I'm kind of disappointed that this didn't mention how our internal memories can fail us. My childhood trauma has almost completely erased my memories of my hometown and I wouldn't have any way to remember the good without photos. I've also worked with elderly people before who keep their rooms full of photos of their families so that they can remember their family's faces. Sometimes your internal memory isn't better than a synthetic one.

@Disastranaut

Жыл бұрын

This is part of why I love photography. My memory is complete garbage and my photography allows me to look back and piece together days I would have no chance of remembering otherwise. I'll always be able to remember fun trips or days out because I have a more permanent record of those fun days.

@theevauwu7853

Жыл бұрын

@@Disastranaut that's why I use a bullet journal because my whole life is a blur without it. I wouldn't even remember what happened a few days ago unless someone else told me

@WanderTheNomad

Жыл бұрын

@@theevauwu7853 Without getting too personal, how exactly do you use a bullet journal? Like what types of things do you write in it. I've been wanting to journal my life in case I want or need to remember when/how something happened or my thoughts at a certain point in time, but I'm not sure what to write down or not, or how much is too much.

@willywonka3050

Жыл бұрын

Same here. I forgot a decent chunk of my childhood in Shanghai - I remember 2004 and 2005 vividly, but 2006-2008 would just be a blank void if not for the photos my mom took.

@theevauwu7853

Жыл бұрын

@@WanderTheNomad since I've been on holiday, I tried to sit down every night/every other night to quickly write down what happened that day and my opinion. I just write the date off to the side and bullet point (i.e. -i went to my favourite pizza shop with my family today, it was very tasty). I also add drawings and other stuff to keep it fun. For school, I usually write down whatever I found interesting/amusing since school isn't usually very eventful

If you're worried about losing memories, I'd suggest journalling. That way you can record what a camera cannot: sounds, smells, tastes, emotions, etc.

@coolgirlzinuwu1615

Жыл бұрын

@jesseislookingforearltypebeats same tho 😭😭😭

@potapotapotapotapotapota

Жыл бұрын

journalling also teaches you to recall information, because you have to wait til you are alone to journal which will test your ability to recall

@emilyharkness9685

Жыл бұрын

ADHD would never let me keep this consistent lol I’d love to tho

@platonymous

Жыл бұрын

My issue is im way to self concious about my writing ( not great at it )

@pieflower6419

Жыл бұрын

with me, looking back on a photo reminds me of everything else that was at the time.

I'm a wedding photographer. One of the first things I tell people is that the photographs are not memories. Photographs, at best, are a crutch. You should look at every photograph as such. A photograph is only a crutch, it's a prompt that you should use to try and help you remember the space around the photograph. My parents got married decades ago, and I mean decades ago. We looked through their wedding photographs and the amount of times a story would come up they completely forgot, or a person they forgot attended their wedding was either every other photograph, or every photograph. They were there as helpful prompts. Do not allow photographs to act as memories. They aren't. I love photography, I got a degree in photography, I intend on getting a Masters and a PhD in Photography. They are not memories.

@orbispictus6127

Жыл бұрын

I'd love to read your master report or even more, your thesis on photograph.

@ivragi

Жыл бұрын

On the wedding of my best friend the most memorable moment was the one when child broke the glass door with his forehead. Not a single photo of this moment was taken by professional photographer (as it should) but everybody remembers this till this day 15 years after. So yeah photo is not a memory. P.S. Kid didn't get hurt. No worries.

@large_words

Жыл бұрын

@@orbispictus6127 Thank you! I really love photography, and how we interpret and understand images. I have to figure out a way of putting my dissertation out into the world one of these days. I wrote it about viewing photojournalism as conceptual art. Because there's a culture around conceptual art of asking questions, and hardline trying to interpret meaning, where it feels lacking when you look at photojournalism. And with photojournalism, there's a lot of subtext and intent that is put with an image that accompanies text, which then informs how you read the text, (Normally a news article). It's something I think people don't realise is a problem often.

@darwinfermin4114

Жыл бұрын

Oh my god yes! This is the best way I’ve ever seen it put and if you don’t mind, I’ll be borrowing the terminology and the rationale behind it.

@brotendo

Жыл бұрын

Disagree. Photographs are definitely memories. I am also a wedding photographer (I've been a member of the WPJA and Fearless for over a decade). It depends on how often you look at the photos. If you dig up a wedding album you haven't looked at in 20 years, of course they'll hardly be memories--they'll be documents.

Human memory is incredibly fallible. We "remember" things that never happened, and forget many things that did happen. I have a memory from childhood of walking beside a bus, holding someone's hand. I don't remember who that person was, where the even happened, when it happened, or why it was so important that I remember it to this day. Maybe it didn't happen at all, and I am just remembering a dream! If only there was a photograph...

