How often do you see people walking and reading their texts or on the train and reading their tablet rather than enjoying the view? What are we missing when we do that?

Breaking the initial question down into its two parts, it is not unusual to see people walking whilst looking at their phone, what they are looking at is difficult to say, it might be looking at texts, Facebook or WhatsApp. Alternatively, they could be looking at a map trying to navigate in a place they are unfamiliar with. After London, Cambridge is the most visited city in UK with over 8 million visitors a year. If I were to sit in the market square or on the wall outside King’s College I would most likely see people using their phones in one of two ways; first to take pictures and second to look at them for information. So I think it is not necessarily the case that people walking around looking at their phone are missing out on the view around them in some cases they will be concentrating on their phone and in others they will be using it to engage with their environment by photographing it.

The second part of the question asks us to consider people using a phone or a tablet on a train. When reflecting about this part of the question I thought about my own experiences of regular commuting before the advent of smartphones and my current, less frequent, experience of now. My recollections of commuting into London in the 1990s was not one of commuters looking out of the windows enjoying the view, rather, in the mornings of trying to catch up on lost sleep or reading the newspaper and in the evenings either dozing or reading the Evening Standard.

My experience of commuting now in a time of smartphones, tablets and laptops is of travelling from the UK to Belgium on the Eurostar. There is no doubt that technology has changed what people do compared with twenty-five years ago, people are much less likely to read a newspaper and are more likely to be working on their computer, but there does not appear to be a change in the degree that they engage with, or observe, the world outside the carriage window. I think the question makes an assumption that by looking at a phone or tablet people are missing out on something, whereas, in the case of commuting, very often the view is uninteresting, for example when passing through cuttings or tunnels. In addition, for a significant part of the year there is a likelihood that the journeys will be made when it is dark and so the view is in large parts small points of light on a dark background. These factors, combined with the speed which fast commuter trains travel at make it difficult to take in the view in any meaningful way, so the fact that passengers choose to look at electronic devices rather that looking out of the window for several hours is not surprising.

I think the reference to looking at smartphones is to illustrate a more general point about the need as a photographer to engage with my environment; if I don’t engage and observe it is not possible to know what I will have missed out on as I will not have seen it. Whilst smartphones are useful tools, especially their ability to take picture and record video, if we spend to much time looking at a screen instead of the world around us we may miss out on great pictures or ideas for great pictures.