To take or not take that photo
If you really want to remember a moment, try not to take a photo - reading this makes me wonder, how do we get ourselves to look at photos we take with our phones or cameras? How do we take photos and not just forget about them?
Turning them into Chatbooks is one way, but are there other ways to force ourselves to look at the photos we take?
Taking photos makes us remember less of the details of what we photographed, because we’ve basically offloaded the act of remembering to the camera. That I understand. What’s surprising though are findings in a study that states that if you are in a photo, you remember less of the moment, than if you simply took a photo of it yourself.
Another interesting finding is that zooming in to focus on a specific part of a subject, somehow avoids the negative side effect of not remembering more details about the moment or the subject.
This advice to not take a photo, goes against the advice of taking photos of your loved ones so you have something to remember them by. It's kind of a dilemma it seems. If you take more photos, you don't remember the moment well. If you don't take photos, then you don't have photos to remember loved ones by. That said, I think the context for both sides are different.
The camp that says take photos of your loved ones so you have something to look back on when they're gone, these people are not worried about not remembering the moment. The photos talked about here are like candid photos. These are not the usual moments you desperately want to commit to memory. And chances are, when your loved one passes away say decades from now, you won't even recall these moments even if you didn't take a photo. So in this case, it seems like taking a candid photo of your wife playing with your kids is a better option, than trying to commit that everyday scene to memory.
The camp that says avoid taking photos to better remember a moment, I think these people are talking about not taking photos during rare moments or once in a lifetime event. Like a Taylor Swift concert, or the final play in a Game 7 of the NBA Finals, or the birth of your child, etc...
But how far back can your memory really go though? Say an important event happened 20 years ago. Does not taking a photo really help you remember the details from 20 years ago? I'm not sure I'm sold on this. I can remember important events in my life, but the details are fuzzy. Photos of said events would actually help me remember better. I guess there's my answer then.
So I'll end with this advice for myself and whoever is reading this, take candid photos of your loved ones as much as you can, take photos of events and important moments in your life as much as you can, but try not to overdo it and ruin the moment by doing so.