If you have to ask yourself that then you probably don’t know. There are 365 days in a year, the average lifespan is roughly 78 years old in the U.S., that’s 21,170 days of taking photographs if you start when you are 20 years old. Should you take a picture every day? Maybe, that would make a really cool blog, book, or something. But what about when you’re outside and looking through your viewfinder and you miss out on all the great stuff going on around you? That’s what I’m talking about.
We take our camera’s out adamant that we are going to take a great shot before we call it a day and all around us life is flying by waiting for no one. In an instant you can miss your kids first step, the hummingbird landing on your dog’s nose (do those things even land?), or something else equally great. When you put that camera up to your face you compress your world down to a tiny viewfinder and everything else around you is lost at the same moment you preserve that one image you so carefully manipulate into perfect focus. Some of the best photographs I have only exist in my mind’s eye.
Next time you’re on your way hiking with your friends or family try leaving the camera behind and really living in the moment. Sure, you’ll see plenty of really cool thing’s you’d like to photograph but just make a mental note and revisit them sometime when your on your own or with someone else who would like to stretch their camera finger for the afternoon. Great moments come and go but they always come back again in one way or another. So yeah, you should always have a camera with you but that doesn’t mean you should always take it out.
This is a great bit of advice!
Thanks, I learnt this lesson hiking with my girlfriend and thought I’d share.