For an activity seemingly innocuous, photography sure has a lot of hunting vocabulary associated with it. The OED has references for "shoot" with respect to taking a photo dating back to 1890, a time when people were starting to build more cameras with mechanical shutters and automatic machinery. Perhaps the simultaneous advances in weaponry caused some kind of association between them?
Or is it perhaps something much more metaphorical? To shoot and capture a picture is to snatch an image to take home and enjoy, perhaps as a hunter enjoys a trophy head, or maybe to isolate and freeze a moment of time, thus killing it and yet immortalizing it. Especially with today's digital technology, moments that would pass away into the mists of time and even slowly vanish from physical canvas can now be stored, more or less permanently, in the digital ether! :D In fact, maybe that is the point. Moments that would otherwise escape us like fleeting gazelle, never to be seen again, are caught and preserved, so that the story of that moment can be displayed and told and remembered.
Or is it perhaps something much more metaphorical? To shoot and capture a picture is to snatch an image to take home and enjoy, perhaps as a hunter enjoys a trophy head, or maybe to isolate and freeze a moment of time, thus killing it and yet immortalizing it. Especially with today's digital technology, moments that would pass away into the mists of time and even slowly vanish from physical canvas can now be stored, more or less permanently, in the digital ether! :D In fact, maybe that is the point. Moments that would otherwise escape us like fleeting gazelle, never to be seen again, are caught and preserved, so that the story of that moment can be displayed and told and remembered.
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