Daily Dose of English 9
Taking Pictures
Daily Dose of English 9
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben, and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about taking pictures, taking photographs or photos or a quick pic, however you want to say it. A lot of us nowadays take pictures. In the last episode, I talked about text messages, which are something that basically everybody does. And I think that now that everyone has a camera in their pocket most of the day, not literally everyone, but almost everyone, I think photos have become a lot more common than they, well, I mean, I know they've become a lot more common than they used to be. But especially recently as cameras are getting better and there's more features, people are using photos more often, not even just necessarily to capture a moment, but to be useful for lots of different things. Our behavior changes slightly when we know that we can take a picture of something and access it very, very easily. A while ago, if you only had a Polaroid camera that you have to print out the picture and actually look at it, you wouldn't take pictures of things that are useful, like information or a sign that you see or a menu. You probably wouldn't reference those things as a picture because that would just be a little bit awkward and annoying. But nowadays it's so easy to take a picture of a restaurant that you walk by that you want to remember or to take a picture of a document and scan the text that way. These are all useful ways that we use pictures nowadays. But then also there's the, I guess, standard reason to take a picture, which is to remember something or to save a moment for whatever reason, whether you just think it looks cool or there's something happening or you want to just take a nice picture of somebody you know or somebody you love, there's a lot of great ways to use a camera. And especially now that they're so good, anybody has the option to take a really good photo at basically any time. I personally am not very good at taking pictures. Yes, I'm not that great at taking them in the sense that they don't always look very good, like the pictures aren't great. But I'm also not very good at thinking about or remembering to take pictures. I have to almost force myself to think about taking a picture just because something looks cool or because I want to capture a moment. That almost never just comes up in my mind. I've gotten a little bit better recently, but it's typically when I'm at home and like I see the cats do something cute or I want to take a video of something to share, to show somebody. It's not necessarily the same as, you know what? This is a nice moment that I want to capture. But I think there's a lot of power in that. And even though a lot of people take almost too many photos, I think there's a really nice thing about that because you can go back through those and occasionally they come up. Come up on your phone is what I want to say. Like I'm saying that because fairly recently in the past couple of years, phones have added a feature where it'll just show you your pictures from maybe one year ago exactly or two years ago or just a random person or time. And that's been really interesting. I've liked to see the photos that I've taken because I frequently don't go back through them. I don't go back and look at what the pictures I took because I don't think about that. I don't think about, oh, I should take a picture of this moment. And I also don't think, oh, I should go back and look at this moment. I should go back and relive this moment for whatever reason, not even to show somebody a place. I do that occasionally, but it's just I don't really think about it. I often try to explain it or talk about the experience. But just a couple of days ago, I remembered to upload a lot of things to Google Photos because I've been switching operating systems from my phone from an iPhone to an Android. And I realized, oh, I can have all of my pictures if I just put them on Google Photos. And so I did that and I uploaded, I think, all of them. I'm not actually sure. And then Google Photos started showing me some of those old pictures that I had. And some photos that I didn't take, like some pictures of me when I was really young also started showing up. And it was just a cool thing to see. Today, for example, I got to see like this day, so the day that I'm recording, but one year ago. And then five years ago, 18 years ago. So I got to see like a bunch of different times, but at the same time of year. And that's something that I think is really interesting. But I realized that I don't really have that many pictures from like that I took in the past, let's say five years, because it just wasn't that I didn't think about it. I mostly have pictures of times that I was either showing somebody what I was doing or of kind of boring things like recipes or like a wall if something got damaged right and I want to take a picture of the damage. And so a lot of my pictures end up being kind of boring. And something that I would like to learn in the next couple of years to really figure out for the rest of my life is how to take good pictures and how to know when to take pictures that are worth it. Because I think it's really, really easy to take a picture that is not worth it. It just wastes your time. It didn't help anybody. It didn't help anything. And it's not going to be interesting later. But I want to have pictures that are worth it, that do look cool or remind me of something and make me happy to have taken that picture. Then also I'm sure I'll have those utility pictures of stuff that I want to remember. But I also should use that information more often. I know something that I do pretty often is take a picture and then just don't go back to it. Just ignore it, which is probably not the best for me to do because I took that picture for a reason. So maybe I should use that photo, that information. But that is currently how my behavior is. And so that's something that I would like to improve. I think it's a skill that I can improve in the next coming years here. A lot of people, after they take pictures, also print out those pictures or get those pictures framed or into the real world. And that's also something I don't think I've ever done. I don't think I've ever taken a picture and then gotten it, printed out or framed or put it up somewhere. I don't have pictures in my apartment of people or of things that are from my life. I do have some stuff on the walls, obviously, but it's not stuff that I made or anybody that I know made. It's something totally separate that's like a piece of art. And I don't really know how I would put up an actual picture that I took. That feels sort of weird to me, I think. But I think part of it is that I've never actually thought about trying to do that. I haven't thought about trying to take pictures for the sake of putting them up or framing them or having a picture of whoever it might be. But I do think it's always a bit of a cliché or a trope or something that happens in every movie. That's what those words generally mean. It's very common for a main character to go into somebody else's house and see pictures of them with their family or with their friends and learn about that person's history a little bit that way. And that's a bit of a trope, like I said, because it's a useful storytelling device. But I don't have any of that in my apartment. If somebody came in here and I wasn't here, which would be weird. I hope that nobody does that. But if somebody comes into my apartment when I'm not here, they would have no idea who lives there. They wouldn't know what they look like or who that person is in terms of family and life. They would only see my possessions and my things that I have in my apartment. And I think that's an interesting perspective to think about why photos might give other people a window into a bit of your story, a bit of your history. And so I think that as I'm trying to take more and better photos, I want to try to capture a bit of that in some way. But we'll see. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not a photographer in really any sense of the term, but I think I would like to improve my picture taking abilities and potentially have some pictures in my place because that might be nice. We'll see how that happens. But anyways, we'll see what happens. That's a better way to say that. I don't know why I said it like that. But anyways, that is the end of our time for today. That was my episode on taking pictures. I hope that you enjoyed it and I hope that you learned a little bit of something. But that is all that I got and I really appreciate you being here listening and I'll see you tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.
For email updates, subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed.