In today’s fast paced world the role of a camera has become indispensable. In a world where time flies past so swiftly, camera is a tool to permanent this fastness, to record the transient and the volatile and immortalize those into pages of history.
The camera can rightly claim to bear the distinction of bringing back lots of nostalgia at any given point of time. It rewinds memories, freshness, time and engenders a river of emotions, primarily happiness. Often it becomes a mode of bamboozlement – as an example, you suddenly discover your oblivious childhood through it, thinking how time has changed and ripened you ever since.
More often than not, the camera is used as a modern medium of advertisements. The competitive nature of survival has given birth to the need of an array of advertisements. If one has to succeed, he has to sell himself/herself. And to sell, he/she has to advertise incessantly. By merely being good or versatile at one subject does no good until the goodness is being advertised. And therefore the ‘incessant’ business of advertisements becomes even more important, in fact a necessity.
Advertisements often turn out to be a signature of authenticity. For example, a person galvanised in a western business outfit with a phone on the ear signifies his/her accomplished campus-placement. So will a face laden with pun-cakes can claim to be the most ravishing given the ever-growing sales and profits of the pan-cake industry and its inexorably tied users.
In fact the modern world has on its menu a lot of forums to be served as advertising fields. For social-networking sites like Facebook, advertisments become its oxygen of operation. It is the variety of flavors of advertisements, often of the same brand, that supports its survival away from a monotonous and mundane world. Here the camera too plays the role of linking the wannabe advertisers with its advertising-forum.
Having said all these, I am still to discuss the most important aspect for a camera. I wish the camera was an artificially intelligent device – which knew to identify the hot-sellable cakes. Alas, it still doesn't. Therefore, today, the camera-person becomes even more important than the camera itself. After all this person decides the subjects, the domain, the art-form, the nuances, the mood, the story and the background through his camera. The paparazzi thus acquires an un-questionable licence to invade every territory through the omnipotence action of his camera. For the camera, in its final advertisement, reserves the power to make or break you, glow or dim you, idolize or hate you, create or destroy you, focus or ignore you, venerate or vanquish you. But remember, the camera-person (paparazzi) is always a default hero!
At the end of it, if you ever wished to capture the nature of nature, to shoot to the default-instant heroism, to become invincible agents of ‘dream’ advertisements, or to get an un-questionable ticket to every event – be it a pompous and high-profile ‘Cynosure’ or a devotional and tranquil ‘Saraswati Puja’; you got to take to one camera - yes just one camera. Don’t be too perturbed about photography; merely owning a camera, which flashes a 21st century brand name with a reasonable professional look, is enough !
