Taking photos has become part of our social ecosystem. Thanks to the technological advancements, now we have better, more convenient and affordable ways to immortalize life's precious moments. The number of photos being taken each day has sky rocketed since the advent of digital photography. Millions of photos are being taken per day depicting normal people's lives.
Photography is slowly moving onto a different culture, which is the Social Era. This era is being described as a phenomenon where photography becomes a crucial part in the social interaction of human beings. We see photos being shared everyday in social media sites. We tend to share photos of even the simplest things such as the food that we are about to have for breakfast, your new do, a visitor you least expected, your pets, your high school photo, and the list goes on and on. Any social network site has a photo-sharing feature. There are, in fact, a number of photo-sharing platforms such as Instagram and Flickr that can be easily viewed by everyone. It has become a our way of self-expression that we automatically capture and share our photos online.
One of the most notable things about the photos we share are portraits of ourselves using a hand-held camera phone, also known as 'selfies.' It started as an obligatory photo taken to fill in a small box allotted for profile picture. Eventually, it evolved into taking photos of oneself for fun, sharing it with friends and feeling good about it. It became so popular as it allows people to present themselves the way they want to. Selfies are a huge hit because they are easy to create and share for social networking, professional networking or online dating purposes. It is undeniable that we Pinoys are very much into taking selfies. We like sharing selfies especially when we are all made-up or when the lighting is good making us looking blemish-free and we like it when we get compliments from our friends or by simply clicking on the 'like' button.
