As someone who knows what a Brownie is, trust me. I also know bad photography. Grainy, often slightly out of focus images, with distant people smack dab in the centre of too much landscape, are generally the visual memories of the boomer generation.
Even if the average person then, knew about composition, gave a thought to lighting or understood that even a bit of a twitch would result in a blurry photo, there was the reality of working with film. You never really knew what you had until the pictures came back.
Fast forwarding a decade or so, we saw the Polaroid craze. Sure, we did get the finished product within seconds, but the results filled albums of photos with faded faces and washed out colours.
Enter the digital camera and suddenly everyone became a photographer. There’s no wasted film, no question about whether or not you got that perfect picture of great-grandpa or one where it looks like he’s choking on his teeth. And even if you somehow still messed up, technology, too, has given us not just the option of getting rid of the bad pictures, but of working with them after to improve upon them.
All of this said, doo-doo does still happen, and even the best photographers have a bad day. These helpful sites suggest ways to prevent it:
photodesk Tips to Prevent Bad Photos
photojojo.com Prevent Photo Horror Stories
Some might say there are reasons for everything, even taking bad photos. Just for fun, here’s the top 10:
