still photography is a dying art

i heard about the crying while eating site a couple days ago, but didn’t think much of it until i went to the site myself. a couple things come to mind about this from a presentation and user interface point of view.

first, i love sites like this and others where people share their feelings or confessions with the world. here’s where technology meets the heart and makes it easier to see how much we all have in common; we’re not alone. in fact, we’re all much more alike than different around the world.

i didn’t realize that each entry was a movie clip initially. i just thought it a form of photo blog. so that’s a usability problem. they have the words “(click)” under each picture but i missed that.

what i’m most intrigued with in this site is how the short clips present such a rich form of the subject. from looking at the stills first i would imagine the person, visualize them, and that would bring a certain expectation and texture of the emotion along with reading the reason for the person crying. but then when i watched the clip it was so much richer. not exactly what i might have expected, but the body language and a subconscious communication was then going on. i had a sense of how genuine the crying might be, or the quality of the sadness that goes beyond words to describe it.

the difference between still photographs and short clips, what i’ve been thinking of as “gestures” to describe them, has been on my mind the last couple weeks. digital cameras are letting you take short clips instead of stills and flash memory advances will make every digital camera into a camcorder of sorts in the next year or two. so how does this change how we relate to photography? i think it will be a tremendous change, because i suspect gestures are significantly more powerful in communication compared to stills. but it’s awkward to browse them or use them. this crying while eating site is the first example i’ve seen that explores the gesture as the primary format. it’s very interesting to experience first hand and see how my emotional reaction differs and how i use it.

one downside, it’s harder to skim to see if the image is worth progressively spending more time to explore. thumbs can be zoomed in. but gestures one must watch linearly in time after seeing the thumb. since they take longer to load currently so that’s a disadvantage. there have been some interesting explorations of temporal browsing like what the folks at the 24/7 video blogging iam project are doing. but it’s an interesting problem.

(some sound bites on why gestures will supplant still photography: no more lost shots from blinking! instead of saying cheese, just wave and say hi; a moving pictures is worth ten thousand words.)

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