@If-loki-was-a-fox

Жыл бұрын

I have had a memory for a long time that was just a blurry image of a parking lot at night, and I didn't realize until a conversation with my parents about a decade later that the memory was the night of my little sister's birth, when we were in the parking lot and learned that our pet cat had died while we were away.

@swordslash50

Жыл бұрын

Memory is crazy, I remember certain details of my great grandfathers funeral (I was around 5) that never even happened. Turns out I don’t remember it at all but I had imagined it so much that I gave myself a false memory

@Shyknit

Жыл бұрын

I have a memory of being at a beach with my extended family and getting sand thrown in my face from a bright red bucket by who I assume to be a cousin. But my family doesn't know what I'm talking about and I can't tell if it really happened or is a dream.

For me, the most important part of taking memorable pictures is to just take the picture. Don't put too much thought into it. Just capture a part of the moment and let the memories do the rest

@andrea.dandelion

Жыл бұрын

I agree with this wholeheartedly!! Thanks for sharing your opinion/thought! 😁

@jun_suzuki42

Жыл бұрын

Yes doesn't matter it is good or poor quality, even the ruined behind the scene NG shots during friends gathering can sometimes make me smile. I having depression and these materials are healthy medicine for me.

So I used to be a photographer but I remember one of the things that soured me to it. I was at a great concert once and got a lot of fantastic photos. But when I was going back over them to edit and find the best ones I really got that "living life in third person" effect. And I realized that I had traded off my own personal experiences for these images. It was then that I thought "Ya know, I should have just gone to the concert and enjoyed myself and then just looked at someone else's photos."

@TheTurtleWithATopHat

Жыл бұрын

I did the same thing. Took a ton of videos just to realize I did what you did. It was a very big and popular concert so there were tonssss of fancams so there really was no need to make my own.

@mhenderson7673

Жыл бұрын

I've realised this too, whenever my family sees something interesting they say to me "quick, take a picture!" but sometimes I just want to experience the fleeting moment without trying to get a good shot and fiddling about with a camera

@luisapaza317

Жыл бұрын

this makes me remember the leopard scene in the Amazing live of Walter Mitty, his friend, the photographer, prefered to focus on living the moment, and giving his proper time before taking the photo, even if this implied that the snow leopard go out of his field of vision. That scene has a certain mystical approach, but is quite significant and profound

@natperXD

Жыл бұрын

Honestly, I am 50/50 with taking photos vs enjoying myself. I think it is due to the fact that my dad would take so much photos and even asked me to do so even though I was doing something else during events that it annoyed me. At the same time, I enjoyed taking photos so I always had my camera near me. So I made a balance between the 2 where if I think the moment is more important than capturing, I won't capture it. For example, I went to a concert one time and took just 1 or 2 photos just to document it and then just enjoyed myself. Since it is just there to remind me that I went to that specific concert. But if I'm exploring a new town or something, I like to do street photography and take lots more photos.

@lilydepot7961

Жыл бұрын

I have this same feeling looking back at photos of a solar eclipse. I'd wanted to see that eclipse for years and years, and traveled over 20 hours to see it. I got that epic 'solar eclipse' photo like you see online, it's amazing, easily my favorite photograph I've ever taken and likely ever will. But there's a strange sensation in the air during an eclipse, and the sky isn't as dark as the photos make it look. I spent so much times staring through my camera to get that perfect shot, that I don't really remember what exactly that was. In some ways I feel like I never really 'saw' it. It's the exact reason I clicked this video when I saw it.

another interesting way that you could have gone about this, is not only looking at pictures, but videos. you coulda quizzed taha or sabrina on their older videos to see how much information they retained.

@goganii

Жыл бұрын

I love this

@Andandand25

Жыл бұрын

I would also like to see a comparison with 3d capture

@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721

Жыл бұрын

That would have been very fun. If it were a competition, my bet would be that Sabrina remembers more.

"A picture makes us not remember" "Except for if you look at it every now and then, then they will actually strengthen memories" "or if you were enjoying yourself while taking them"

I think you're onto something about the differences between different cameras. When i was a kid i was really into photography using a point-and-shoot camera or my dad's DSLR. but since getting my first smartphone over 10 years ago, I've found my interest steadily decreasing. For a while, when I was making lots of KZread videos, i mostly used the phone to film cool shots. But now that I don't really make videos, I also find that my smartphone photos tend to be either intentionally low-quality slice-of-life shots for instant sharing with friends, or kind of carelessly taken for the memory/reference later. I've lost so much of the joy for photography itself; maybe it's time to dig out those old, lower-res cameras and see if that changes things.

@kepler3.14

Жыл бұрын

I think something similar happened for me. I used to lug around an old film SLR everywhere and *loved* it, but for years now I just haven't been able to feel excited about photography.

@zr1129

Жыл бұрын

People think smart phones make good pictures but all they do is just add vibrance and hdr compared to your standard DSLR/mirrorless. You end up caring more about the cool vibrance and hdr THAN what it is in the photo with smart phones imo.

