Photography: There's More To It Than Fun
Taking photographs is such a common thing. Mobiles can capture scenes in amazing detail. Millions of people carry a camera around with them. Why is that?
I remember taking photographs when I was very little, in the early 1960s. Tiny black and white square photos with a very simple camera. When we were first married we had an Olympus Trip camera, which we very proud of. It had a few more adjustments that you could make. Rolls of film that would take 36 pictures were inserted and we kept careful count of the pictures ('don't waste your film on that, we've only got two pictures left!').
Recently, after a long period of not taking too many photos, we've bought a Canon 250D, with a telescopic lens. It takes excellent images and the adjustments seem to be countless.
We now have tens of thousands of images (all now digitised and backed up). They show childhoods, parents, places, events, travels, celebrations, sadness and so much more. They are a history of our lives. We often gather around a screen looking at images from decades before and they always generate a conversation - 'do you remember that?', 'what was her name?'.
Images seem to have a special ability to capture our memories. We all need to remember our histories and I believe that photographs do that in a way that stimulates a depth of memory, asks questions of ourselves and have an internal conversation. In my opinion, they do it better than a video. I don't exactly know why that is. Perhaps a video doesn't leave as much to the imagination as a photograph does.
You sometimes hear someone say 'No you take it, I'm no photographer', but I think that we are all photographers, documenting history on a small or large scale.
So, take as many photographs as you can and enjoy them. After all, that's the main reason to do it.
