Partying with friends, at a festival, voting for someone, or funeral ceremonies, Selfies are a must, these days. Deepa K. Basfore puts pen to paper to explore the journey……

It’s no point saying that most of the pictures captured today are usually tagged to friends on social sites especially Facebook. And, why not? After all, everyone wants to be talked about or liked by people for that obviously is the human nature.

Gone are the days when someone had to say cheese till the photographer finds the best shot, or couples on a trip hardly had pictures taken together. Even if there is a photograph clicked, there might be chances that one may not like the photograph. So, for the new age bracket, selfie is the trend where you don’t have to wait for someone to click your photograph. With the new technique, it has been observed that the number of pictures uploaded in the social sites has almost doubled or tripled than the previous numbers.

While, the race for likes and comments continues in Facebook, some hundred years old technique has again taken a new shape with a new name and has flooded the social sites. Selfie is the trend where people are seen to capture their self-portrait photograph, typically taken with a hand-held digital camera or camera phone.

Selfie is an age old technique which was started when neither the digital camera nor mobile cameras were invented some hundred years back. So, how selfies were possible. Robert Cornelius, an American pioneer in photography, produced a daguerreotype of himself in 1839 which is also one of the first photographs of a person. Robert is credited of taking the first photograph without being known of the fact that it was to take a name centuries later called – selfie.

Moving from the past to the present, we see that the term “Selfie” was first discussed by photographer Jim Krause in 2005. In 2009, the image hosting and video hosting website Flickr and its users used ‘selfies’ to describe seemingly endless self-portraits posted by teenage girls. Initially popular with young people, selfies gained wider popularity over time.

By the end of 2012, Time magazine considered ‘selfie’as one of the “top 10 buzzwords” of that year. Selfie was earlier popular with only the young hearts but later US President Barack Obama also made news for selfie. It became news headlines during Nelson Mandela’s memorial celebration at the Johannesburg’s FNB Stadium when Obama was snapped taking a selfie.

Even, our present Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who keeps his twitter account updated, also posted a selfie after voting in Gandhinagar, India, which also became headlines and became a major trending item on the micro-blogging site.

This new trend has indeed opened market for more devices which can capture the best selfies with little involvement of time. A city based smart phone dealer marks that “today most people of all age group want to buy phones which have a good quality front camera for only a good quality front camera smart phone suffices for selfies”. Nokia, Micromax, Samsung and Sony, all are giving each other a tough competition to manufacture the best phones with best front camera quality for their market lies mostly in the age group of 18 to 24 years.

The appeal for selfies comes from how easy they are to create and share, and the control they give self-photographers over how they present themselves. However, while doing so, one should be cautious in taking selfies. A woman from United States went a step further to make sure her friends knew exactly how good she looked while sun tanning by the seaside sending her own selfies. What she did went viral as her posing attracted the ire of a bystander who caught the solo photo shoot on his camera phone – and the video attracted over 2 million views on YouTube.

While it has also been pointed out that while selfies are often intended to give the photographer control over how their image is presented, posting images publicly or sharing them with others who do so may have the opposite effect—dramatically so in the case of revenge porn, where ex-lovers post sexually explicit photographs or nude selfies to exact revenge or humiliate their former lovers.

So, be cautious when taking a selfie or sharing it, but enjoy the trend as its time to show up.