In Plato's Cave

There is a balance between taking a picture to remember the moment and taking pictures for the sake of taking pictures.

I found it interesting that the Sontag writing mentioned that a French study stated most households have a camera and that homes with children were twice as likely to have a camera than homes without children.

One could gather that a parent wants to document those adorable moments in a child's life to look upon years later and cherish the memories the photographs recall.

Another may argue that being so caught up in taking any picture and every picture of an event or moment in life can lead the photographer to forgetting the details of what happened because the photographer was so caught up in making photographs, they missed the moment.

I have caught myself not enjoying moments in the past because I was so caught up in composing that perfect shot. In two recent and similar trips to Chicago, I had two very unique experiences.

In the first, I brought my camera along with an array of lenses and accessories to capture every possible moment. When I returned home, looking to freshen-up my desk's picture frames, I started sorting through the images. Out of nearly one thousnand digital images, I had one I enjoyed , printed and put in the frame. The seconds and minutes spent composing the hundreds of other images were wasted.

In the second trip, I left my camera at home. No point-and-shoot, no digital SLR, nothing but a cameraphone with a crappy sensor that made terrible images. Upon returning home, I realized that I had not taken the time to even take one image with the cameraphone and I had more memories of the events and moments of the second trip compared to the memories of taking many images in the first trip.

To summarize, there are times to take photographs, times to leave the camera in the bag, and times to leave the bag at home.