Binaya Ghimire

On November 20, 2017, Paris Hilton, an American socialite, actor, and singer tweeted a photo of her and Britney Spears (American singer) saying, “11 years ago, today, me & Britney invented the selfie” However, that was not true. According to Buzzfeed, a popular online magazine, the word selfie was used online first time in September 2002 by someone called “Hopey.” The selfie was a close-up broken lips. “Sorry about the focus, it was a selfie,” was the caption for the photo. However, later Hopey explained that he did not invent the word, it was already a popular slang.
According to Oxford Dictionary, “Selfie is a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media.” The word selfie was incorporated in Oxford Dictionaries in 2013. It is basically a self portrait taken by a camera at arm’s length. Even though selfie became popular in the past 5-6 years, self portrait has been around since a long time. According to the Library of Congress, the first self portrait, or the selfie in modern terminology, was taken in 1839 by an American called Robert Cornelius.
While selfie is the word for a self portrait by a single person, words such as usies, groupfie and wefie have been used to describe group selfie. The word “usies” was used for a group selfie by magazines like Business Insider, The Daily Dot and TMZ in 2014. The same year, Huawei trademarked the word “groupfie” in the US, France, Germany Rissia and China and Samsung trademarked wefie in the US.
If you look on the internet, you can see a lot of variations of selfie; netizens are using different terms for a selfie with focus on hair, eyes and other organs. They are even giving new words for the selfie with animals or book shelves in the background.
Phone photography, or phoneography as some people have coined, is a new photography venture that is going viral these days. Even though most of the phone photography incorporates selfie and wefie, photography enthusiasts are exploring a lot of subjects with their phone cameras.
The days of mobile phone as a device to talk or text are gone, today you can use your cell phone to read ebooks, browse internet, play games and take pictures. There was a time when cell phones only had camera with Visual Graphics Array (VGA) resolution of 640 pixels wide by 480 pixels high. The photos taken with VGA camera were low quality. However, VGA cameras are now out-dated. Then, owning a phone with 1.3 or 3 mega pixel cameras was considered a status symbol. These days cameras with eight, 12 or even 32 mega pixels are common.
Actually the “camera” feature has become unique selling proposition for almost all camera manufacturers from Apple and Samsung, to Sony, Opp, Huawei, Vivo etc. A good camera is in fact a good feature to consider in a phone. If you like taking pictures, there are a lot of benefits of owning a phone with a good camera. Traditional camera can most of the time make your subject self-conscious; however, cell phone camera allows you to take pictures stealthily. You can take amazing pictures, even in the places where camera is not allowed.