this life and they seek to reduce their misery in comparison by making others feel more miserable.

I seek to shield myself from the misery-makers of this world. I surround myself with happy people whenever I can and don't belong to clubs or societies if at all possible as they tend to attract people who need others around them in order to climb their social ladders. There are quite a few that join societies and clubs not because they have any real interest in the club or society but because they like to play at being managers of the club or society.

Every day I hear arguments as to why one camera is better than another, another sensor is better than another, another sensor size is better than another but rarely do I see photographs that are better because of the camera or the sensor. It doesn't matter what camera is used to photograph most subjects. Most have already been photographed many times before anyway. What we're doing is not new and unique. Technology has not allowed us to do something miraculous that we could not do before. We could quite happily work around things with our older equipment, even though it might have taken a little longer.

I see new things that can be done with newer digital cameras and my question is simply - "why". Movies can be made with digital SLRs but unless they're going to be professional productions, it leaves me wondering why. On the other hand, any digital camera's video output is going to be far better than the junk that used to be paraded as video cameras.