So for years, I smugly avoided taking photos—too cool for clichés. It only hit me much later that I wasn’t missing out on better shots of monuments… I was missing pictures of the people I was with. Family and friends looking younger, sometimes happier, and—how shall I put it—sometimes still alive.

He’s not wrong. I’ve got tons of pictures of the outdoors. Not that they aren’t beautiful. Pressed, I mostly couldn’t tell one from the other.

It's easy (an often correct) to assume that most such photos will never be seen again, or maybe scrolled by quickly at best, but the fact is one doesn't know the motivation of the photographer, nor how they might change their motivation in the future to actually make use of that photo.

They also go away faster than you expect.

Even if it's just walks around a city center, I have a thing for photographing street art, and uploading the different photos to my walks and it places them at their locations on the recorded path/map of the walk (or hike) to be revisited/replayed when feeling nostalgic.

It also helps to be more discerning about what photos to keep (do I really need another wide landscape shot?) But once the "worthy" photos of my walk/hike are added, I remove the others from my phone and make the recorded activity private for me to enjoy. The context + notes with the photos in one place makes it all mean so much more when I revisit them. I completely ignore all social bits of the app, but this might appeal to some since you can share/fork an activity to the accounts of people that where with you.

*I don't work for them, but been using it over a decade now

They're my favorite memories. NY's Central Park, London's Hyde Park, Norway's fjords, Barcelona's beaches... The best part is that these feel like very tangible memories and take zero physical space to store!

There one of of a non descript mountain turn with a small gravel pullout. There's a million prettier pictures but that one means the most meaning to me.

I almost died there; crashed on my motorcycle. Took the turn just a little too fast, panicked and just went over the edge trying desperately to stop. I don't remember much of the crash itself; just green, brown, and blue. Just that when I finally managed to get myself together, my leg crushed under the bike on on dirt that felt like concrete. No chance of pushing the bike off. No chance of digging or wriggling free. No chance of being seen from the road. My only hope was 911.

Except... I couldn't bring myself to call. There was nothing technically stopping me; good signal strength, modern phone with enhanced positional reporting. Just one little button press and help would be on the way. But why?

Why should I call for help?

Why did I want to keep living?

Why do I deserve to live?

Damned questions that I had been asking myself nearly every day for almost 26 years of my life by then. And here, finally at that mountain road I couldn't run from it any more. But it was also the first real chance I had to put myself to the test; to know myself one way or the other. So I turned my phone off. And left my mortality to the hands of fate.

For 7 hours I just lay there, nothing else to do but watch sun and cloud drift in the sky with waiting for an end. And yet there was a stillness there that I had never experienced before in my life. No more voices demanding that I meet their expectations. No more fear. No more uncertainty. Just a blessed silence with a light at the end of the road that I had no seen in a long time.

It seemed almost cruel when motorist looking to relieve himself found me. Part of my wished he hadn't but there was not much else that could be done then. Him and his buddy played the rescuers, and I played the victim; freed me from my entrapment, got my bike on the road, kindly offered to call for help or stay with me, and I declined as graciously as I could and limped both myself and bike home.

But after so long, I had an answer.

I don't want to live.

I don't deserve to live.

My life has no meaning.

But it also means that I don't have to care anymore either. Not about trying to maximize my career. No more forcing myself to fake smiles to make friends I can't find any connection with. No worry about finding a partner. Not about measuring myself or trying to improve or anything.

That photograph on my phone is meaningless to everyone else.

To me, it was where I finally found peace. And nothing can ever replace that.

It made some sense to take pictures of panoramas or art when you could show something to people that could not see it otherwise, but in this era it makes no sense (unless you enjoy photography as a hobby).

A goofy picture of you kissing some old bronze statue? Dumb, but yours.

I took the girls all around the US, around the world even as they were growing up. I had grown up in a “camera family” so always had one on trips as a parent too.

Now, with two decades behind me, the photos of my young daughters, wife are the vacation photos I return to.

Oldest daughter is wearing a kimono sipping tea at some place in the mountains of Japan… Two youngest are chasing each other on the beach of some island in Hawaii…

These are not achievements, or unusual places, or humans. The things I'd like to see are stores of subtle cultural information than gets lost because it seems unimportant, and then a couple of decades later I want to look at all the details of it again but I can't. What was that car I used to be slightly interested by every time I walked past it? What range of items used to be for sale? What books did I have? What was actually on that poster that got torn and thrown out and now it's impossible to find another? Instead of answers, I have holiday snaps and pictures of humans.

