Snapshot (photography)

Common snapshot subjects include the events of everyday life, often portraying family members, friends, pets, children playing, birthday parties and other celebrations, sunsets, tourist attractions and the like.

Use of such settings can reveal the lack of expert choices that would entail more control of the focus point and shallower depth of field to achieve more pleasing images by making the subject stand out against a blurred background.

Special head-rests and arm-rests could be used, and even if a subject managed to stay comfortable under these circumstances, they had to try to keep their facial expression in check if they wanted their features to properly show on the picture.

[2] During the following decades, many kinds of improvements —such as increased light-sensitivity of emulsions, quicker lenses and automatic shutters— were developed by experimental photographers who hoped to capture sharp details that would previously get smeared by motion blur.

Many of the early pioneers were not necessarily ambitious fine artists, but could also be amateurs, or commercial photographers catering to a public that mostly fancied affordable small formats, such as cabinet cards and stereo views.

As spending time at the beach had become a favorite pastime in pioneering countries France and England, seashore views became a very popular topic and the clarity of waves in such pictures provide an idea of the duration of the exposure.

A broche-sized original "chromo-crystal" example depicting three children was praised by the Brighton Herald: "the laughing, mocking eye of the pet in the centre is, indeed, a photographic triumph, and the characters of the two others are unmistakeably stamped upon their features.

Because a heavily retouched single picture from 1877 had been received with much suspicion, members of the press were invited to witness the event, resulting in extensive coverage of the successful experiments in the newspapers.

The photographs were published as cabinet cards entitled The Horse in Motion and also featured in popular science magazines, including Scientific American and La Nature.

Many professional photographers and filmmakers used the technique as quick test and reference material before engaging in the more time-consuming definitive production of their work, of which results could only be viewed much later.

[10] The snapshot tendency was promoted by John Szarkowski, who was head of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991, and it became especially fashionable from the late 1970s until the mid-1980s[citation needed].

"[15] Szarkowski brought to prominence the work of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand in his influential exhibition "New Documents" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967,[11] in which he identified a new trend in photography: pictures that seemed to have a casual, snapshot-like look and had subject matter that seemed strikingly ordinary.

The term arose from the fascination of artists with the "classical" black-and-white vernacular snapshot, the characteristics of which were: 1) they were made with a hand-held camera on which the viewfinder could not easily 'see' the edges of the frame,[citation needed] unlike modern cheap digital cameras with electronic viewfinder, and so the subject had to be centred; and 2) they were made by ordinary people recording the ceremonies of their lives and the places that they lived and visited.