Originally posted by Rondec Personally, when I am with my family, I like to take photos for a bit and then put down the camera and just enjoy their company. Yes, I can interact with my kids while taking their photos, but it isn't quite the same thing and they tend to be a lot stiffer when I am constantly snapping their photos. If I am honest, I don't really need 300 photos of them at the zoo looking first at the monkeys and then at the lion and then at the zebras. I either delete a lot of those or just let them sit on a hard drive.
When I'm not with my family, then the point of my being out is specifically photography and I don't care how many photos I take.
I would say that the biggest issue I see is that folks don't do enough creation of photo books. I make one every year with plenty of journaling in them. To me, a combination of photos and written recollections is the best way for me and my kids to remember past trips and events. Memories are lost over time if they aren't used and simply the act of my writing them down fixes them better in my mind and as my children look at them down the road they also remember these things better.
I do wonder about all of the millions of photos that are on folks cell phones or somewhere in the cloud. If you die, those are probably lost. The concept of finding a shoe box or two full of photos is a foreign one in today's climate where everything is stored on phones and the interwebs.
---------- Post added 12-29-18 at 07:00 AM ----------
I think it really depends on what you are doing. If you are out hiking with your family, having a camera will probably be a natural part of that experience. If you are playing a board game or just sitting in a room having a conversation, then not so much. It probably depends as well on the age of family members and how they respond to having their photo snapped periodically.
I used to take more photos, but I realized that going to a museum and taking photos of all the exhibits that I later delete wasn't actually enhancing my enjoyment of anything. But you are right that each of us needs to do the things that make us happy and not worry about some little study about taking photos and memories.
We’re an example of people who have kept decades of photos documenting our marriage and children growing. We have ten feet of shelving with albums of 4x6 prints 6 to a page with my wife’s notes below each one. She currently blogs daily, often scanning one of those prints and adding it to the blog to illustrate her commentary, usually about the nature of change and the passing of time, or just for the fun of seeeing us in younger days. We continue to add prints from phones (the contemporary automatic snapshot camera) and cameras.
Most of these arn’t art - they’re just snaps of people at places, but they’re valuable. We booth have inherited portraits and prints created as early as the 1870’s and into the 1980’s. They illustrate the stories of people and places told by our grandparents and by us to our children. They give us a sense of family, and of place in the river of time.
I should also say at the time we took one or two photos and simply enjoyed the rest of the outing or party together, but the photos do anchor the memories.