@HappySlappyFace

Жыл бұрын

Everything you said about phones taking the magic out of photography is true, take out that old camera and enjoy your hobby again

@spntageous5249

Жыл бұрын

honestly same, i got really into 35mm film photography, i love it, i love how you wait for the film to get full, for the pictures to get developed, that you might not if your pictures are nice until much later, all the pictures that get developed have this weird grain that makes them 30 years old even tho you took them last year..... and recently the prices of film rolls in my country have raised and its getting a bit hard for me to shoot. I tried using a digital camera but it's just not the same. It's....boring.

@kaitlyn__L

Жыл бұрын

That’s interesting, I had an opposite experience. Couldn’t get back into photography taking my big camera out to do it, but turning-on the grid lines etc in my phone camera have got me really engaged in shot composition, framing, and exposure again

It's funny how you said you felt really vulnerable about this and then lots of people came to comment with advice on how to improve it or what more they wanted (myself included actually.) After reading all that I realize what I most want to say is thank you for exploring a topic that felt tender to you. We need lots more people to talk about the "in progress" parts of Answer in Progress, and I deeply appreciate this part of this video. Thanks for being vulnerable in a big public space and I hope you see this one.

@dmtr404

Жыл бұрын

I wanted to write the same one. She raised the fascinating topic and was vulnerable. Thanks, Melissa!

I turned into a pile of dust when Melissa casually mentioned she had that digital camera *in elementary school*

@greensteve9307

Жыл бұрын

I turned to a pile of dust when she explained how a film camera works!

@mausmalone

Жыл бұрын

I work in higher ed so I get a dose of this at the start of every academic year. But yeah, that's not even an /old/ digital point-and-shoot. I remember getting our first one at work and how it meant we could go straight from an event to posting a story on the web in the same day - it took photos in 640x480 and could only store like 25 of them in memory before you had to dump it all.

This made me think of my last trip, where I went a little further and made short clips with my phone instead of photos. They were kind of "first person" and great for capturing the atmosphere of the places. But I realized, that sometimes I didn't even actually look at the thing I was filming, I just looked at it trough the camera app on my screen and then moved on to the next thing... That was a weird realization for me and probably that is also why we remember things differently and why you didn't have that problem with the analog camera or the point and shoot. These cameras aren't good enough to just experience the thing trough the screen so you have to actually look at it directly...

@seraphina985

Жыл бұрын

That probably also is a significant contributor to the third person effect, you are experiencing things only from the otherly perspective of the camera sensor and it's optics which differs from your own so it likely makes it feel more disconnected. It is a lot more like watching a random youtube video in that regard it is a projection of what some mechanical eye saw once from a perspective you never shared yourself personally. This is probably why I actually take fairly few photos, I prefer to take a small selection towards the end of a visit or whatever that I want to remember. Just a few selected things to reinforce my own memories later after letting myself just enjoy the experience in the here and now first. Granted you wont get as many "picture perfect" moments as such that way but you can pick out pictures of things that resonate with the most meaningful aspects of the experience itself and important parts of the narrative around the memory like the people with me etc. But that way I find looking back on them I tend to be more likely to be able to let myself go back to the story of what happened. By that I mean that picture of me and some friends outside a cafe I enjoyed tends to do a better job helping me remember the music and smells as we walked in and the tastes of the food and so on as it is more of a souvenir of the experience rather than a poor replacement for it.

"it's like I was living life in third person" I feel the exact same when I go to edit videos

5:34 Spaced repetition may have helped to remember moments you have captured with a camera using film, but I think it's also because you don't get (near) instant results with a film camera like with all of the other cameras you have used. So you are more forced to actually live in the moment and remember as much of it as possible right there and then, because you don't immediately have that photo as a reminder of the moment you have captured.

I like the Johnny Harris idea of editing photos to shape how you remember the events the pictures portray. You find the core images that encapsulate the experience for you, you get to experience it all over again, plus you weed down the sheer amount of information you are in charge of. Every time that you do this (I at least tend to do it multiple times per album) weeds it down until you have strong photos for strong memories.

This seems like a clickbait title but you actually put a lot of time and research into this, well done!

I have terrible memory if I don't have triggers for them. Photography helps. If I want to live the moment I snap a quick photo. If I want a good photo then I understand that I might be sacrificing some moments for an aesthetic photo.

@roadrunnercrazy

Жыл бұрын

This! There is a balance to both taking a photo as a memory prompt for later and experiencing the moment. If we are mindful of what we are doing, we can find that balance.

