While I now love the convenience that consumer photo-sharing and printing sites such as Snapfish and Shutterfly offer, I admit that I haven’t always been in love with the online process.

I consider myself pretty technologically savvy for a thirtysomething mom: I navigate my iPod with ease, I text-message my husband and friends, and I can even figure out how to fix my MacBook laptop when things go awry (forget about PCs, though — they’re a whole different animal). Yet when I first joined the online photo portal world four years ago when my son was born (I’m a Snapfish member), I was annoyed by some of the glitches that I soon encountered during my uploading endeavors.

For a supposed time-saver, using this type of online service didn’t seem that convenient when I had to check each individual photo in my image library, a process that wasted many a summer afternoon when I should have been playing with my infant. Plus, more often that not, I would finally finish uploading all the images, only to find that half of them hadn’t uploaded correctly, or at all.

Now I know that I’m not the only one who has felt this type of photographic frustration. A new study by digital media management company Memeo shows that other consumers are also working around the kinks and conundrums that still plague some of these online solutions. The study found that some of the respondents’ biggest gripes were the time it takes to upload photos (36%) and that family members who want to access these photos can’t figure out how to use the sites (19%). (I can certainly relate to that last point — I don’t even want to reveal how many hours I’ve spent in an e-mail trail with my 80-year-old grandmother trying to explain to her how to see her great-grandkids on her computer screen as she tries to mouse around the Snapfish or Flickr screen.)

To be fair, things are much better these days than they were during the last Summer Olympics — I’m happy to report that I can now select multiple photos at once to upload, go stir the Classico, and come back a little later to view all my albums online. The service I use (still Snapfish) now offers a ton of gifts, photo books, and other photo accoutrements that keep me shopping for hours (I especially love the collage-poster option — I’ve started a tradition of creating a 20 x 30 version every holiday season to showcase my family’s favorite photos from the entire year, which I display next to the previous year’s version in our hallway).

Most telling (and most disturbing to those of us in the industry) from this Memeo survey, however, is that a whopping 79% of respondents revealed they have taken digital pictures they’ve intended to share, but never did. The photo industry still has a lot of work to do in terms of educating consumers and eliminating the intimidation factor. Only then will photo sharing reach its full potential online.

Last month I had the opportunity to see the world. If you’re wondering whether I went on some multiple country world tour, or just returned from Disney World’s 11-country-buffet at Epcot Center, you can rest assured that I did neither. Instead, I saw the Real World—and I don’t mean MTV’s pseudo reality-television show. What I did see, though, was untainted by a hotel view, a television screen, or a ten-foot grinning Mickey Mouse. It was candid and sincere, and it was a display of press photography from the 2008 World Press Photo exhibition.

I was invited by Getty Images to cover the event for our website (you can find the story in our Online Exclusives section), and was made a witness to the many different realities of the people showcased on the clean walls of the United Nations building. My experience seeing a world unscathed by a political pundit’s quick-speak, or a news network’s agenda, was for lack of a more exotic description, simply eye opening. Though the realities of those subjects that I watched from a distance that night, with a pen in one hand, and a pig-in-a-blanket in the other, seemed unreal in the context of my own, sheltered reality, I also saw a world shared by people in significantly different places, but who unknowingly affected one another. I have not been able to quiet that vision since.

I thought of that vision again this morning when my web editor asked me about my blog topic; she was putting together this week’s newsletter and needed to know what I would be blogging about. Forever in the throws of procrastination, I embarrassedly asked her if she had any ideas. I received an email with three appropriate topics along with a 1pm due date. The items she sent me were: “UK Government to Discuss Photography Guidelines with Police”; Brangelina’s Baby Pics; and “Astronaut Photography Researcher: A Space Journal.” Never one to discuss science before noon, I sat at my chair staring at the remaining two topics which were indignantly staring back at me. Brangelina’s Baby Pics vs. UK Government to Discuss Photography Guidelines with Police. My thought-process was as follows: “The Brangelina story is national, and I have an American readership. Do British people read my blog? Is the term ‘British people’ politically correct, or are they people of the UK? Press Photography, Brangelina…”

It went on this way for some minutes, and then my eyes scanned a couple of lines in the UK story:

“The announcement was made in the House of Lords on 16 July after Lord Rosser submitted an oral question on public photography rights. Addressing Lord Bassam of Brighton, who represented Her Majesty’s Government in the House of Lords, Richard Rosser said ‘Is [Lords Bassam] aware that magazines for photographers are reporting that photographers, including professional press photographers, are being challenged by police and private security guards when taking photographs in the street and other public places?’ He continued: ‘Photographers are sometimes filmed themselves; they are told to move on or asked for their name and address. They feel that they are being harassed.”

