Missing the Moments

No one wants to miss the big moments in life. The first step of your child, weddings, dancing at the school prom. And thanks to technology it is now easy to preserve all these big things with the help of a camera. Most big events have that person in the corner happily taking many pictures for not a small fee. But what about all the other moments in our lives that we wouldn't want to forget - a first kiss, having coffee with friends, a family meal? These are just as easy to preserve with the use of a digital camera - and you can have the images up on your screen or printed out for not much cost and almost immediately. But someone has to be behind the lens.

It is rare for me to go anywhere without my camera. It's not a particularly great one but it does the job - takes pictures and preserves all those moments I might forget otherwise. But this isn't entirely true. It is almost impossible to take a photo of yourself and completely impossible to take a natural picture of yourself, so automatically I am cut out of most of what I create, so I wasn't really in the moment or if I was, I have had to come out of it to take the picture.

The other problem with constantly looking through a lens waiting for just the right moment for everything to come together is that I sometimes miss it entirely. I can only see what the camera shows me - it doesn't show the full picture. And taking the photo means I miss the moment entirely.

Will I ever stop taking the photos? I'm thinking no. It is an enjoyable hobby and the subjects of each picture, I hope, will appreciate the memories that are brought to the forefront of their mind. As for my own moments I have other ways of recording them - I keep a diary, others sometimes take photos and my memory still holds out, at least for now. But what I try and remember is that it isn't the big moments that make the difference - it's the little things that often go unnoticed, they are what I hope to hold on to for they are what makes a person who they are: their experiences, their memories and their feelings towards them.