This kind of reminds me of Walter Benjamin's paper, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." He had concerns with taking photography seriously as an art form because of how they can be mass produced over and over again for every person to experience. To him it loses the "aura" of the artwork. Hence why when you look at a painting in person up close and really immerse yourself in the density and physical movement of the brush strokes, you are more aware of it. It enhances your experience than looking at that same painting, taken with a phone camera, staring at an instagram post about a person showing of how aesthetic their day went while visiting a museum, and you only get to see it for two seconds until you swipe up to look at more similar, collective images online. It is the same with movies and how it creates fictitious realities almost inaccessible to the real world, while the dramatic arts, opera, plays, and Broadway gives you the intonation of the character's voice, how they reverberate and echo at a distance in a room, the vivid sound of their foot steps. You can actually feel the story as it is being played out. Perhaps that's the same way with remembering with photographs sometimes. Instead of retracing back an experience, a feeling, all we notice is mass produced imagery that a fragment of our brains just consider as mere data.

It's so interesting to see this video and some of the comments, and feel so disconnected from it. I have ADHD my memory is ass, like absolutely horrible. I have so little memories of my childhood, just flashes. And from my teen years and now adult years, i have them but i have a hard time retrieving them without a trigger. I fell in love with photography even before my diagnosis. To me it did feel like capturing a moment and at many many times it did jog my memory from times i'd sworn i couldn't remember. Another thing that was mentioned was concerts. I am a music fan and to smaller gigs i used to take my good camera and snap some photos. It never took me away from the experience, once it even caused one of my favourite memories. Concerts are very high energy and emotional for me, which can lead to me losing said memories in the long run. Photos jog them back.

@Atechet

Жыл бұрын

I'm of the opinion that the results can be very different for neurodivergent people

I'm a hobbyist/occasional professional photographer who got into film photography during the pandemic when I was having major artist's block and feeling really burnt out. The whole process of shooting on film really revitalized my love for photography, and I could never quite explain it. Knowing I could get mirrorless quality photos but I was paying ~$2 per exposure made me think a lot more about my process in order to get one single perfect shot rather than quickly shooting 20 digital photos. Because of that, I'm much more aware of my surroundings. That, combined with the spaced repetition, makes it so when I look back at one of my film photos the memory feels so much more tangible. It's so cool that I have an actual explanation for that feeling now.

I have a condition that gives me memory problems so for me my phone is my favourite memory keeper, if it weren't for photos of childhood holidays I would have no memories of any of them. Even holidays of 5-6 years ago, practically gone out my mind already Friend: "Did we go to X in March?" Me: "Did we take any photos?" Friend "Idk" Me: "Not a clue then"

I feel like the way I use my smartphone camera is conducive to spaced repetition. I’ll take a bunch of photos when I feel like it and then not look at them until later. And now with the option to put notes on each photo I feel like it’s really helpful, you can almost make a scrapbook. Especially during peak quarantine. I was losing track of time with how similar days were. Staying in all day every day working from home on the same couch with the same 5 songs playing on the radio station my parents chose. It was disorienting. So I started trying to take at least one photo every day. Not even of interesting or aesthetic things but of little differences in each day so I could use them as anchor points for my memory of the rest of that day. A screenshot of that vaguely funny thing I read or a blurry picture of my dog when I went out to the yard with her and maybe type out a blurb for the context of the photo. It was partly to help me keep track of time as it was happening but also kinda an actualization of hope. My hope that one day things would get back to normal and the only proof I’d have of it ever having happened would be pictures.

I'm so glad this didn't stay in your diary - thank you so much for taking the time to break down how and why we photograph things. It's something I feel like I've heard lots of discussion about over the last several years, and friends lamenting that they took a picture but had *no* memory of that moment. This video was so thoughtful and helped me to consider how to best use the wild amounts of technology available to us but not set aside my human sense of the moment.

A photo is such a strong anchoring point for me that when I look at one, I instantly recall all details of the exact situation when I was taking them. I've been going on vacation to the same, beautiful and exciting, place for s couple of years and the years from which I have any photos I can remember in vivid detal (not all of it, but a good chunk around those anchoring points). Those years I didn't take any, they're gone. What is damaging to my memory gathering rather than memory recall later is the process of taking photos - instead of focusing on living the moment, I focus on attempting to capture it... It can be a fun memory in itself when you're taking photos with your friends or family, but it can be stressful and completely take you out of the situation if you're trying to catch one-of-a-kind moment, e.g. at a concert or event. So for me it's important to know when to take pictures and when to not. Especially considering I have depression and that further affects my ability both to experience fully and to keep and remember a memory.

I take a couple photos to go along with a journal entry. This helps me recall the moment better. I always find it interesting when I go to a concert and see a large sea of cell phone screens. Nice video, thanks for sharing.

Yeah, this whole video pretty much encapsulates why I went from being the friend at the party documenting everything to someone who won't take pictures at all. Sometimes I do get frustrated at not having ANY pictures of an event/gathering, but when I was the one taking all the pictures, I never felt like a guest at the party, I literally felt like a documentarian. It felt like work. And if you're photographing an event for work, it's fine that you didn't really experience it. But personally, I just got sick of not really attending any of these personal events, and I'd even acquired "friends" who didn't invite me for the company so much as free labor. I do think there's a nice compromise, somewhere, it may just be my brain has a hard time not behaving in black and white on this one.

