Re: the wasted photos on your phone
| 2 min read
Stop taking loads of photos of the same thing with your phone.
Del wrote a brief note to self recently, about having too many repeated "waste" pictures on his phone. This is my reply, which hopefully helps him see his camera roll in a new light.
I have come to accept that the purpose of those thousands of "waste" photos is not too be seen, shared, printed, but simply to be taken.
Both Del and I are accomplished photographers, and I'm sure we can take a great single shot of whatever on our phones, if we want to. It takes a bit of planning, moving around, framing, but once the viewfinder shows the result we want, the moment can be immortalized forever with a single click of the shutter button.
Instead, what we do, Del, I, and everybody else, is to use the camera as a memory collection device.
I believe when we shoot something from every possible angle, or take multiple identical frames, we are creating a memory map of that moment. A single frame couldn't possibly register everything, the feelings, the colors, the curiosity, the joy. A single frame is perhaps too clean, too detached. We want to get close, to remember forever, and so we shoot just as much as we need to create this memory map.
It is easy enough to delete all but one of those identical frames. The reason we don't, and why we hesitate when we try, and why we postpone going thought the dreaded camera roll of repeated shots, is because they are not a waste at all.
Those shots are angles, reflections, feelings, surrounding a moment in time. We are afraid that by erasing them we'd be erasing the memory itself.
We can be more conscious and do a little effort to create one good photo. Or we can just accept that our camera rolls are memory collection devices and keep shooting 26 identical frames of that single moment.
My camera roll.
Comments