You mean in the sense that no one sends/receives them? Because that might be true for the younger generation, but postcards are still available literally anywhere I've been in the world, and are still very easy to send, for those who enjoy that.

I mean both that they are used much less and they're much less available.

You can find postcards of the Coliseum in Rome, but you'll have a hard time finding one of Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola.

Even in major touristic hotspots, 30 years ago you'd find postcards sold at any shop, but these days you have to look for a while, in my experience.

I've been to some countries where only the official post office was allowed to sell stamps. That makes things much more inconvenient than the shop selling postcards also selling the stamps.

For a moment I thought...he's right, I see myself and my girlfriend all the time.

Then I realized...objects, never change, why do you take it. What makes your photo unique? He was by himself, taking photos. He has no one to capture his moment.

Although I don't disagree with him - I do have some nice landscape and photos, of just trees, mountains, and of course tourist buildings. But in modern times...I will always take a photo with, and without people.

Sometimes I look back and I am in the mood to just look at places I've visited, sometimes, I want to look a who I visited with.

I hope that man found someone he enjoys taking photos with/of.

Don't photo (much) things that won't change. Things that change - people, but also landscape to certain level, cars, technology, even some buildings, sure its amazing to look back for you, or anybody else after decades and see the change. Obviously people change the most.

Basic photography advice is to have something alive in each photo. Not 100% but a good rule of thumb.

We also don't have any wedding photos, newborn photos, family photos, etc and there is a certain special feeling to knowing what someone looked like when they were younger lives only in our memories. Particularly in a world where we are flooded with pictures all the time.

The AI era makes this even more interesting. A custom in our circles is to try to find a photo for your profile pic on WhatsApp that maybe sort of looks like you, since it can't be a photo actually of you. So now AI-generated photos are quite popular for this purpose. I think it is an interesting art form.

Likewise, new baby announcements don't have a photo of the baby... you will get either an artistic impression or something, or else something AI generated, often of another type of animal. My second son was represented by a koala bear, my first daughter by abstract watercolours. I enjoy not knowing what a friend's baby looks like until I meet them for the first time.

I also find some of my friends and family, well, I don't regularly see pictures of them, and I tend to remember them however I first saw them. They age, but my memory of them lives on.

Years later I started taking pictures only with the people I was with.

Nowadays that smartphones got much better, I just start recording a video of the moments I think will be worth remembering, but without paying much attention to the frame, I just record and that’s it.

Years later when you watch them it feels much more vivid than watching a still dead photo.

From now on, I will include my travel companions whenever I can.

My favorite shots are selfies… one with the two of us on the tarmac in front of the plane on arrival, the other on a random street.

I lost my wife to cancer, and regret that pre-kid, we took very few pictures relatively speaking, and I cherish the ones I have.

I suspect this is true for large scale exhibitionism and voyeurism (which is what this is, you are either a subject or the voyeur in these pictures, and if you are both, then you are narcissist). It's been going on for decades and it's heinous. The sheer scale of it will not allow our society to stand back and examine it. I consider all these things part of our current public crucifixions. And like litter, the harmless gum wrappers (the selfies, the "look where I am" photos, etc) have accumulated into a pure garbage world. That's the power of accumulation, and now we all live in Garbage Land.

Our society is nasty and has been for as long as we can remember. It takes constant reflection to clean the grime and address our hygiene, in all its wonderous forms (put the fucking camera down please).

Rorschach out.

-----

I had an idea for a small short story about the after life where God pulls you into a small video editing room and makes you sit through every frame of what your eyes recorded. It would take a lifetime to get through, and every time you are committing a sin he pauses the giant film and you feel the utter presence of judgement. This goes on for every frame until you are begging for mercy with a newfound realization of just how damning the concept of an "observer" is. Smile, someone's watching. Sure as hell aint going to fool him with our curated album (can't we just look at the good stuff?). We look at all of it or none of it. Which brings us to the final point - did you fool anyone?

Yes, yes there was. It was called "The Final Cut" from 2004. Just one more of many proofs of Robin Williams' stellar acting talent.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-6-the-life-review/i...

This podcast somewhat changed my life.

Totally checking out the podcast!

The article is appalling. To me it more effectively conveys his character than his ideas. Maybe for some people it really is hard to find a balance.

If I was to guess what might take me out is if I was addicted to instantly posting them, watching the likes and comments flow in, and viewing my friends posts, at the same moment.

I take the pictures and then a day or two later I post 5-8 of the best, if I thought this particular experience was worth sharing. The point being I’m not thinking about posting and likes during the experience. My time spent on photos is < 1%

Consumption of the photos changed as well, but I'm going to let the idea of negatives, prints, and literal slide shows wait for another day. The point is that photography today is not the same as photography in the prior century.

