A Thousand Words

Lots has changed in my life since I was born (I know... that's a no-brainer, right?). I've gone from being an innocent little baby in the care of my parents, to an innocent little boy who went to school and made friends, to an innocent big boy who was still going to school and making new friends, to an innocent big man who is in the working world, not making friends as quickly but experiencing new things. But if you were to go through my photo album, you wouldn't see that progression clearly - the only thing I can guarantee that you'd see is that I'm innocent :-)

I think I first owned a camera when a got to 4th form... one of those long cameras that used 110 film. I think the first time I really used it was to take pictures for my Geography SBA project. I also used up two rolls of film at my graduation (and, inexplicably never processed one of them). Some time after that, that camera went out of commission and I haven't owned a camera since, always borrowing one from my sister, parents or girlfriend if needs be.

For most of my younger years my parents never owned a camera. And even when we did have a camera at our disposal, we were not avid picture takers - the cameras would come with us when we went road-tripping on had some special occasion - but you would be hard-pressed to find a picture of my father just lazing around on the verandah. Even now, with a good digital camera at my disposal I tend only to take pictures on 'special occasions'. As such, my 'life in photos' is chronicled in a disjoint-timeline way. And you would not be able piece my life together through my pictures. You couldn't tell who my closest friends were. You couldn't tell who my girlfriends were. You couldn't tell what I did for my summers (even for some of my overseas travels) or what social occasions I went to or who what classrooms I resided in at school.

It's a big regret of mine. It's also an ironic regret, and here's why - if you take the time to browse through photo albums on Facebook or Hi5 you will see hundreds of seemingly pointless photos, photos that were perhaps only taken by and for the self-indulgent. However, intentions cast aside, what these people have effectively done is written their own photo-biography... a paper trail to their past. I have no such trail. Instead, I'm then forced to commit lots of good moments in my life to memory, and given that my memory is not at all the best, I will always run the risk of losing touch with my past as time rolls on.

It may be too late to capture all that I've failed to capture in the last quarter century, but I'm gonna make an effort from hereon in to be more liberal with my picture-taking. I'll lean to the self-indulgent side if I need to... if that's what it takes to really capture my own moments in time.