I've noticed this a lot when I was looking over my old photos, this perfectly explains it, my memories of these experiences were shaped by photos I took of them, and while they might have been lost entirely without taking them, it still changed how I remember those moments.

The price for the film rolland development may be high when put against digital media, but I think it’s absolutely worth it. Geez, in the part where you showed the photos you took over 2 months, just seeing the general aspect of those shots, with the flash, the wonky but passable focus, the gloss of the photo paper, the oh-so-characteristic light balance… that alone gave me goosebumps. And those weren’t even my photos! It’s been a while since I’ve gone through the old family albums, (all shot from that kind of camera, no fancy or professional shoots, and the ones taken by any of the family’s kids have a high “thumb on the corner partially covering the lens” probability, but it’s always an intense experience. Well, I guess I’ll be looking for a serviceable compact auto-focus film camera. Wasted too much time already.

I don't take photos anymore, I just hate the process and the last photo I took must have been pre-pandemic. However I log what I do, I can know what I did this day last year, if I could be bothered to grab my log book. I was really close to my paternal grandpa and he logged every day since 1953 until his death, a lot were really short single sentences, but none were empty. I remember in his house in the corridor he had a rack with piles of books. He used A7 notebooks rather than calendars such that if he had a lot to write he had the space to. He was also an architect so many of the pages had sketches. Each book lasted 2-4 months. Whenever I would visit him I would get a random notebook (and place in a placeholder card so I knew where to put it back) and I would sit down with him and the notes were able to jog his memory and he would be able to tell me about the day. He had very few photos and instead relied on experiencing, then choosing what things to remember, and having a grandchild go through the books with and stir up memories. He ended up with alzheimer's and lost all of his memories to the point that he didn't recognise me but he knew he was happy to see me (more than anyone else ... including his son, my dad), when he died he had left me, among all of his architecture tools and mathematical instruments, all of his notebooks. He has no photos but he was able to capture a meaningful moment from every day of most of his life and while very few accounts had picture perfect details he was aware enough to never skip important information he assumed he would know (my first log entries are meaningless because I left out details I assumed I would know but I don't know what I meant), and I was able to effectively reconstruct his best life, what he wanted to remember. We are our memories, and while some photos are nice, I have a few from my wedding, I'm personally not so interested in the way things looked in the moment I'm more interested in what I was doing and more importantly what I was thinking. People talk about corrupted memories as a bad thing, but by modifying memories in a constructive manor we are able to improve ourselves when we refer back to it. We don't need to remember the many small bad things. Photos are, despite their control, fairly uncontrolled at triggering memories and you may not remember the main thing you wanted to capture and you may remember the bad. "A picture is a thousand words" is only true if none of the thousand words are wider context and inner thoughts. Documenting your life is I think incredibly important, it reinforces your experiences, pushes you to do more or at least get out of bed, allows you to remember that you have actually been alive, and you could one day be reconstructed as an AI which it then has enough details to think it has actually been alive. But I really think photos shouldn't be the only way you document your life and no matter the camera it can't capture what words can, unless taking a photo of words.

YOOO NEW ANSWER IN PROGRESS VIDEO WOOOO

I don't usually post photos online, but I always try to get a great shot everytime, which means I take not a lot of pictures, and that makes me rely on those pictures less, and I can still remember the place and feelings normally, it feels like a good balance

I love how you explore this topic and bring it to light on the internet. Here's my two cents: I'm going to talk about smartphones as camera only since it is the most common and accessible camera nowadays. We have an obsession of taking too much photos of every moments in our lives! So much so that people feel like they lived in their own phones and photos instead of remembering the moments in our memory. So, stop being obsess about taking a hundred shots just for the most perfect Instagram photo. Be present and enjoy the moment with our own eyes not the camera lens. Take photos but not too much. That way you will enjoy precious moments and be fully immerse in it.

I've recently picked up street photography and I've actually noticed that I am paying attention to my surroundings more instead of listening to podcasts on my walks. I am genuinely engaged with the spaces I move through via my camera instead of not engaging with them at all. I'm not trying to make memories but position myself within a space to take interesting or even artistic photos. I even end up taking off my headphones to listen for squirrels and birds when I'm walking through neighbourhoods with trees. I started on film (Pentax ME Super) but moved to an older DSLR (Pentax K-7) due to the cost of film. I think you should try either a film or digital SLR and take your photos with the viewfinder, not the screen. I had a Sony NEX-F3 (no electronic viewfinder, just screen) and I fucking hated it, but shooting with a proper optical viewfinder is just better for my approach. (except for the fact that I can't see the whole viewfinder frame due to my glasses lol)

@ggenc

10 ай бұрын

I really love this! I need to get out and do this kind of photography more, I forgot how much it connects me to the space around me. Thanks for the reminder :)

The most effective memory aid I have found is photos from whatever camera is right for the job plus journaling. I don't have time for this day to day, but on important travel it's irreplaceable. I regret not figuring it out sooner.

