SROTD Archives: Dozens of redditors have worked with Subreddit of the Day over the years. Sometimes those features slip through the cracks as writers come and go. We dig them up and get them posted and to honor the subreddit. This is one such feature.
1,164 camera swappers swapping for 3 years!
Who doesn't like taking pictures? Whether it's of a beautiful landscape, a beautiful sunset, a beautiful person or even just yourself, taking pictures is something deeply ingrained into our everyday culture. Ever since the advent of cameras, taking photos has been all the craze. There's something magical about being able to capture a moment in time. You're able to preserve everything in the camera frame for as long as the medium you captured it in lasts is, when you think about it, absolutely amazing. This is a feature for a tiny subreddit helping us connect through pictures.
For those of you who don't know (which is probably most of you, seeing as this is the tiny subreddit week), /r/cameraswapping is a subreddit dedicated to taking photos with a disposable camera, sending it to other reddit users to develop, and vice versa. For those of you young'uns who aren't familiar with disposable cameras, they are really cool old cameras with the film reels that have to be developed into polaroid pictures. You're not just limited to sending the camera though. The subreddit also encourages you to send a letter along with the camera for another extra smidgen of that personal touch. There's something amazing about this subreddit that I can't quite put my hand on but I'll try to explain it anyway. Hopefully you'll fall as in love with the concept as I have.
I can't exactly explain the allure of sending people around the world photos of your life and having them send you some back. Perhaps is the idea that you've affected someone who you don't know. You've entered their lives in a kind of meaningful way and maybe even shared a part of who you are with them and they with you. Alternatively it could just be that you're getting to take a look at part of someone else's life through their eyes. Whatever the case, this picturesque version of penpals (heh, get it?) is a novel idea that tips its hat to the good old days of taking pictures.
Much like how we've moved on from sending letters to sending emails, we've also moved on from sending physical developed pictures, to sending a bunch of pixels. Even thought the subject matter is the same and probably with better clarity, there's something missing with electronic pictures taken through the lens of a phone camera. If I had to guess, I would take a gander that it was a sense of importance. It's not quite the same if you can simply copy something and send it to a thousand people with almost no effort. When you have to invest time and effort into making the pictures come alive they have a sort of soul. Additionally you can't simply take a million photos of the same thing knowing you have all the space in the world (figuratively). You have to chose and select the special moments to capture. This ensures a higher average quality of photo and better yet, can make you reflect on why you're taking those photos in place of some other ones.
Written by an unknown redditor.
[–]TotesMessenger 0ポイント1ポイント2ポイント (0子コメント)