Women take more selfies than men!

67 pc young travellers prefer smartphones over DSLRs: Study

Women are more obsessed with selfies than men. Delivering this verdict based on a survey of a 12-million-strong Indian youth traveller community, HolidayIQ gets into more specifics: 41 per cent of women respondents take selfies, a clear edge over the men at 35 per cent!

Twenty-one per cent of the travellers carry a selfie stick, while only nine per cent take a tripod with them, the survey found. This is another indication that interest in DSLRs, those professional but bulky standalone camera, is on the wane.

Purist shutterbugs might frown, but the results show that the young Indian traveller’s preference of smartphone photography over DSLRs continues unabated. A decisive 67 per cent prefer their smartphone cameras to take travel pictures.

Social media connection
The smartphone’s instant social media connection is clearly the game-changer.
Consider this: Eighty-one per cent of the young travellers surveyed admit to uploading photos from their smartphones immediately onto their social media, online communities, WhatsApp groups and personal portfolios. This is then shared with friends and family.

For professionals, the smartphone camera may never displace the DSLR’s ability to take photos in a million different ways with multiple customisations. But the fast-maturing smartphone is quickly catching up. Thirty-two per cent of the respondents who preferred smartphone photography swore by the mobile device’s ease of use. It was handy and relatively maintenance free.

Even hardcore DSLR users, finicky about shutterspeed, aperture and sensor controls, now acknowledge the giant strides made by new-age smartphones.

Some phones now offer hitherto unthinkable controls over photographs. Attachable lenses with zoom control are now flooding the accessory market.

Revolutionised
But the clincher should be this: The emergence of phones with high-end cameras has revolutionised photography itself. Much more photos are now being taken than the DSLR-only era. In fact, 74 per cent of the traveller respondents admitted that they would never miss a great live moment. Hence the need to take that perfect photo with an instantly available phone camera.

Analysing the trend is Hari Nair, Founder and CEO, HolidayIQ: “With these numbers, we see that travellers are now curating their own experiences using social media and travel apps. This proves that photography has now become another reason to travel and the photographs taken from photo apps - the best souvenir from any travel undertaken.”
The explosive growth of smartphones, camera quality and photo editing apps has only accelerated this trend.