From behind the camera lens

If there's a camera around, I am most often the one behind it (even if it's an iPhone).

I spend a whole lot of time on pictures - taking the pictures, editing them (dumping bad ones, cropping, slight fixes), then uploading them to a photo sharing site, writing captions to tell the story, plus printing the pictures, putting them in albums, and writing captions in the albums. And all that is leaving out a new task that came along with buying a Mac: assigning keywords and peoples' names to the photos, so they can be easily searched. I spend a lot of energy on it for two reasons: first, I want our far-flung family to get an idea of what our daily life is mostly like (I don't take pictures of everything, despite complaints to the contrary), and second, I want to capture our family's activities so our kids (and us) can look back on them years from now.

Sometimes I wonder if I go overboard; by most people's standards, I probably do. I hear of other moms who don't ever print their pictures, who barely even upload them off the camera, or who upload them to share but don't bother with captions to explain what's what and who's who. Tod's Aunt Suzy said to me "You're quite a documentarian" and at first I bristled at that, but then I realized it is accurate to say what I'm doing is documenting our lives. I think I probably do fall into the "overboard" category, but I'm alright with that. I enjoy doing it, and I know all too well that time flies by and it won't be long before these kids are grown and the days of missing teeth, first days of elementary school, and first friends will all be memories. If I have the pictures, I can relive the moments.

I hope that one day Reed and Amy will look back and see this work as the treasure that I think it is. I don't have a tremendous amount of pictures of myself as a kid, and the ones I do have are so special to me. I hope the kids don't say "good grief, why did Mom take so many pictures?" or "can you believe she spent so much time on this?" or see the many photo albums as a burden. They are my gift to our kids, and I hope they'll know how much love went into every single bit of it.