Photos Capture Memories

Yesterday on Facebook, I noticed a lot of people posting old photos and calling it, “Throwback Thursday.”  I don’t know how I missed that  – but I loved seeing all the old photos of friends of mine.  Of course, I had to share one of mine too!  Then, this morning, I received an email from Shutterflly, (where I order photo books from regularly,) saying their “photo book sale was on.”  Four times a year, I order a new photo book filled with photos from that season.  I have been taking photos for years and for the longest time, I’d have prints sent to me.  Those prints would pile up and I’d get stressed from all the clutter!!  Then I discovered photo books!!  They take some time to make but instead of prints, when I am done creating them, I have a beautifully bound book filled with all of my favorite memories from the season.  I sound like an advertisement for Shutterfly – but I truly love using their site to create these books.

Tonight, the boys are out with Dave at a hockey game and I am home alone so I decided to get together all of my Summer photos that have been filling up my desktop computer and begin working on the latest book.  Every time I create one, I realize why I take so many photos all of the time!!  I am sitting here alone, reliving the days of Summer right now.  Baseball games, days in New York City, time spent with friends and family, mom’s bench…the book is filled with memories of a happy summer.  I love all of the books that I have created, but this year’s Spring book wasn’t one of my favorites.  It was rather slim – not having a lot of pictures to fill it.  Spring was really tough for us this year and although we kept busy, I realized as I compiled those photos, that we really did not do a lot- or at least not a lot that I wanted to remember.   Summer was different.  We went out, we visited places and we enjoyed ourselves.  We even celebrated mom’s first birthday in heaven by releasing balloons.  I caught most of it through photos and now, those memories are captured forever.

Photos create memories.  As I go through them, I can go back in time and I get to remember just how significant all of those little moments were!

Capturing Memories

I have been told that I take A LOT of photos.  I bring my camera along almost everywhere, and if I don’t have my camera, I have my iphone to capture the moment!  It is quite amazing how easy it is with digital cameras. I have thousands of photos on my desktop.

My parents took photos when we were young, but they are mostly thrown in boxes, unsorted and unorganized.  I remember a Polaroid instant camera they had and the flash and pop of the bulbs on their early cameras.   I remember getting my first camera for Christmas one year when I was a kid.  It was a disk camera.  How awesome we all thought that camera was!!  It was so small!  If I remember correctly, I could fit it into my pocket.  I am sure that it is about the same size as today’s smartphones.  I thought that the film was awesome!  Way back then, those little round disks were “so modern and innovative”.

Although at the time, I did not know any different, the hardest part of taking photos was the waiting….waiting to fill up the disc and film, waiting to bring them to be developed, waiting for the developing process…it all took so long!  In college I received a “real camera”.  My first Canon.  It still used film, so I was careful about how many photos I took, always making sure to get the best shot possible.  By then, there were one hour photo shops.  I thought those were the greatest.  I hardly had to wait at all to get them back, but after they were developed,  as I looked through them, there may have been 20-25 really good ones on a roll.  It got quite expensive because I took so many photos.  I spent many hours organizing all of those photos into albums and still love to take them out and go back through memory lane.

In the age of digital, there is no limit to how many photos I can take.  There are times that I will take hundreds of photos before realizing just how many I actually took.  Now the hardest part is going through and choosing my favorites.  I don’t even print them out anymore.  Instead, I go on line and create photo books through http://www.shutterfly.com and in a few days, I have the book mailed to me, organized with stories to go along.  Digital also makes it so easy to share the photos with others.  No more prints to carry around in little photo albums, a quick share on the internet and everyone I want to share them with can see them.

Some would think that it is not necessary to take as many photos as I do, but I admit that I am a sentimental, sappy person.  I want to record everything.  I am creating memories, that I might not remember without them.  I look through the photos on my computer reminiscing often and find my kids looking through the photo books all of the time.  I go back in time when I look at old photos.  I can relive memories that are slowly fading and those photos trigger memories, that I may have otherwise forgotten.

After my mom died, we dug through boxes and old albums to find photos of her.  There were not as many as I wish there were.  When we were kids, she was usually the one taking the photos.  As we got older, she just did not like having her photo taken, so in the thousands of pictures we went through, we were limited in what we could use, but those photos we did find brought back amazing, beautiful, funny and emotional memories of times I don’t think I’d have remembered without them.  Nearly four months have passed since she died and I still have the mounted poster boards in my living room because every time I look at them, they remind me of happy times with her.

Photos might not be able to capture every moment, but they can encapsulate a moment in time that years from now… I can look at… and just be reminded.