I have a cousin who passed over 18 years ago. The last time my grandmother took photos of him he didn't want to take photos and she always regrets not taking more of him. I think that is kind of my philosophy. I don't really care what we are doing, I'll try to get a photo of my family and friends.

My family has taken me on many cruises my whole life until Covid hit. The last one we did was to Alaska at the end of 2019, and it was the first one I took photos during every once in a while. I have Aphantasia (can’t “picture something” in my mind), and that trip is the one I can remember the best because seeing the photos helps re-piece the entire trip and remind me of the non-photographed moments in between I would have otherwise forgotten. All my other cruise “memories” are a sliver compared to the one I took photos on.

Johnny Harris made a video two or three years ago about how he collects, and then permanently deletes photos to only keep the good ones without duplicates. It was pretty enlightening to watch.

I love printing my pictures from my phone. It lets me have a physical copy of my favorite moments, and I’ve been doing it for a few years so going back through years and years of pictures is such a nice experience. I think it’s probably a similarish way of capturing moments as the experience of a point and shoot camera.

I had an interesting experience a few weeks ago in terms of the 'memory effect of taking photos'. I live in Australia where it rarely ever snows, but I had traveled to my parents' place in the mountains and arrived in the early evening right as it had started to snow. I immediately took my dSLR out to the grounds of an old local hotel where I knew there would be lots of great photo opportunities and found a whole lot of local families there having the time of their lives, out at night making snowmen and throwing snowballs and doing all the kinds of things people in Australia usually never get to do. I took a bunch of photos of all this and found it turned out well - really well! Looking at these photos later on, I realized there were two sets of memories of the event. There was my memories of the cold numbness of my hands on the camera dials and the feeling of the snow gently coming down and slowly melting all over my fleece. There were the memories of setting up shots and peering through the viewfinder. Then there were the camera's memories...what the camera had seen. Because I was using fairly high isos and slow shutter speeds, I knew that the camera would be able to see into the darkness and perceive the interplay of light and darkness and colour in ways that my eyes would not. In the end, I found my own memories of the experience and my camera's 'memories' of the experience complemented one another in the most wonderful way. It's interesting to think whether the whole experience would have been anywhere near as satisfying if I'd just been there with a phone camera.

Very interesting topic! I'd like to hear your thoughts on morii, a term from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, sometime, since they're related (i.e. With every click of the shutter, you’re trying to press pause on your life. If only so you can feel a little more comfortable moving on living in a world stuck on play.)

@anhphuong.13

Жыл бұрын

thanks so much for referencing to the morii video - easily one of the most heartfelt, relatable one i've seen lately

@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721

Жыл бұрын

I don't know how the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows does it, but every single word they've come up with is viscerally relatable.

8:00 a photo can be a trigger for the stored memories we document internally imo, remembering the bounce of a truck, the smells, the posture of people, the love you felt in that moment. use the photo as a trigger than visualize the actual moment in is moving memory glory like a thumbnail

Awesome video! Personally, I think how you take the photos/interact with them after is more important than what you take them with. There are 2 main contexts I take photos in: Day-to-day randomness (food, cats, cool stuff I randomly see), or on vacation or a more fancy outing. For the vacation, I used to use a DSLR/mirrorless, shoot everything in raw (and f/8 auto ISO unless things get dark so I don't have to think about it), and have fun editing maybe a few weeks/months after the trip, and then pick some photos to print for a photo album. Now I mainly just shoot in AppleRaw or whatever it's called on my phone and it achieves the same thing, though the a7iii still comes along. For day-to-day stuff, I also love my phone, since it allows me to jump in and out of taking a photo without it really getting in the way of the whole living of life thing. For these, I usually go through them a few times a month, delete repeats/shitty ones (there's that spaced repetition), edit the nice ones in VSCO, and share as I feel like. I've started using a photo every few weeks to make a quick album cover for a 80-90 minutes mixtape playlist, and let me tell you, photo + music of the moment is just the ultimate memory maker!

I used to take lots of photos but had to tone it down. see I have a crappy memory and often when I leave something like a holiday I get sad immediately because its in the past and I can't remember it well. so I took photos. but then my desire to have everything and know when what happened became toxic. I'm glad I toned it down and decided to live for the present rather then just to allow my future a glimpse of the past. it makes me happier, even if I still sorely miss things after they end

This just made me appreciate my film cameras more :( yes theyre expensive as hell but the experience i get in return is worth it… and truly having a mix of both film and digital is what works best for me

Been a photographer for decades. It is definitely a good thing you shared this. Understanding your process and why you take photos is what sets us apart from snapshots. Even when _we_ photographers do snapshots, they have an intent behind them that most others' don't. Sharing your concepts with the world helps commit to that vision, I'll call it. Because you have it.

