I've been a hobby photographer for over 40 years. I've also sold my work. This past weekend I watched the latest James Bond movie. When I was a kid, I used to

I've been a hobby photographer for over 40 years. I've also sold my work. This past weekend I watched the latest James Bond movie. When I was a kid, I used to love those. Not only was Bond invincible and always cool, but he also traveled to the most exotic places. Watching the movie yesterday? Meh. Not so much. It occurred to me that with all of the photo sharing going on social media, it takes a lot more than a movie star in a panoramic shot to impress me. In fact, lately when I watch movies, I'm guessing the locations they were shot -- simply because I've seen so many other images of the same place. I feel that images as a way to say something about yourself, like "Hey, I was here!" probably don't work like they used to. I have some friends that will dump 80 pictures of their day at the beach. Wow. Nobody has a day at the beach that is that memorable. Images as a way to show your feeling at the time? I don't think they're ever going out of style. I'll take 100-200 shots, then find 1 or 2. Then I'll spend some time in post production making the image match the feeling I had looking at the scene. This may or may not be realistic. I find that I rarely can achieve this effect by pushing pre-canned image processing buttons. It reminds me of my first trip to the Grand Canyon. My wife and I got out of the car and looked. Wow! Big! Really big! So I took some pictures. Just then a bus pulls up. Scores of other people get out, all with cameras. Big! It's really big! Many more pictures were taken. I realized that this was total bullshit. If we go home now, we'll just have yet another picture like 7 million other pictures. It means nothing. So we went hiking down below the rim. (We hiked an hour or two down. It was twice that time coming back up.) It was during this hike that I actually had a personal experience of the Grand Canyon. We met the new superintendent, we chatted with other travelers, we noticed how that once you started interacting with the canyon, it left a completely different experience than just looking at a 2D image. Technology is giving us a lot of little ways to pretend we're "starring in our own reality show", but most of that is just pretend.