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Comment by peferron | Hacker News Reader

Several years back I decided to stop taking photos. I felt I spent too much time looking at the world through my camera screen or viewfinder instead of with my own eyes, and worrying about the right settings instead of simply enjoying myself and letting go. (I'm not an experienced photographer, which probably also makes me slower.)

Turns out it wasn't the best solution either. Memory decays, and a few years later it became difficult to reminisce anything about the places I went to.

The sweet spot for me is to just snap a few pictures, quickly, without worrying about how good it looks. I don't post anything on social media anyway, so I couldn't care less how cool my photo looks. But years later, these photos are invaluable as catalysts to trigger my brain into reminiscing much much more about these moments than if I didn't have any photos.

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I completely agree with you.

Although I use social media, I tend to only post pictures there that are meaningful to others, like photos with/of other people that dignify them, or pictures about my life that do not serve my ego, but can hopefully enrich the life of my friends.

I am quite sad by the glorification of narcissistic attitudes, posts, photos, etc in most of modern societies. That does not seem not me like the way humans as whole can evolve to be even better beings.

Yep. I don't get the extreme stance on this of not taking pictures, where people are like "oh no! no one's actually experiencing anything except via their phones! you need to stop taking pictures!"

Sure, there are people who can go to extremes, and it doesn't take a smartphone to do it. I remember when my mother would basically leave the camcorder on constantly for any event involving her kids, and take 30 rolls of pictures (literally hundreds of pictures) on every trip we went on. She now has crates of pictures and 8mm video she's never had the energy to properly sort through. She still takes tons of pictures, but now they become files on a computer, so they're much easier to sort and keep track of.

But you can just take a couple of pictures quickly, when the mood strikes you, and then go back to enjoying the experience. That quick picture literally took maybe 10 seconds for you to take. Oh no! I didn't experience the moment for 10 seconds! I'm wasting my life, according to these people!

No, I'm creating an artifact to help me remember what happened in the future because my memory is crap because I shove mental models of software architecture into it all day.

This is what I do - most of my picture taking is spontaneous, when I feel that I'm suddenly in a moment that would make a good picture, I'm aware of it, and it is a good moment to take a picture.

The trick for me is that I don't feel particularly compelled to have to take pictures to share with people. My experiences are for me first - to enjoy them, one would have to be enjoying them with me to get the full experience :) .

>The sweet spot for me is to just snap a few pictures, quickly, without worrying about how good it looks.

this is my strategy as well. usually its at the end of the trip when I realize I haven't taken a picture of anything yet

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