This is so sweet and really strikes a chord! Thank you for being vulnerable and putting together this high quality video :)

The best camera is whichever one you happen to have on you when a photo-worthy moment occurs.

I tend to document the media I consume with photos and screenshots. It's often details I would forget easily but love coming back to.

Thank you for sharing with us, Melissa!

I have long had a practice of going through my phone photos at the end of the month to clear out junk (screenshots and downloads and photos I may have taken for reference at work or whatever). Nice to know that it might be helping me better remember events.

Those film photos look absolutely amazing; they’re warm and the colors look spectacular.

Thank you so much for making this. I think you made such wonderful points and definitely got my brain gears turning. I’m definitely the person to always take pictures and now I’m asking myself “who are these really for?” I’ve gotten into film recently and I have been loving it for the feeling of “take your one or two shots (since $$) and then enjoy the rest of the moment”. This has really been the best balance for me!

I think my favorite thing about this video is the fact that I have been exploring this exact question in my life. I strayed away from my phone for pictures a while ago because its not the vibe and I've been messing with a film camera, and my sister is mailing me her old point and shoot in a few days. So this is incredibly timely and your pros and cons list is great validation for my choices.

That was a really cool exploration and something I was actually thinking about as I've been abroad and taking a lot of photos on my phone (not the best but I don't have a camera right now) but worrying it was getting in the way of me experiencing my time. Thank you for your time and thoughtfulness you put into this video!

Thank you for this video! It was food for thought and made me think about my relationship with my phone camera - taking photos/videos for social media or because I was afraid of missing a moment. I was so focused on taking photos that I did not live in the moment, probably explains the poor recollection of events and why I have to rely on looking at past photos to jog my memory.

I really enjoyed this video, as a professional photographer for over five years, it’s something I’ve mused over, and here’s how I go about it: I’ve got an iPhone, which I love to capture random moments, like new growth in my veggie garden, or a random sunset. I consider it for my “practical” photography on it - capturing a photo to compare things I might buy, taking a shot with the wide angle lens to get an idea of a space, that kinda thing. I’ve got a Instax SQ6 (like a Polaroid but the film is cheaper, and more reliable quality, as Polaroids don’t do well in warmer climates), and I love bringing that on a night out with friends or if I ever go somewhere new. It captures colours beautifully, and has such a timeless quality to it. When I’m working, I use Canon mirrorless cameras for fast, high resolution shots with beautiful colour technology. I started out with Canon DSLR’s, and slowly am upgrading my gear. I learnt the basics of photography on point and shoot’s, and have a great appreciation for them even if I don’t use them much now. I would really like to get into film photography as well, but it’s just a matter of saving up at the moment. I think all the different mediums have their place, and it’s such a personal choice, as cameras are so different and what we like best is different between each person. I think as we grow older, and technologies change, our choice changes as well. The best camera is always the one you already have, so don’t feel like you need to get the latest thing, just enjoy the process, and enjoy the moment.

Love this video so much,, Melissa is so calming and chill and systematic love it

This is by far my favorite video of yours thus far. Thanks for sharing with us.

I make videos for work, and as a result I've always struggled with capturing my own life's moments with video. You'd think it would be easier, but I run into lots of internal pressures and tend to overcomplicate the process. Really enjoyed this exploration into cameras as a way to document our lives. They're incredibly useful tools, and it's fascinating how much the experience changes from camera to camera.

This was an awesome video, and I appreciated your perspective! As someone who often lugs a dslr around, I have recently found more often than not I am just using my phone camera, even while traveling (where I usually come home with ~10k hi-res shots). I've dabbled in film over the last 15 years, but have recently started shooting 35mm again, and the experience is so very different. Maybe due to cost, or being fully manual, but like your experience, it really does make you slow down and contemplate a shot much more. The memory component of your video is also quite interesting, I'm going to go back thru some of my work and see how I remember the moments surrounding the photos...

Really loved how introspective this video felt

Such a great video! Really interesting premise and sweet vibes

The videographic and photographic quality is always a treat to view. Keep up the good work!

I stopped taking photos of my life a few years ago, only getting an incidental photo here and there, or photos when other take them of me (which my ex did A LOT), and I found I actually could recall my life events better and I had more positive emotions associated with them (even when bad things happened) than I did when I was taking photos of everything in my life. Taking photos all the time always took me out of moments, and left me only ever remembering anything bad that happened during those events, but when I stopped, I really was able to focus on all the good. This all directly relates to the section about taking photos with the phone, because I never really took photos with anything else.

