Days Sets Out To Make Everyday Life Normal Again

As someone who grew up with a director for a father, I’ve always been someone who loves to take photos of people, of places and of things. I’ve been fortunate enough to own a Nikon D40 since my junior year of high school when I was accepted into the AP Art Program. Since then, the photography world has changed quite a bit. And now there is a new app called Days.

The invention of smartphones with high quality cameras gave everyone the chance to own a nice camera. And a few years later the app Instagram, took photography in a whole new direction. Today, the average person has the ability to take a photo and edit it with the click of a button. No need for Photoshop or fancy editing software. Instagram has made it all much simpler and publically accessible.

The integration of camera apps has allowed us to take ordinary pictures and edit them into enhanced images of our everyday lives. Suddenly, a picture of the tree in your front yard looks like it was taken by a professional photographer. And the best part is it’s easy to share your artwork with the world around you- so that everyone can see just how awesome your life is.

Along Comes The New Days App

Through this evolution of camera apps, the question has risen: is there a problem with glorifying every image of our lives? What happened to real photos of real life without any editing?

During my quest for a topic to write about this week I stumbled upon a new iOS app called Days. The apps tagline is: Real Life: Unfiltered. TechStars company Wander built the new iOS app to allow its users to share sets of photos taken over a 24-hour period of time. Days was designed so you can chronicle, then share, a typical day in your life with the world around you.

Every photo is time stamped and shared in chronological order. Days appears to be in direct competition with Instagram. And that means Wander is planning to battle against Facebook for your camera usage.

Days is an app for the everyday photographer to express her unaltered, daily life. It allows you to post your photos to Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. When asked about the reason for creating the app, Jeremy Fisher, founder of Wander explained, “The concept of a day is something everyone understands.” The photos you take will be grouped into a set beginning at 5:00am and ending 24 hours later at 5:00am, what Fisher calls “the folk definition of what a day is.”

Days enables people to create a chronological narrative of their day with real life photos, taken in the moment, unedited. The app is a month old and who knows if it will take off. It certainly says something about the altered online images we have created of ourselves. Every action we take online is seen by someone, and our natural response to that is to depict ourselves as perfectly as possible in our profiles and through our pictures.

This app is bringing its users back to real, unfiltered life before the mass editing photography craze. It’s a way to share your daily life with normal people and as a normal person.

What do you think? Are you going to download and use Days?

Katie Komnenich is an Intern with The Friedman Group, LLC. She’ll be writing blog posts all summer, so keep coming back to see what she comes up with next.