Preserving More Memories

I am a “serial” picture taker. I got my first camera when I was in 5th grade. I took pictures of everything! The film canister only allowed me to take about 15 or 20 pictures to a roll and then it had to be taken to a photo development counter at the local drug store. They sent it off for developing and then called us a week or two later when the pictures were in and we could go pick them up. We didn’t have digital cameras back then so we had to wait until we picked up the hard copies of our photos to see how they turned out. Being very inexperienced, most of my early pictures were blurry - but I saved them anyway!

I recently went through old pictures I had saved and found a lot of blurry pictures of my stuffed animals. 😂I had very encouraging and gracious parents who were willing to pay for my film to be developed despite my careless picture taking habits. My Dad was the picture taker in our family and he would often have slides made of the negatives and bought a slide projector. One of our favorite things to do as a family was to project those slides of our family pictures onto our living room wall. We watched those slides dozens of times and it never got old. Memories are important and SHARED memories are even more important in a family.

I took a photography class in high school and joined the yearbook staff. I got a better camera and learned how to develop my own black and white film. I still have pictures that I took for the yearbook and one candid shot of my yearbook and photography teacher that I came across the other day.

I took a LOT of pictures in the years following- most of which my parents paid to develop and I still have.

Once digital photography became a thing, my husband and I bought a digital camera and I started taking even MORE pictures! It became possible to delete blurry pictures and pick and choose which pictures were worth the cost to print. Printing pictures could be done from a kiosk at the local drug store and I could watch them printing out while I waited. I tend to have a bit of an unsteady hand so I started taking multiple pictures of the same thing in the hopes that one would turn out well. Eventually my husband bought me a smaller, more portable digital camera for my birthday.

I have taken probably thousands of pictures and videos of our children and, now that the phones we carry with us everywhere have cameras as well, I can take pictures or videos in situations I would never have been able to before because I didn’t carry my camera with me unless I intended to use it for something specific- like on a vacation- but certainly not while grocery shopping, for instance.

One thing our kids love to do is watch old videos of themselves as babies and toddlers. They love going through pictures of themselves as they were growing up. It’s even more fun now that we can easily access those pictures and videos through our TV that is connected to our computer through a wireless internet connection.

After my father-in-law passed away in 2008, I realized we didn’t have a whole lot of recent pictures of our parents. So I started taking more pictures and even videos of my husband with his Mom, of me and my sister with our parents. I especially took lots of pictures and videos of our kids with their grandparents. In more recent years I have started to take more pictures of people in our church with our kids.

After I was diagnosed with MS it became even more important to me to take pictures of our lives, our activities, our neighbors, friends and families. I know that my days of mobility may be numbered. I can’t ride on fair rides now but I have pictures to remember the times I still could. It became important to me that my children have pictures to look back on to see how much they were loved and how excited I was to be there during all their favorite childhood moments.

And as I age and lose family and friends to the ravages of age or illness, it’s so special to me to be able to look back at pictures of their smiling faces and remember the times we spent together. I recognize that we have only so much time with our loved ones. And if I live to be as old as either of my grandmothers (one lived to be 90 and the other was 99 when she passed away), I may not be able to do much more to pass the time besides look back at pictures and remember.

As I look back at pictures now, I share them with friends and family. I find a blast from the past and want to share the memory with someone who was there.

At the end of each year I put together a calendar for the next year and fill each month with pictures from each month of the that previous year. These calendars are gifts I send to close family and to our children. It has become a tradition that my children wouldn’t let me discontinue even if I wanted to (which I don’t). It is as special to them as it is to me.

I also print pictures of the kids and our family and make ornaments that I send with a Christmas letter to family and friends each year. I used to take pictures of the kids with their teachers at the beginning of each year and make Christmas ornaments of them as gifts for their teachers but once they started having multiple teachers it got cumbersome and now I’m told it’s “cringe.”😉

Picture taking for me is much more than just documenting major events. It is a way of continuing connections with the people I love while they are still living. It’s also about preserving memories for myself but also for my children. And with a traveling husband it’s fun for him to get texts or emails with pictures of his family while he is on a trip and then he has them to look back on later or to show his coworkers as conversation starters sometimes.

And my picture taking isn’t restricted to just pictures of people. I take pictures of God’s beautiful creation. Beautiful sunsets, sunrises, rainbows, cloud formations, trees covered in leaves changing during the Fall, snow-covered trees, hummingbirds, deer, flowers, etc. And I use a lot of the pictures I take to pair with verses to send to people via text or paste into these blog posts.

My husband once told me I shouldn’t take so many pictures. He told me I would likely never look back on those pictures because I had so many that I wouldn’t have time to look at them all. But I have found that the pictures I take have value that can’t be measured. They have been used to bless others and to bless me as well.

So if you see me coming to take your picture, be sure to smile because the face you make will be the face I see when I’m 90 years old and remembering you. 😉