More and more I remind myself not to try so hard to capture every moment on film. Sometimes life just needs to be lived.
In this day and age my brain has been trained to think in perfect snapshots and hashtags. How will I remember this moment if I have no physical or virtual prompt to remind me?
Now this is an especially tough practice for me. I love photos. I love taking them. I like being in them (hopefully looking sane). I have several photo albums bursting at the seams full of the perfect throwback thursdays. Pictures to me have always been fun to peek back at, relive the moments captured and smile or laugh. There are lots of good times and amazing people.
Even if no one else takes the time to look, my photos give me great joy. I have thousands of pictures yet to print, books and albums to create and fill. Thanks to sites like Shutterfly, I can build beautiful visual books to give as gifts and share the timeline of some of my favorite highlights in my life’s history.
Even still, I am learning more and more that there is a time to take a photo and there is a time to put the camera down.
For my sister’s wedding last week, I kept my phone in my purse most of night. I snapped a few here and there but mainly I relied on others in the wedding party, guests, the photographer and videographer to get all the shots I would love to see. I told myself I did not want to have my phone glued to my hand. I wanted to party and dance and enjoy the company of those who were around.
There were lots of times I said, “This would be a great picture.” A lot of those moments did not make it to film but that is okay because I was there to see it live, enjoy it in the moment and now I remember whatever I remember.
I have been managing the WedPics app where all the guests could upload the photos they took throughout the wedding day. It has been equally as fun seeing the event through their eyes.
Pictures are truly great but so is knowing I was not missing something truly great by fiddling around with the apps on my phone trying to get the perfect picture. I managed to live through not having every second immortalized in my gallery. I had a phenomenal time in real time. Those memories will last forever.
In the future, I will still keep my flash ready but I may just have to start relying on my memory more for some moments in my life. This could literally cut my hashtag usage by at least half.
Life Untangled 