Younger people may not remember it, but there was a time when mobile phones they did not have a front camera, so we satiate our cravings for self-centeredness and make us selfies with a minimum of quality they depended on our skill and ingenuity. Part of this boom selfies was born with some already extinct social networks like MySpace.
This was a wonderful catalog of selfies that were off-center or taken with a background nothing careful -the bathroom of your house with toilet paper as props It wasn’t the best frame for a photo. Nonetheless, We flood the networks with these types of photographs and we enabled mobile phone manufacturers to insert into them the front cameras that we know today. But, how did we take this kind of photos before?
Groping and fearless
The term ‘selfie’ was chosen as the word of the year in 2013 by the Oxford Dictionary, the year in which it was used more than 1 million times a day on social media, and since then he has not separated from us. The basic mid-shot selfie (face and bust) that drank from the mythical self-portraits in photos or on canvas, has given way to variants such as ‘belfies’, ‘ussies’ or selfies without hands.
But going back to the past, before the Sony Ericsson Z1010, the first front camera phone Incorporated, Fotolog (2002), MySpace (2003), then Facebook (2004) and later Instagram (2010) were nourished by this type of narcissistic photos, so that each one had to figure out how they could to take them.
The most common thing was to grope us, stretch out our arm as far as we can and, with greater or lesser dexterity, manage to press the shutter-release button. The problem with this technique is that it required a lot of practice and, of course, patience, since getting a good selfie the first time in this way was not easy and the results ended in blurry selfies or with any object in the environment -except us- as the protagonist.
Depending on the phone that we had, this could be somewhat easier, since some like the Motorola V300 had a small circular mirror located right next to the lens, quite useful as a guide to take somewhat more decent selfies than those that were achieved ‘blind’.
And the bathrooms came, the mirrors … and everything else.
But at some point in this maelstrom of self-portraits on social media, someone realized that use a mirror it could be the perfect solution to a procedure as uncomfortable as the one we have just seen. And in which room of the house is there always a mirror? Correct: in the bathroom.
This is how selfies in the bathroom were born, protagonists of some scenes so sordid that not even here we dare to reproduce, since in many cases not only the props were not taken care of, but everything that was in the bathroom at that time appeared. And when we say “everything”, it is everything. Glorious time that for Fotolog, there is no doubt that we miss it.
Squeezing technologies
We asked users on Twitter and Facebook so that they themselves could tell us what their tactics were at that time of the absence of a front camera on the mobile and we discovered that when the need is pressing, the human being is capable of bringing out all weapons.
Some went directly from the mobile, making the leap to the computer webcam, doing screenshots of Skype video calls or even using devices as classic as the Game Boy Camera. And it is that everything was worth when it came to quenching the thirst for self-centeredness.
One selfie stick to dominate them all
After so much previous suffering, the selfie continued to gain points in society and even had its own executor complement. The selfie stick, that object that many even today still they are ashamed recognizing that they have, it was patented by its creator, Canadian Wayne Fromm, in 2005.
Since then, these devil inventions accessories have been used all over the worldAlthough, yes, many public places such as museums, concert halls or sports centers have restricted their use both because of the possible inconvenience they may cause, and because of the possibility of being used as a weapon.
As we can see, mirrors, crooked arms, selfie sticks or inventions like the one in the header photo of this article were valid in those days, but surely we left some on the way, so we want to know: How did you manage to take these kinds of photos before?