The comments here about the failure of Everpix hit close to home. I worked for a photo sharing startup that I really wanted to take off. I still think all of the key reasons that startup was founded are true – most pictures taken die on SD cards or hard drives because sharing is hard. At the time, one of the market sizing stats we kept hearing was that four flickrs a week (or a month, or a day, I’ve slept since then) were uploaded to Facebook. Clearly, flickr, a brand I love, is dying. Nobody at Yahoo! cares, flickr is fail, and that makes me sad.
Another side effect of internalizing the fact that most pictures die after the shutter closes is I started trying to take intentional pictures – to really only take pictures when I had something to add, when I really wanted to capture a moment. The result of this is I’ve pretty much stopped taking photographs, as they’re all derivative. When I get a chance to make a joke or a pun in a photo… nobody gets it or it isn’t nearly as funny as I thought it was.
This clearly means I’ve failed as a photographer; taking photos when you have nothing to add makes for trite photos by definition.