I take a lot less than I used to. I do try to take in the moment now.

You can give it a try: there are very easy cameras!

The real problem is the price of film has skyrocketed. Since factories has been closing in the last ten years, the offer is low, and the demand is high... Even low quality Chinese stock is going for prices higher than professional rolls where 5 or 6 years ago.

All those compact cameras were still too large for that purpose, because as the saying goes: "The best camera is the one you always have on you"

After some searching I found an AWESOME gem of a little camera: The DxO One, a camera from back in 2016 from DxO, a company actually specialized in benchmarking camera-quality.

The device was built to be sold at ~700 USD, but flopped and can still be purchased as old-stock for ~110 USD now.

Size is fantastic, Pictures are great, I can only recommend it if someone just wants to capture a moment like it is without people getting pulled out of it.

The device is also somewhat hackable [0], as it's based on the Ambarella platform (RTOS and Linux).

I started collecting infos about it to preserve it [1], there's still alot of potential in this little gem.

[0]: https://github.com/rickdeck/DxO-One/wiki/1.-Hardware

[1]: https://github.com/rickdeck/DxO-One/wiki

When I was an exchange student I lived with other people and we went out partying every night, had a ton of fun, and still had a ton of fun rewatching pictures of the night the next day. This was a time where you'd have an actual camera. Sometimes me and friends from that era share back the pictures and have a laugh.

10 years report: Nowadays google photos regularly shows me those "memories" from years ago of my kids (turning 9 and 11), and about half the time I share them back with my wife and viceversa, and we get moved a bit or have a fun moment.

I really don't see why taking pictures would ruin an experience, unless you go _wildly_ overboard to prioritize the picture.

I'm not the kinda person to hold my camera up in the air filming a concert or whatever. But pictures of family! Pictures of random food I enjoyed or found cute. Pictures of random cute things in the store. Pictures of friends and cars and the beach and whatever else.

So much changes in the world. I love looking back at old pictures. During covid my mom and I would get together and dig through and find old stuff to post on facebook. It was a lot of fun.

I mean. I have pictures of random old cereal boxes I found amusing at the time. I have pictures I'm quite proud of, and others that just capture random happy moments.

I don't know what people mean about change? Things change a lot. People change, things change, the world changes. I have pictures of vegas casinos that were demolished years ago. Foods that aren't made anymore. I have a random picture of a quarter pounder meal from like 2005. Why not? XD

Those sorts of things cost me no time or effort really. Whipped out the camera real quick. Click. Put it away. Go back to enjoying my life. :)

Some people learned this lesson in the days of clunky, fragile, expensive cameras.

If you were carting around 5 lbs of DSLR camera and accessories, you weren't scrambling up that rock or going into the sea or getting on that rollercoaster.

1. Is it a picture someone else would’ve already taken?

2. Does it have our faces in it?

3. Will it have historical significance in 10 years time?

If all of it answers no, I rest easy knowing I missed nothing.

I mean, almost by definition there's basically no way of knowing this right?

A picture of a mountainside with nothing interesting going on other than nature might not be significant in 10 years, or maybe the entire landscape has transformed into something completely different.

I grew up in Bali, Indonesia. In the 90s, where I lived was nothing but lush jungle and beaches, with a few very small houses here and there dotting things. By the 2000s we had actual asphalt roads, and by the 2010s we had a full on highway on the south of the island. The stretch of land where I grew up is quite literally incomparable to what it looked like before despite my house not changing much, and it took roughly 10 years to reach that state. I would've loved if I had a camera back then to record the changes as they were happening, because you'd be amazed how quickly things become significant in some way, not to mention any potential memories of a place you think of fondly!

And why should it matter if someone else took a similar photo? it’s your photo you’re taking it like come on man am I taking crazy pills over here?

Speaking of which, I'd get even more use of these pictures if Google photo search was better. I'm looking forward to when some photo service is 1000x better for searching. Right now if I put I can put in "dog" and see that it's listing too many photos with no dog or pictures with "hot-dog". If I enter "black dog" it shows pictures with black color somewhere in the picture, like a shadow, and a dog. If I enter "dog with black hair" it says no results, even though I pictures of black labs. I tried "dog on beach". I know I have some. "dog in pool" got two results by I know a very dear picture of my younger sister with our dog in the pool and it didn't find it.

