In the 90’s and 00’s there was a photographic movement to take photographs with more depth using more hand and arm movement to make more dynamic images. Some say it came from comic book artists and others say it started as everyone doing the double thumb and index finger as a ergatz frame gide of what you were about to film, but this time you were the subject.
Anyways it got popular so people with cheap cameras and phone cameras started propping them up and trying to do some of it and most of the time they didn’t have enough time to get their hands right. So they started to take all these pictures of themselves with weird hands and people started doing it on purpose, and then photographers picked up on the trend.
Phone cameras weren’t a thing in the 90s or 00s
I think 2003 is when they started taking off.
Sure they existed around then, but go back and look at the photo quality. Phone cameras were a novelty in 2003, and anyone wanting to actually take a picture was still using a dedicated camera. No one was taking pictures like the ones we’re talking about here on their Nokia
In the late mid to late 90’s they had cameras and video cameras on what we would now refer to as ‘Dumbphones’. I was born between the Summer of Love and the original Woodstock. Those were my 20’s and 30’s. They had cameras. Not great cameras. Not all of them but enough of them. BTW I worked in IT and studied WAP and online multimedia formats as part of my training.
And something else you are forgetting is the trend was on blog like sites before blogging was a thing. People didn’t expect high quality images because they took forever to download. Often people also used crappy pocket cams and videos from cheap video cameras. But most people think phones when you say selfies these days, but they often used digital snapshot cameras and then imported them to the PC and shunk them down to Internet size. However AIUI the movement were based on camera focused dumbphones.
You don’t want to believe it fine. No skin off my nose.
POV: you’re boobs
Because that year researchers discovered hands
I am still thankful for that 🤗
is the guy at the 3rd image Limp Bizkit?
No, that’s Fred Durst. Limp Bizkt is the name of the doctor that created him.
ohh right
That’s when fingers began to fing
This is being done today. Ever notice how Youtubers/streamers are always waving their hands across the screen like they’re doing ninja chops or something.
They had to prove they weren’t ai
MDMA and DXM is my guess
I witnessed this in the 90s and 2000s. AFAIK, it started in rave culture. People would lace their fingers around glow sticks and wave them in front of a friend’s face. I was told that the effect is really cool if your rolling on MDMA. However, I also saw Mormon kids doing it stone sober, because they’re always imitating things they see without understanding the drug component (e.g. a Mormon kid at a local high school who wore a pacifier on a necklace – an MDMA raver accessory to give something to chew on – despite zero awareness of drugs).
Personally, I think these photos are a combination of raver culture seeping into the mainstream, along with a trend of “reversing subject and photographer”.
Well that big ass asteroid was coming in 2012 so we had to make sure and be ready to catch it. But since it’s really big everybody had to work together to do so. Then we just yeeted that thing up like a volleyball and it went away. And that’s why we’re still alive today.
I still remember Yeet Day fondly, the sandwiches afterwards were great
I showed my nephew the movie 2012 when he turned 12 and told him it’s based on real events. He believed me for like 5 minutes.
Skate videos popularized the use of the fish eye lens. Music videos had people waving their hands around in the face of the camera because it looks cool through that lens. The idea was applied to still images, and this is the result.
Hype Williams directed the music videos in the 90s-2000s with lots of contrast, bright colors, bright lights, and the fisheye lens.
If you look up some Busta Rhymes music videos you will see plenty of examples.
It’s weird but, without the sound track these gifs just look like a bunch of posers trying to look cool.
It’s all in the (fish)eye of the beholder.
Everybody is just trying to look cool. Everybody probably looks like a “poser” to someone else. And in a cruel twist of irony, the inventors and early adopters of some “cool” new thing, look derivative and boring years AFTER everyone else has done it. Kids don’t have a long memory for these kinds of things; they grew up in a world where it was already old news and boring, never having experienced a world without it. This shift in perception can happen sometimes even among people old enough to have been there at the beginning. So yeah, they are just a bunch of posers trying to look cool, but aren’t we all?
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but with the music it also looks that way to someone over twenty years old or so.
It was a remarkably stupid time, however even back then there were better music videos. E.g. stuff by Michel Gondry, Run Wrake, or Spike Jonze.
I jumped in slow motion / off the curb.
Without a skateboard / that should look absurd!
But with my fisheye lens / hey, haven’t ya heard?
I got the moves so smooth / to make ya mom say:
Look, it’s the same every time a new gadget comes out and takes the world by storm only for it to become boring after a few years. If you weren’t around in the late nineties it’s hard to explain just how exciting fingers were.
We had to do our finging manually before that. It was hell.
Yeah they digital now
Remember trying to use an ATM with your dick? I know women used to complain about having to use strap-ons, but I actually think they might have had it better. Those Braille bumps hurt
STRAP ON spelled backwards is NO PARTS
You’re welcome.
The photographer had a huge pair of beasts and they just couldn’t help themselves but give em a little squeeze during thebphotoshoot
Those beasts must have been friendly if they were willing to be squeezed.
Same reason everyone started doing the stupid duck face shit in the 2010s then everyone started doing peace signs again.
The newest generation isn’t immune to stupid shit just like every other decade isn’t.
We didn’t have selfie-cameras, so the only way to do a selfie was to throw your camera with a little spin on a short timer and hope it all looked great when one of your 24 photos were developed on bits of paper some time later…
I broke so many cameras this way…
You joke but you can actually get some neat photos doing this, assuming you are competent enough to catch your camera. Especially with a fast auto shutter.
