The following post is from Ruth of Creative Memories: 3 Reasons To Take Photos
It’s happened to many of us who use Facebook or another social networking site: Your child does something cute, you’re vacationing somewhere beautiful or doing something extraordinary — your first instinct is to show your friends. And thanks to mobile uploads or a USB cord, you can!
This is terrific as it highlights one of the main reasons we’ve always taken photos: to capture and then share with others the special moments in our lives. What concerns me, though, is that while we’re getting really good at instant sharing, we may be neglecting the other reasons we take pictures.
Why do we take photos?
1. To Share:
O.k., Facebook is great at this one, especially in the here and now. We can show our friends and family who are near and far exactly what’s going on in our lives as it happens. I’m all for that!
But what happens 6 months or a few years down the road? You’re sitting in your living room enjoying a visit with friends and begin talking about that wonderful holiday you took. You wish you could show them the photos – do you all gather around your smartphone screen or laptop computer to scroll through your “photo albums” on Facebook and oooh and ahhh over the images there?
2. To Remember:
For most of us, once we’ve uploaded our photos to a social networking site and chatted about them for a few days with our friends, they’re mostly forgotten. But we take those photos because we wanted to remember a moment in time, presumably farther into the future than next week.
3. To Reminisce:
I’ve differentiated this reason from “remember” because I believe it evokes a subtly different emotion about the passage of time.
When we look back at photos of our children when they were newborn infants or back to photos of our own childhoods, and beyond, it reminds us of people, places, and things we have cherished and of the people we are connected to in our lives. Reminiscence can bring peace, comfort, and joy.
While social networking clearly enhances our ability to share our photos, our needs to remember and reminisce are not satisfied if Facebook is the ONLY photo organization tool we’re using. Putting those photos into some album satisfies all our memory-keeping needs.
So once you’ve done that quick share, be sure to print your favorite photos, scrapbook or slip them into an album, or drag and drop them to create a digital photo book. Looking at your photos for years to come is why you took them in the first place!
Why do YOU take photos?
As a Creative Memories consultant, Ruth Brickman provides people with choices and solutions for their piles of photos and hard drives full of digital images! You can choose to slip your photos into a super-easy PicFolio pocket album, create a traditional scrapbook album, or click your way to a digital Storybook. Ruth will support you with the time, space, and ideas you need to make it happen, or she’ll even make your album for you! It really is about telling YOUR life’s stories YOUR way.
