I Take Really Bad Photos Now

I don’t think it’s a surprise or a great revelation to say that Instagram is on hospice these days. While I owe my entire career (including my full-time job in pens) to the app, that doesn’t mean I can’t see the writing on the wall. And since I don’t plan on pivoting to video any time soon (because of my gay voice and physical insecurities, of course), that’s left me in a bit of a stalemate, creatively speaking.

There was a time when I cared about taking nice photos — I even had a food blog, if you can believe it. Everything a little tweezed, it helped me understand the baseline for what branding is and how I could see a path to getting paid to write, but the actual act of photographing anything has always been a bit too complicated (and therefore frustrating) to me.

This is all to say, I notice myself phoning it in when I’m traveling these days. “Oh, look, a door” — snap. “Oh, look, a beach” — snap. Sometimes it’s fun (especially if I want to brag online), but most of the time, those photos sort of sit in my iPhone library and then get deleted when I need more storage. I don’t even remember what was so special about this cake or that wine glass, but damnit if I didn’t feel the need to take a picture of it.

Ironically, the thing that seems to have corrected this thinking a bit was to force myself to take bad photos, and so that’s what I’ve done. Over the holidays, I bought myself a 15-year-old camera (Olympus PEN E-PL1, to be exactly) for the sole purpose of lugging around on trips. $40 on eBay — how can I pass it up?

And while that probably would have served my purpose just fine, I took it one step further and ordered a Pocket Dispo lens, which is a repurposed disposable camera lens, built to fit on digital cameras. By doing this, my photos have taken on a sort of grainy, film-like quality with strange saturation, no ability to zoom, and a lot of blurry bits around the edges.

In doing this, I’ve been given a sort of freedom to point and shoot. I don’t want to care so much about perfection, in some ways, and while I don’t think of this little camera as anything more “authentic” than using my iPhone, it lessens the pressure, so to speak, to break a sweat over that (mediocre at best) “one perfect shot” I’ve strived for all these years.

I took the camera to Palm Springs last weekend, where we visited our dear friends and former neighbors, Todd and Judy. It was a great little trip, a bit too short, and I’m grateful to have these photos instead of losing them in the tens of thousands of other photos on my phone right now.

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