It's not all about the scenery

 

I just completed a photo book of our trip out west last summer. While I was making it, I asked my daughter, who spent part of the time with us, if she had any photos to add. She did, and her pictures, taken with a cell phone, ensured that, for once, I was in some of the pictures! That's not always the case. Whenever I spend time with family, they usually groan when I reach for my big camera, so it is often hard to find pictures with everyone in them. 

In 2007, my husband and I celebrated out 30th wedding anniversary with a trip to England, where we got married. We had a big party, which included many of my friends who attended the wedding, and even the pastor who married us.  The next day, we gathered at my niece's house to continue the celebration and I persuaded them all to pose for family photos. Everyone was in a good mood and I got some great pictures, especially of my mother with her children and grandchildren. It's a time capsule now: Mum died in 2014, my brother in law in 2018. My newly married daughter and her husband are now parents to three growing kids, and my son, who attended with his girlfriend, is on his second marriage (neither of them to the girl in question) and has four children. The cranky five year old just graduated from university. What made the photographs from this trip special were the number of people photos. I've noticed that my holiday snapshots tend to include more scenery than people and I have resolved to change that going forward.

My husband hates having his picture taken and I'm the one behind the camera most of the time.  As a result, landscapes and cityscapes tend to dominate the photographic records of our family vacations. They are fascinating to show people when we return but 20 or 30 years on, they lose their excitement. They are just a way of proving that we went somewhere. What is really valuable all those years later are the people pictures.

But how to get them?  One solution is the humble cellphone!  When Rick and I went to Paris in January, we started taking selfies together at different locations to send to the family back home. It started as a joke but it ended up being a fun record of our trip. We always had our cell phones with us, even when I left the "big camera" behind and, of course, everyone knows how to take a picture with a cell phone, so it is easy to hand it to a waiter or a friendly fellow tourist and ask them to take our picture. The result was a great mix of images which really gave a complete picture of our vacation.

It's easy to scoff at the tourists posing to take a selfie with the Mona Lisa but who knows, maybe they had the right idea all along?