Right there, the last line: they felt that they are being harassed…stuck with me. I again returned to that feeling I had the night of the World Press exhibition; it was as if my conscience was harassed by those images.

Like the pictures of the body bags returning home in droves from Vietnam that my parents always told me about, these images of soldiers, citizens, women and children in Iraq was my first uncensored glance into a world unclaimed by popular media circuits, but of which was my own, and it was affecting my reality again. Press photography is the last of a dying breed of mediums that showcase the truth. Irrespective of eloquent sloganeering, good lighting, and convenient historic narratives, it is a vision and a reflection of ourselves and our world. If I didn’t step foot into the United Nations building that day, I most likely would have been blogging to you about Brangelina’s baby pictures. Before you read my next line, stop a minute, as I did when I wrote it, and think about that.

I say let the photographers do their job, because if we don’t, then the only news items we will find in our own industry and in, dare I say, contemporary culture as a whole, will be Brangelina’s new baby photographs.

As many of you may already know, this is the last year of the old Yankee Stadium. A new stadium is currently being erected across the street.

Recently, I went to see a Yankees-Red Sox’s game– even forking over more than $300 on StubHub.com for prime seat, since it is the last year. My husband and I had no idea of just how good the seats were until we arrived. We had Field Level seats just a few rows back between the Red Sox dugout and homeplate. We were in the field of vision of the players, if they would have just turned around.

I was in awe the whole time, not really caring who won (shhh), but just “wowed” by the experience. I mean we even had waiter service. That’s right. There was a menu and we could order lunch from it.

After I got over the initial shock that I was a stone’s throw away from Derek Jeter (i know, it’s cliche, but those uniforms look so nice in person), I looked around at the stadium. It was probably going to be the last time I saw the place afterall.

Call me naive but the photo industry practically “owns” the available ad space around the stadium walls and seating areas in the field and inside where the concessions are as well. Below the scoreboard: there was Sharp and Canon, on the field level was Sony, Fujifilm and Nokia; Mitsubishi popped up too. They were the main contenders…they weren’t all necessary referring to cameras directly–just the brand names were listed.

I felt proud that the industry has such mainstream appeal…but I wondered ‘why does Canon and the others go so well with baseball, like say baseball and beer, or baseball and Cracker Jacks’ (which I happened to be pigging out on incidently)?

Well, I looked at what I was doing at the game. It really enhanced my experience to capture this memory with my camera. I even took video of the entire 9th inning…Jeter slipped and fell at bat and I have it on video for all posterity. I shot the seats we were in, the players doing their warm-up swings on deck, the crowds pawing at each other to grab a foul ball, the field sweepers, the plastic covering when it began raining, the subway stop we walked out of. It all added extra fun to the experience.

Whether you make a living from photography or take photos as a hobby or to capture memories–Photography is important. It is a vital piece of American culture. As American as baseball. And the industry’s products that are compatible and/or support digital make photography even more satisfying.

I mean my husband has never asked me to take a picture of him anywhere. But he asked me to take lots of pictures of him at Yankee stadium that day–at the subway stop, by the field, in his seat, in the rain. We will soon show these to his 87-year-old father, who once took him there as a boy.

When visiting New York City this past weekend to check out a July 4th Yankees/Red Sox Game, I had the opportunity to see “Polaroids: Mapplethorpe” at the Whitney Museum of Art (on view until September 7, 2008).

While shooting Polaroids to keep a record of his artwork in the 1970s, Robert Mapplethorpe fell in love with the Polaroids’ immediacy and pretty soon, he began to experiment and hobby around with the medium. In fact, many of these instant photos have never been seen, overshadowed by his later, more precise work.

The result was thousands of photos of the young man’s friends and lovers and even common everyday objects. The exhibit, which showcase more than 100 shots, one right after the next, highlights the nature of Mapplethorpe’s experimentation with framing, lighting, angles and finding beauty in the everyday. These photos, taken from 1970-1975, were his tutorials, in essence, preparing him for the medium-format Hasselblad he would get as a gift a few years later. Ultimately, he would alienate the immediacy of the Polaroid for the crisp, sharp quality of a pro camera.

Here’s what the New Yorker magazine said about the exhibit:

“Many of these small, intimate photographs convey tenderness and vulnerability. Others depict a toughness and immediacy that would give way in later years to more classical form. Unlike the highly crafted images Mapplethorpe staged in the studio and became famous for, these disarming pictures are marked by spontaneity and invention. Together, they offer insight into the artist’s creative development and reveal his pure delight in seeing at a formative time in his career.”

The show is accompanied by a book that places this early work in the context of his life-long artistic production.

Perhaps some of the spontaniety and fun he saw in his earlier photo days was lost with the Hasselblad. It’s too bad Mapplethorpe died young from AIDS in 1989 and never lived to use the digital cameras of today, where immediacy does not mean sacrificing quality.