Exploded by a photobomb

Earlier this month an IT expert told me that when you buy a computer, it’s outdated before you even unbox it. Analogously I can’t tell you what the world’s population is – because as this population clock graphically shows [1], in the time it’d take me to say or write the number, it’d have increased. We live on a crowded planet all right. And it seems that in so-called developed countries, and increasingly in the others too, digital camera use is increasing. The twin effects of more people and more cameras means that ever more of the world’s happenings are captured on disc, chip or card. Mostly this capture’s intentional. But sometimes not. Unintentional photography – at least from the photographer’s viewpoint – has a name: photobombing [2]. I didn’t know this term until a few days ago when I read this gizmodo piece [3]. It tells of a bag thief who was apprehended because his act of theft was photographed – unintentionally but serendipitously. And the story’s even more exquisite because the photographer’s the owner of the stolen bag. Sometimes synchronicity’s a curse – say when your car stalls on a railway crossing with a train approaching. Though sometimes it’s a blessing – as in this case. The growing world population’s a harbinger of ecological disaster. But until then, some good’s coming from more people taking more photographs. Ho hum.