Leave photos alone

Stop post-processing your photographs with novelty crops and filters. Every time you do so, you are making your future self sad. In the future, when you are ten, twenty, or thirty years older you will regret that every photograph you have from your younger years looks as if you lived your parents' generation in the 1970s. And that's saying nothing of the present-day contempt of technology displayed by using multi-megapixel ultra-high-definition cameras to produce artificially fuzzy, unevenly exposed, low-resolution photographs.

When your parents reminisce of their past, they see it through a lens of washed out colors and film grain out of necessity. They have no better photographs because they had no better technology.

You do have the technology and you should be happy. Your photographs should be crisp, clear, high-resolution reminders of past experiences.

Having recently scanned our own old photographs for posterity, we also regret photos were cut to fit a novelty frame. It may have seemed clever twenty years ago, but now it seems wasteful. With digital photos, there is no need to crop originals, so don't do it.

Every time I see your modern photography reduced to a facsimile of the 1970s, I am awed that you have such disrespect for your own future.

Snap out of it. Have respect for your future self and use your high-quality cameras the way they were built to be used.