I'm currently listening to All Is Well by Austin Basham. A very nice, calm song for a lazy evening on my laptop in bed.
During this trip to California with my boyfriend, I've realized a few things. One is how much I used to be on my phone during vacations. I don't even mean texting or twitter - I would constantly be pulling out my phone to take a photo of something we were doing. Normal, right?
Unfortunately, I wasn't seeing how much of the experience I was losing by doing so. For one thing, things never look as good through the lens of a camera than with the naked human eye. By looking at the scene through my iPhone camera, I was missing out on so much detail and color that was right in front of my phone. Plus, I would be so focused on getting the perfect picture of a specific item or area that I would miss everything else going on around me.
Another thing is that I never looked at the pictures and videos. All that time and effort on getting the perfect angle, the right enhancing light - all for a picture that was to simply be deleted later in order to save space on my phone. The greatest honor a photo taken by me could get was to be posted on instagram, a social media app that I hardly ever log on to and is completely about aesthetic. Even pictures with family and friends - they would be put onto a computer or a cloud program and then never be accessed again. Obviously, I was losing out on the experience for almost nothing.
So during this trip, I've kept my phone in my purse for the vast majority of the time. I have almost no proof in my camera roll that I went anywhere. My boyfriend, on the other hand, is a tourist here and so his phone was constantly out and taking snapshots of the views and interesting sights. While I think this is understandable for someone in a new place, for some reason I found myself getting annoyed when I was trying to show him something and he would only look at it through his phone. I wanted him to be completely in the moment with me.
But it would be a lie to say that I wish he hadn't taken pictures. Almost all of the group pictures are on his phone, and we have so many couple pictures now for us to cherish the memories of our vacation together. If it had been up to me, we wouldn't have any of those. But I now see that all of the selfies and corny poses weren't for nothing, and they only enhanced our memories of the time together and gave us something to look back on during bad days, or for the future when our memory starts to fail us. And with all of the innovative technology now, we can put those pictures in the cloud so that we can save space now and enjoy the memories later. It isn't a waste because someday, even if not today, those pictures will be worth more than anything to us.
To summarize, I learned not only the value in putting your phone away but the value in taking pictures of yourself and with others during special memories. While I'll continue to refrain from taking hundreds of pictures of the scenery (which will never be looked at again), I'm going to try to take more pictures of the people I'm with so that the important part of the memory, the love and the laughter, will be preserved.
“Humans, not places, make memories.” - Ama Ata Aidoo
