Killing Yourself Softly With Digital Photography

We try to provide helpful advice on a number of photographic subjects here in this column - a service to the profession and the trade...and all the rest. One of areas that may have been neglected up to now is how to injure yourself with digital photography.

Now we're not talking about harming your reputation with bad technique, dodgy subject matter, or dubious business practices - feel free to make your own way to perdition just as you wish. Be assured, you will have company on the road...

No. it's more physical than moral harm that we are concerned with here. And the news is not good - digital photography work is nowhere near as easy a path to destruction as the one with the older chemical processes.

In the dear old days you could poison yourself real good, real quick - if you were using mercury fumes or cyanide washes or ether vapour in the same space as a candle flame you could expect a prompt cessation to further care. Later on the black and white chemistry got safer but the advent of colour work with the organic solvents and dire bleaches and carcinogens brought the statistics back up.

You could also do wonderful things in a very short period of time with some of the early  electrical connections, safelights, pools of water, and metal workbenches.

When all else failed, you could fall over in the dark and pull the enlarger down on yourself.

Now in the digital realm it gets harder...no more chemistry. The computers are all sealed and earthed and you rarely use them in the sink with an inch of water round the bottom. You could swallow a lithium ion battery and harm yourself but it takes some doing. Hitting yourself on the side of the head with a 120-400mm zoom lens is difficult to do more than once.

Sitting in front of a monitor for 15 hours straight might be bad for you, but then so many people are trained to do this by their years of television that they won't notice.

Possibly the best result will be if you set the digital camera on a tripod and put it onto interval shooting and then link it straight to your Facebook account. Eventually your friends will get so sick of seeing you on their feed that they will band together to come round your house and beat you up.