Looking forward to LLM/AI enhanced photo search so I can just say "show me photos of my sister in the pool with our dog" or "show me pictures of my trip to paris with my mom". As it, I have to find these through other means (remembeing the date, etc...)

I used to think the same. But in the end, this is not true for me personally. Having pictures of events or valuable moments does not add any (or much) value when remembering these situations. This of course may differ from person to person - but I guess we use to have this assumption from your quote as a given default. Overall I get the most "value" from focusing on situations when they are there, instead of wasting it by capturing them.

Just know that somewhere there's the pile of pictures of years past, in approximately chronological order.

You will not remember what you have forgotten. When you flip through the old photos you'll remember that you did much more than you can pull straight from memory.

This becomes more valuable as you get older, not only will you likely feel that your memory is becoming lower in resolution(my memory felt photographic until late 20s, the assumption it would always be that good turned out wrong) but you'll also have more bygone years to remember from as you get older.

But don't back up photos to an SSD that is unplugged from power.

I carry my camera 24/7 because I am a photographer who makes visual art and I might make art any time of any day. It isn’t about publishing or social capital or performance, it’s about making the best art I can for me and myself alone.

After searching alot, I found the long-discontinued DxO-One being a gem. A really nice blend of good camera-hardware and ultra-compact design, at a (now) crazy-low price. It almost has a analogue-camera feel to it, because you don't get to review the picture instantly but have to connect it to a phone or PC first.

It's a hardware designed for a ~700 USD pricetag. It flopped but it can still be purchased at ~110 USD as old stock, and that's hard to beat for a large-sensor (1" size) camera with a great lens (f/1.8 with mechanical iris).

It has a tiny display for rough configuration, linux OS, I started collecting data about it, because it also has quite some potential to be hacked and customized [0]

[0]: https://github.com/rickdeck/DxO-One/wiki

Yes. I take lots of photos and even I regret not having more, or videos of the kids learning to walk or learning to talk.

Also: memories are fleeting, very fast. I've been keeping a journal for five years now; I try to describe my day the day after at the latest, but when I miss a day or two it's incredibly hard to remember anything--anything!!-- about what I did 48 hours ago.

Some moments stay with you for the rest of your life, but most of the things that you do disappear from your mind extremely fast.

You will absolutely remember the birth of your first kid, with many details and the sweet and sour smell of hospital corridors, camera or not; but not everything is like that (actually, nothing is like that!)

Now the counter-argument is maybe that what you don't remember didn't deserve to be remembered; but I don't agree with that. Memories is the only thing that's truly ours.

Recently, I've found myself trending heavily towards candids/snapshots. Heck, I never asked for a Polaroid for Christmas to even further "dumb down" my photography. And all my 35mm film cameras are fixed-lens rangefinders (35 DC, 35 RC, and a Demi EE-17).

I still try to be thoughtful about what/when I''m shooting. Especially with my film cameras (film + processing isn't cheap). But, I spend less total time looking through the viewfinder.

I'm sure I did sneak a few candid pictures over the years but that leads to another issue a sea of unsorted pictures on who knows what media.

Also elderly people not good with technology, the cost of it, may be embarrassed to say often no longer take pictures.

For years, I made the conscious decision to focus entirely on enjoying moments instead of taking photos and recording videos. I now regret having been so strict about that.

Before I got married and settled down to work on building my family, I had so much fun as a single man. I traveled to so many places, enjoyed many concerts, went to lots of events/conferences, etc. Fast forward to now, I have nothing to show for most of it (other than maybe passport stamps and whatnot). Sometimes, I wish I could show my wife what it was like when I was in this or that country, but I can’t—it’s all just in my head!

My wife is pretty much the opposite of me when it comes to this. She has snapshots of most of her adult life. I came to truly appreciate her commitment to maintaining snapshots of our lives after we had our first child, because I noticed how quickly our little baby was growing and I constantly wanted to see how he looked and what he was doing a month ago, two months ago, etc. If it had been up to me, we likely would have very few of the photos and videos we have now.

I don't get this mode of thinking, that if you don't have pictures there is no proof you were somewhere. Are we trying to prove something to the jury or what?

Why? I mean, why we cannot just NOT take pictures, or taken them very very very rarely, like on our wedding, kids first steps, or something major like that?

We managed to do without immediate access to photography for some millenia, and with very ocassional and rare use of it for the best part of the 20th century.

Like we didn't "yearn to capture" moments all the time, the way we do now, even in the 80s and 90s.

Even though regular and compact and even disposable cameras were available, few walked around with one or used within the year. At best somebody would take a camera on holiday or some major life event, which is like 1/100 of current use.