TRUST ME, TAKE LOTS OF PICTURES

Take lots of pictures AND video. Document life events, places visited, emotions experienced, anything and everything. Everyday for the past two weeks I've been scanning photos, taken before digital photography was the norm, for my three step-children. Their father, my husband, died suddenly in January of this year and there are so many anniversaries, trips, pets, homes, parties, that they never got to see because they lived in Ohio with their mother and step-father. Once or twice a year they came to visit us for a couple of weeks. I documented each visit by snapping as many images or filming as much footage as I could without missing out on the event at hand. Of course, with today's "cameras" (usually a smart phone with a multi-mega-pixel-digital-camera/video-recorder) I can hold the "view-finder" away from my face and I am able to see and participate in what's going on more fully than I did when I had to close one eye and look through a single lens view-finder.

I got in on the beginning of the digital age. That's when I bought a digital photo and a digital video camera. I am so glad I did. The enhanced quality has helped me remember the man I shared 32 years with way more clearly than I ever could with the ancient equipment I had before. He took some pretty good pics/video of me too. One day, those may be of some interest to my son and grandchildren. I have few images but no audio/video of my parents so I cannot remember much about them. What photos I do have of them are in black and white and all of them have that slightly fuzzy appearance that was typical of the photo processing from the 1940s through the 1970s. Color photography gradually got more affordable. But video equipment was still too expensive. I splurged and got my first video camera in 1989 but I didn't get my first digital video camera until 2003. Today, most of my video and photo capture is on my smart phone and a tiny dedicated combo camera I bought that has a slightly higher mega-pixel count than my smart phone.

But I digress. The point of this post is to convince you of the importance of taking pictures. When someone is gone, it's too late. I still wish I had taken more video of him and us. My memory is great but I cannot transfer that into viewable images for my step-children to see. Memories fade eventually but digital photos and video will last forever in the cloud, are easily retrieved, and able to be enjoyed by all.