Click! Post! Share!

The ability to take pictures with a digital camera or your ordinary mobile phone and, then to be able to instantaneously share them with the wider world via so many different mediums is truly re-defining communication.

Every single moment of our lives can be captured and, shared with everyone we know and beyond. That is thanks to social media like Facebook. I constantly see my 'Friends' sharing pictures of what is going on with them on a average, daily and instant basis! What are they eating for lunch and where? Bam! A picture of their salad taken at a supposedly artistic angle, Instagrammed, and uploaded immediately. Everyone is 'Liking' it! What'd they do on holiday? You can see the whole trip recorded in style. What do you see today while walking down the street? Click and post! Did you just see some weird bug crawling across your desk? Take a picture! Did your baby just do something cute? Click and post. Is the view from your window especially dreamy? Take a picture. Do you think your feet are beautiful? Take a picture and make it your profile picture. Are you tired of your profile picture? Pose and take a picture and replace your older profile. Do you feel like showing off your new outfit? Pout and pose. 

Capturing the moment is one thing. There is also the creative captioning. Everyone wants to be clever and or really gushy mushy. 

I am not disparaging any aspect of social media: be it the spontaneity or the amateurish photography. I certainly used to make fun of people who took such bad photographs and their content until I started doing it myself. I used to think people were weird for wanting to photograph every single moment of their boring lives but lo and behold, here I am posting pictures on Facebook and trying to update my blog every day.  

I have whole heartedly embraced Facebook and, love updating it with personal, business and random stuff. What I do with my personal photographs is customise who is able to view them. So, for example, I have an entire album of Kavita's pictures but these can be viewed only by a select few of my friends and family instead of my whole list of 600+ contacts on Facebook. My other every day photographs of my life in Monrovia is shared with everyone.

What I love about being able to instantly capture an image is its powerful potential to convey information. There is nothing banal or useless about what you are choosing to share. You are trying to convey a place, a time and even a mood. You can caption it and, record life. It is pretty extraordinary. Where a few years ago, photography was quite an expensive hobby, now everyone can do it! We can all be photographers, capture life and record moments. 

I often take lots of pictures of my every day life and, if there's a good one, I post it on Facebook with a relatively brief caption. But I find myself wanting to write even more and, then, I decide to blog about it. The blog allows me to talk about something at length. 

I experiment with my photography all the time, sometimes using a camera or a phone. I play with the edit tools on Preview or iPhoto before uploading photos. And of course, I love to talk about the image. 

I hope to get a more powerful camera eventually and, really experiment with my photography. Meanwhile, let's continue to click, post and share.