Better backyard photography: Sue Dickes, a guest of The Grass River Garden Club,
photographs a bloom in the gardens of the Sundy House during a recent class.
Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star
Simple tips to create better backyard photographs
Meet the Photographers: The Coastal Star's Award-winning team
By Emily J. Minor
Remember the old days, when photography meant buying the film and lugging the camera and finagling with one of those shiny cube flashbulbs, the ones that rotated after each impressive pop? And taking your kid to Sears for the first birthday portrait. Remember that?
Of course you do. It wasn’t that long ago.
But today, everyone’s a photographer. Using smartphone apps like Instagram, Snapbucket and Hipstamatic — Who thinks of these names? — most of us are out there falling in love with the visuals around us, from a fiery sunset to a shadowy palm frond to a certain someone’s toothless grin, brightened with just one careful touch of the fingertip.
And, boy, do we love sharing, instantly, waiting only seconds for the compliments to start rolling in. Like!
In the past few months, Instagram — the mobile app that allows us to fiddle with our images, almost as if we’re taking the film to the darkroom, sitting it in the soup, then lightening it up or darkening it, just a tad — has hit 100 million users. The company claims its users post 40 million images a day.
And Polaroid estimates we’re using digital devices to take 1.5 billion images a day. Old barns and fluffy kittens and fun nights out on the town.
So, what do the professionals think about all this? Is it good for the industry? Bad for the industry? How are they keeping up?
Spectators used smartphones, as well as point-and-shoot, high-end digital SLR
and waterproof cameras, to document a recent turtle release at Gumbo Limbo in
Boca Raton. Coastal Star file photo
Well, for starters, Addie Lorber, who is one-half of the husband-wife team that owns Boca Raton’s Hasselblad photography store, says she loves that photography is so popular, and it doesn’t surprise her. After all, she’s been married to renowned panoramic photographer Peter Lorber for many, many years.
“I think people have always enjoyed photography,” she says. “Today, the smartphones just make it convenient.”
And when her husband saw this coming, about 10 years ago, they started changing their business. Today they still help customers turn their images into works of art. But the staff is smaller, the space is smaller — and the work is much more high-tech.
Addie and Peter Lorber own Boca Raton’s Hasselblad photography store,
where they now help people process digital images. Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star
“They email me the image,” she says. “We have a 55-inch screen and we pop the images on that screen and we go over it with people. We spend time, and we listen to what the client wants.”
The changes, of course, are industry wide. Polaroid is set to open its first “Fotobar” retail store in late February at 14851 Lyons Road in suburban Delray Beach, where it will help us “easily liberate our favorite images from the confines of (our) digital devices.”
How kind.
At the new store, customers will be able to upload images to one of the store’s bar-top workstations, and turn those digital moments into everything from a 4-by-6 print to a giant, glossy poster.
The store, say the folks at Polaroid, will be “cool, hip and experiential” — just like that classic, white bleed-off border the company brought us 75 years ago.
Comments