Photos I Must Stop Taking

Let me begin by saying that my children are fascinating and talented in a million ways and their faces literally have no bad sides. Each photo and video I take of them is sacred (including the ones they have begged me to delete). I must be immediately capable of showing their perfection to people I run into at the grocery store.

Also… my pets are adorable, so an endless collection of dog and cat photos is inevitable.

That said, there are things I keep photographing that make no sense; things that I would never have taken a picture of back in the pre-historic days when you had to get rolls of film developed at the local pharmacy. As I sit at my kitchen table, trying to clear some space on my iphone, I am wondering why I have:

• 20+ photos of meals I have ordered in restaurants
• 30+ photos of single glasses of wine
• At least a dozen very unflattering shots of me trying on shorts in a Superstore dressing room (I think I was sending them to a friend for her opinion but Why-in-God’s-name did I keep them?)
• Countless photos of crocuses in the snow, daffodils in the snow, and tulips in the snow (I an obviously horrified by spring snow!)
• 3 photos of a man I do not know walking across the street while texting, with cars coming from both directions (leading me to question why I was taking photos instead of hollering for him to get off the road)
• Several shots of my feet including: photos of a beach as seen over the ends of my painted toes, photos of the living room fireplace as seen over my slippers (perched on the coffee table), and photos of my flip-flopped appendages standing in the snow beside… you guessed it… a bunch of very cold crocuses.

Obviously, I will delete all of the above (except maybe the flower photos because they make me feel artistic). And I will congratulate myself for the general lack of selfies (although truthfully it is not for lack of trying… it’s just that they all end up looking like mug shots). But at the end of the day, I think it’s time to start getting a grip on my photo taking.

When I am an old, old lady, sitting in a chair in the sunshine, will I really want to reminisce about all of the restaurant-pasta-dishes I have eaten over the years? Or be reminded of some crazy fool who wandered into traffic and survived? I think not. So I have decided to implement a very simple rule:

Every photo I take has to include at least one familiar face. 

This might require me to improve a bit on my selfie-taking skills because I am pretty sure that old-lady-me will want to remember how happy I looked drinking those glasses of wine!