See, when I got my new iPhone 4s with its perfect little camera perfectly smushed inside it, I really had this idea that I'd be a smart, judicious photo-taker. The perfect round of images from all the events I went to, and no more.
And now look at me. There are things I go to and don't take a photo at all, and then there are times when I let my camera get its hungry little mouth around every view I see. Today, for instance, with the sky too bright an Autumnal blue to be really feeling well, and the sun and the shadows making such a sweet contrast--I started taking photos off the top of the swingset, feeling vaguely that it reminded me of some Robert Louis Stephenson poem. And I had to get every angle of this little idyll, even with a guilty part of me knowing how much it filled up memory space.
And I can't delete photos, not even the bad ones. Because so what if it's blurry, it's a moment in time, a second in time, and if I touch that little trash can it'll be gone forever. It's a big responsibility I have. (This is also why I don't usually take video. Because I have a pathological fear of forgetting, and if once I let myself get too obsessive with the video camera, I'd never stop filming long enough to watch.)
This is the same side of me that ran around with mittens on when I was little, trying to catch all the snowflakes, because I'd heard no two were alike and I needed to save all of them that I could before they fell into that snow bank and got lost to the ages. I wonder if all writers feel on a pretty day that they're being dictated to, and that they're so busy listening that they're forgetting to write down every single word.
Two songs compete in my head right now. Panic! at the Disco, reminding me what I owe:
Go on, grab your hat and fetch a camera,
Go on, film the world before it happens.
And on the other hand, Matt and Kim insist:
No time for cameras, we'll use our eyes instead.
Sing, o muses.
Well, anyway, my camera's crammed and I need to start a photo blog.
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