Have you ever seriously thought about why you take pictures instead of say collecting stamps? No seriously, have you?

From when I was a youngster up to when I left for the Army in 1961 our family took a 2 week vacation every year. We started out with a Kodak Brownie Junior and worked our way up to various Polaroid cameras. We took location shots, family on location shots--you know snap shots. We put the prints in a box and the box in a closet. We took the box out every once in a while and relived the experience. My parents are gone now but my brother and I still take the box out occasionally and reminisce about 70 years ago.

Now I am old, and now I take photographs. Hundreds, hell, thousands of them. Agreed a large percentage of them are deleted. I still have several thousand of them in a box, you call a computer file. Some are landscapes (location shots). Most are "subject shots" (birds, bees etc.). There are very few family pictures, and they are in their own box. Some are printed, maybe one in 500, and kept in a real box and almost never looked at again. My "photographs" have no intrinsic value to me or anyone else. They are only examples of my skills and techniques, if any, they don't invoke memories of "I remember when I took that shot".

I have concluded that the main reason I take pictures now is because I am a collector and to justify the money and effort that goes into my hobby, I post my pictures on the internet but that is a subject for another post.

Recently helped clear home of cousins that had passed. No kids. There were 15 boxes w/8-10 photo albums in each box. Several photos were saved. The balance: thrown out. Same with my brother-in-law’s 12 boxes of slides. Pulled 20 slides to scan. Discarding the rest. What remains of value when we’re gone? The family’s not interested in old photos of standing beside old friends, long forgotten, at the edge of the Grand Canyon…black bears eating fish in a stream.

Our photos bring us joy, but our 10K of photos need to be culled, regularly, so when we are gone there will be a few of the great-grand ancestors, a few of our favorites, but then…what will have value for the next generation? Not much.

Holding onto things, it’s a weighty responsibility, and what is the payoff?

~ Eileen

I have many of my recent photos backed up to iCloud. I recently got a second message saying my cloud was full! So this time, I decided to delete all duplicates and those that weren’t very good except family photos. I deleted approximately 2000 photos over a three day period. I still have a few thousand. Plus thousands more on a hard drive that I haven’t looked at in years.
Really! Why am I saving all these non family images. (BTW, I kept about 20 shots of bees yesterday who knows how many I deleted 😄)