Does photo quality matter?

I've been getting really stressed out about cameras recently. 

I've always enjoyed taking photos. When I was in primary school, I had a film camera. I was able to take 24 photos － sometimes 25 or even 26 if I was lucky! － before I had to take them to the photo shop to get them developed. In 2004, I got my first Nokia camera phone as confirmation gift. I used it to take some cat photos and random selfies that I could put on IRC-galleria, the online site the Finns used to use before Facebook. But I still took all holiday photos with my lovely film camera. After I got back from a language course in Oxford I took 8 film rolls to the photo shop. The lady who worked thought it was a lot. The times have changed. Imagine if almost 200 photos from an adventure-filled holiday was still a lot!

We visited Paris on the way home from Oxford.

In 2007 I got my first digital camera as a present. I still used my film camera a lot though, and normally took both of them with me when I went somewhere. I have several albums filled with photographs from all of my adventures. But nowadays all of my photos (well not all but some of the best ones) just get uploaded on Facebook. That's the only place where I have some of them, thanks to Microsoft Support that deleted them from my hard drive.

Fitting room mirrors have been handy whether I've been using a film camera or a camera phone.

But I really love taking photographs. They help me remember all the fun things I've done and amazing people I've met. I feel like photographs keep me together. My memory has been very bad recently and it has really helped that I'm able to look back in time in form of photographs, and that way being able to remember things that I would have otherwise forgotten. I might be a completely different person if I hadn't had a camera all of those times, because I wouldn't be able to remember them!

I've used a digital camera i.a. at Avebury, Aberdeen University and Stirling Castle.

  

What's the point of going on a holiday if you can't take photos to remind you of the sunny days when you sit at home and it's raining outside?

Taking photos when visiting Dublin really does help with remembering the holiday afterwards.

But recently I've been getting really stressed out of photo quality. Everyone is getting fancy super cool cameras. It is important to take good quality photos. It's necessary to have a system camera － an ordinary digital camera is not enough. That's what they say.

I haven't used my camera at all recently, and I have a compact system camera on my birthday & Christmas wishlist. Hopefully I will get one and will feel up for taking more pictures.

My digital camera has never been able to take pretty photos inside. It's not amazing outside either, but it takes photos. But my inner obsessive-compulsive photographer has been demanding me to take better and prettier photos.

Two deer in headlights? Nope, just using the self-timer.

I'm not sure why it's become so important for me to take better photos, because before I was perfectly happy for an occasional camera phone photo.

But camera phones have come a long way since then, and my girlfriend's Samsung camera phone quality is better than my current digital camera's. My camera phone's quality is not quite as good, but I'm still amazed how good it is compared to the phone I had 6 years ago.

Camera phone captured the moment of when I turned 17
and my friend Tiia's little brother rolled me into a mat.

My mum has asked me a couple of times which compact system camera I would like. Of course I would be grateful to get any camera, but trying to figure out which would be the best one for me has been a headache. Truthfully, I know nothing about system cameras. I thought that knowing that I would like it to be compact would be enough. Compact because it would be nice if I didn't have to take a separate bag for the camera if I wanted to take it with me. Because I know what that would be like. When I got my first mobile phone when I was 12, I had to take a separate bag for just the phone. It was a size of a brick. It was brick-coloured as well. And it doesn't look cool when a 12-year old girl is carrying a brick around.

But I mean the camera? They have so many different ones. There are cameras for beginners, cameras for amateurs and cameras for professionals. I'm no doubt a beginner because the first and last time I touched one was at school when I was allowed to take two photos with it for a visual arts project 10 years ago. And all that is definitely somewhere but clear memory. 

So it's hard to know how to use a camera if I have never even seen one. But I need to own one to learn to use one. And I'm terrified if I get one for beginners that is rubbish and everyone will think that the quality of my pictures stinks. But if I get a really fancy and complicated camera then the picture quality will definitely be rubbish because I won't know how to use it. I'm motivated to learn to use any camera and have some basic understanding to how a camera works. But there's no point talking to me about objectives or lighting times, because I've never even tried using a proper camera. Well, apart from that time 10 years ago when the teacher told me to press a button.

Okay, I really would like to have the ability to take good quality photos when I want to, but I'm also perfectly happy with funny snapshots that lack the quality but have a proper story to tell. I love being able to pull out a picture album when I meet an old friend, so that we can look at the old photos and laugh at all the memories together.

Do you like taking photos? And how much do you care about the quality – is capturing the funny moment enough or do you want everything to be perfect?