A photo app has out-designed most of the software I admire, and I want to be honest about how much that stings and how much I love it.
Instagram arrived last autumn, in October, and it does almost nothing. You take a picture, you choose a look, you share it. That is the whole product. And it is quietly beating things built by much larger teams.
The lesson is one I keep having to learn again. Doing one thing well is not a smaller ambition than doing ten things adequately. It is a larger one, and much harder, because you have nowhere left to hide.
It lands differently for me just now, because I am in the middle of a real education in photography. A colleague here at the Grey Nuns is a gifted photographer, and he has been teaching me most of what I know. Aperture. Focal length. F-stops. Composition, and then composition broken on purpose, because he keeps pushing me to see differently rather than correctly.
We work on a Nikon D300s, and there is nothing automatic about it. Learning what light actually does, with a real camera in my hands, has changed how I look at a screen. Photography is design with the fewest possible controls, and it will humble you very fast.
So I am watching a filter-driven app teach the world to frame a shot, and part of me wants to grumble that it is a shortcut. The honest part of me says no. It lowered the door and let millions of people walk through, and some of them will fall in love with light the same way I am falling in love with it. That is not a shortcut. That is a gift.