Memory's images, onced they are fixed in words, are erased

My philosophy on this is if it's important I'll just remember it. So I take about 3 photos per year and it's usually something that I need some else to look at

Omg i thoroughly enjoyed this video 😄 love the story the premise and the resolution. So good 👏

this video helps me understand why I love my rayon stories, I dont have a camera in my hands but I get to capture everything as I SEE IT! so I think they are my fav. camera!

Unless i take pictures for art purposes, i never really look at them afterward. It is sometimes months before i see them or edit them and i really related to that experience with film. Re-remembering experiences is so sweet

amazing video! Thanks for sharing!

This also happens to be very related to my dissertation topic. Happy to see the area getting some mainstream notice

SNAP I have been waiting fir this video since you guys mentioned it in the newsletter So glad it’s finally out !!!

I think this might be my favorite video that I've seen of Melissa's. ♥️

Film photographs are like drunk photographs, they are special because you only knownwhat they look like after they are no longer replicable. I have some shots I tooks in college that are pretty much blurs and lights and I they make me feel how I felt back then

This was intersting, I've recently gotten into film photography as a hobby but also to hopefully build what I am calling a "wall of happy memories". When you have depression and other mental health issues, that too can adjust your memories, like I struggle to remember anything positive and happy that occurred during my teen years (I'm 22) the instant photos help counteract the effect that depression has on your memory.

This is a very cool video. Thanks for understanding this for the rest of us. I'm so bad at remembering to take photos and maybe now I can figure out the best way to take them

CONGRATS ON 1 MILL

Rarely ever is a video so well put together, that you need to take a moment to reflect at he end. That ending segment capped it off perfectly.

I appreciate how this video doesn't really go into any deep research but is still so thoughtful

I used to take a lot of pictures. This was before social media. But then I learned about the memory effect of taking pictures. I don't miss thinking "I need to take pictures!" I just experience what's happening. I document very important events only. This is about 15 years after making the change. I think the main change is that social events are simpler. I have one less thing to manage.

I’ve always held the philosophy that if I can’t remember it on my own than it wasn’t a moment worth remembering and is better left in the past. I don’t take that many pictures, and maybe I’ll be bitter about that when I’m older, but humans have always found a way to share their history long before we developed film and I think I’ll manage too lol

I got a digital compact [the Casio version of the Sony you used here] for my 13th birthday. I still swear by that camera for nature photography, journalism, even portraiture -- it's so small that you can use it while staying mobile, your 3 point stance can be real loosey goosey, and at 10.1mpx it can output pretty large images, so blurriness and pixelation tend to look more like texture.

It's because taking a picture is like the doorway effect, it's a context switch for discarding old information.

I personally enjoy film, I own two cameras and in the past 8 months of owning one I’ve probably taken a total of 140 pictures, and almost every single one is memorable even tho I haven’t had time to get any developed yet. Because film is expensive it makes you think about what you really want to document and what’s actually important to you therefore accidentally internalizing that memory. And also the mystery behind “ohh did the photos at my (insert special moment here) come out how I planned or are they all way underexposed…. I guess I won’t know for a while🤷‍♂️” is intriguing

Loved the video!

If cameras affect your memory, I can't imagine what creating a KZread video could do. This video has so many memories that I'm sure were cherished, but the way they're shown in a video, I can only imagine them in the third person.

@ThePenguinMan

Жыл бұрын

You know who else has dementia?

there are so many things i would have forgotten without photos, for better or worse. it makes you wonder just how much of their lives people in the past actually remembered.

thank you so much for this video

Camera's change way more than just memories. People who grew up in the black and white film era dream in black and white more often than everyone else, even decades after black and white cinema went away.

Thank you for sharing your journey and your epiphany.

Those pics in the ad read were 🔥🔥🔥

7:16 - that's an absolutely gorgeous shot.

Funny enough I recently experienced spaced repetition by looking back at old photos. I'm an event photographer and bring my DSLR everywhere and take photos of everything. The other day I went back through the raw unedited photos and found the droves of moments I had nearly forgotten because I chose not to edit and post them. It was a huge smack in the face of nostalgia.

This video deeply impacted my perception on taking photos. I know it made you vulnerable, but I am seriously considering getting a crappy point and shoot just to for the fun of re-remembering moments.

I just wanna say that the photos shown here are amazing

This was a cool little exploration of this topic

I've found that because I'm so much more selective about what pictures I take while using a film camera, I'm more in the moment than with a DSLR. Instead of just pointing the camera and taking tons of pictures without thinking too much, I'm always on looking for a good shot while very rarely actually looking through my camera. I put a lot of focus on what's going on around me, then when a good photo appears before me I'm ready to capture it.

I love this video so much. Also, your voice is really pretty!

What an interesting experiment! When I was in middle school we use to always take photos! Developing photos were the highlight of the month. But now I just don't take pictures anymore, and I really think it's because Id rather be experiencing the moment. But at the same time, I've found I have whole chunks of life, friends and places, that I don't have any photos of. I haven't found the right medium for taking pictures.

wondeful cinematography in this video