Note to selfie – store some memories in the mind’s eye

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There’s one good thing to be said about selfies; having the facility to photograph yourself and your loved ones together in the one frame at least means there’s evidence you were all on the one holiday together.

Before the arrival of the selfie, the photographer was always missing, behind their own camera when everyone else was preening in front of it.

Which was a minor issue if it was a full ‘family and friends’ pic – but it looks utterly ridiculous when there was only two of you on the trip and yet just photographic evidence of one over and over again.

The alternative was to alternate; one snapped the other in front of the Trevi Fountain or the Arc de Triomphe – and then the roles were reversed so that at least there was documentary evidence that both of you have seen it, if not at the same time.

But the selfie sorts all that – even if it only gives you the sort of close-up, distorted shot that does no one any real favours but does prove both of you were there.

I have a habit of offering to take pix for visitors when I see them in similar straits; some accept with delight and others look at me like I’m about to run off with their phone.

But I’ll keep doing it because I know what it’s like to have a lifetime of holiday snaps that alternate the same scene with one of you first and then the other.

Of course another way around this without relying on the kindness – or nosiness – of strangers is to get yourself a selfie stick….a six foot extendable plastic pole that has you at one end and your phone at the other.

The problem is that, to overcome one problem, you create another – at least for passers-by who now have to negotiate their way around a tourist holding the equivalent of a broomstick that effectively throws a cordon around them.

Furthermore, they’re now looking at a camera that’s several feet away from them and trying to frame the shot, while all the while bumping into people on a busy tourist street.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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