Why did you take this photo
Mathias Lux, Marian Kogler, Manfred Del Fabro · 2010
Why do people take pictures? While substantial work has been done on the intentions of people producing photos in specific domains (e.g. Flickr users or mobile phone cameras) the general case - arbitrary users taking photos with arbitrary devices - has not yet been investigated in detail. In this short paper, we present an exploratory study on the intentions and goals of people taking digital photos. 40 different specific photo taking situations of 10 people where investigated. We classified the situations and reflected them into context of existing work to investigate the applicability and usefulness of classifications existing for specific domains. Our findings show that applicability of existing models for small domains is limited and they indicate the need of a generalized taxonomy. We further identify hypotheses and research questions for future work in this area.