Why We Should Take Better Pictures

Now that cameras are ubiquitous, so are photos.  Gone are the days when you had to decide if it was worth using the exposure on your roll of film or figure out how many exposures you had left on the roll.  You no longer have to wait to get film developed.  You can now know instantaneously whether or not the picture "came out" and retake it immediately if it didn't.  This should have left us with better pictures, but unfortunately, it hasn't.



This meme absolutely infuriated one of my millennial Facebook friends.  She went on a tirade about how previous generations would have done it if they could have (probably true) and that there was nothing wrong with having fun with her friends this way (certainly true).  She went on and on about the ways prior generations wasted time (yep, got us there too).


She isn't wrong, but neither is the meme.


I have been taking photos as an actual hobby since 1990.  I have taken landscapes, animal photos, architectural photos, and vacation photos.  I teach yearbook, so I take pictures of kids doing work on computers, creating artwork, playing sports, performing in plays, dancing, singing, playing instruments.  I am one of the photographers at a camp during the summer.  I take photographs of kids doing woodworking, crafts, playing games with friends, posing with their counselors, participating in activities, and swimming.  I take about twenty-five thousand pictures every year.

Here are the pictures I don't take.
- Duck Faces - Five years from now, when campers look at the albums we gave them, duck faces will have no meaning.  A picture of themselves conquering a new challenge will.
- Tongue Out Faces - When my students look back on their yearbooks, I doubt that they will believe their tongue was their best feature and really wish that I had captured it.
- Shots of Body Parts You Can Only Take in a Mirror - I know that people who work out are proud of their hard work, but if you have to stand backward in a mirror in your underwear to show it, maybe there's a reason God made it that difficult.
- Selfies - I'm pretty sure even Narcissus would tell us to give it a rest.  He only looked at himself; he didn't force everyone around him to stare into the pool too.

There is a place for silly pictures, and I'm not saying you should have zero.  I am saying mix some meaning into the mix.  I am just asking people to slow down for a second and ask themselves how many identical silly shots are going to want in the future.  I have hundreds of prints in a shoebox in my closet; you have hundreds of thousands of digital photos on your phone or in the cloud.  When I flip through those prints, I'm glad there aren't twenty in a row of the same five people blowing their cheeks out at the camera.  Twenty years from now, when you flip through your photos, you might wish there were fewer of those and more of you actually doing something.  It only takes a second to document something you'll be glad you can remember later.  After all, it's in your pocket for the meaningful stuff just as much as it is for the silly stuff.