Instant Memories

The impulse to instantly share experiences online has become almost second nature. Whether it’s a delicious meal, a stunning sunset, or a candid moment with friends, many of us instinctively reach for our phones, not just to capture these experiences but to broadcast them to the world. When seeing the Mona Lisa in person, we all take out our phones and take a photo. Who are we taking that photo for? And do we need millions of photos of the same painting? I often wrestle with this puzzle.

This culture of instant sharing has fundamentally altered how we experience moments. In the rush to post, like, and comment, how others perceive the experience online can overshadow the immediate, raw connection to it. The present moment becomes a commodity that followers can package, filter, and consume, frequently resulting in a disconnect between our lived experience and our digital persona.

I’ve learned to recognize the difference between capturing an image for likes and capturing one for love.

Hans Scharler

When I first picked up photography as a hobby, I was drawn to the technical aspects—the play of aperture, shutter speed, and composition. Over time, I began to realize that photography offered me a way to connect with the world around me on a more profound level. I’ve had moments when I felt the pressure to snap a picture simply because it would look great on my social media feed. But I’ve learned to recognize the difference between capturing an image for likes and capturing one for love. I now have an audience of one. Me.

The journey has taught me to pause and ask myself why I’m taking a picture. Is it to preserve a memory, tell a story, or simply because I’m drawn to the beauty of the scene? Or is it driven by an external need?

Finding the Balance

Finding equilibrium between our desire to capture memories and the need to fully embrace the present is no easy task. It’s a dance that requires awareness, intention, and practice.

• Set Intentions: Before you even take out your camera, know what you want to capture and why. This clarity can help guide your focus and keep you grounded. Sometimes my why is to learn a lens or to learn how to capture a scene in different lighting conditions.
• Be Present First: Experience the scene fully before reaching for your camera. Soak in the sounds, smells, and feelings, then capture what speaks to you.
• Get into the Photography Flow: I have found that looking through the lens is a way for me to focus on the moment. PUN INTENDED. After I took in the scene, I then start to imagine the photo that I want to take. This gets me into a flow state and I can loose minutes of time at a clip.
• Limit Your Options: Only bring one lens with one focal length. I love the challenge of learning one lens at a time. This causes you to move around to find the right angle and compoistion.

Some folks enjoy knitting, reading books, or perhaps painting watercolors while on vacation. These hobbies provide a way to unwind and a means to engage with the surroundings in your own personal way. For me, blogging and taking photos have become those connective threads that tie me to a place, a feeling, or a fleeting moment.

Since sometimes my camera is my phone, I’ve had to become extra conscious about both staying in the moment and capturing it. It’s a delicate dance that many of us face today, where the very tool we use to preserve memories can also pull us away from truly living them. You snap a photo of your poke bowl and suddenly, your off looking at your friends photos on a better vacation. You find yourself swiping up on Instagram, drawn into another world while the real one continues to unfold around you without your full attention.

I also took a picture of someone taking a picture of someone taking a picture of a PowerPoint slide. This rabbit hole goes all the way down.

I have thought about this topic before. I have even given a talk about taking photos of PowerPoint slides. PowerPoint slides do not take up a lot of storage space as a PowerPoint slide. But, when you take a photo of a PowerPoint slide you take a small file size and make it over 20 times the size. Then, imagine more than one person taking a photo of the same slide. A small file could expand to thousands of times of its original size. And, those photos have to be stored on the cloud for the rest of time for everyone who captured that image.

I take photos of things all of the time: fireworks, weddings, PowerPoint slides. I am doing this more and more to capture the moment and to remind me of something in the future. It is my modern day way of note taking. The problem is that I just keep taking photos of moments of my life. I wonder how important the moments will be later in life. The late Norm MacDonald covered the evolution of photography and the absurdity of how many photos we are taking of our ourselves.

All of us are building data lakes filled with screenshots, photos, and texts. In the current state, this lake is only useful to the companies that use the data to understand our buying behaviors, but the data is not too useful for all of us. Many that is the next step for us? Maybe there will be a service that curates our photos, culls them, and extract meaningful insights for us to easily parse. Otherwise we are going to drown in the data lake.

As I asked in my article about taking photos of fireworks, why do we take pictures? I use photos to remember things, to remind myself to price shop online for things I find IRL, and to capture the moment. I have been somewhat reflective about photo-taking these past weeks. This reflection probably got triggered by a rash of in-person events this summer. I have been with a lot of people noticing what they do, noticing how I behave too. I happened to be in this beautiful wedding of two long-term friends. As I stood beside my fellow groomsmen, I could not help but notice the sheer number of phones pointed in our direction. My mug was probably captured by over 100 people. And, the wedding had a professional photographer capturing moments with the largest camera at the event. I didn’t get my wedding photos for weeks after our wedding. Professional photos seem to take a lot of time to process. We have shifted to a real-time world. Even events like a wedding happen and the next day you are on to the next thing. We also have good enough cameras on our phones. By the time you get your professional photos, you will not have time to revel in them. You will be experiencing something new… then.

Do you ever look at these photos again? Do you share them on social media? Do you write a blog post about them?

It’s a funny thing we do. I mean, I do. I take a lot more photos these days. I take screenshots too. I also don’t remember things as well as I used to. I have been taking pictures to help me remember. I have gotten into a routine where I look over the day’s photos at night and in the morning. The images usually jog my memory about doing something. That’s what happened today. I looked over my photos to help me remember the blog post I wanted to write this week. I saw my pictures of fireworks and I started writing my post.

How do you use your pictures?

I also noticed that during a keynote talk that I gave last year that no one took photos of my slides. Was I doing something wrong? Did I need something provocative on the slides?

Some slides have a lot of information on them. This slide from the Pentagon is the densest slide that I have ever seen.

I started thinking about how much data is contained on a normal PowerPoint slide. The average slide is about 150 KB. My Pixel 2 phone has a 12.2 MP camera. When I take a photo of a PowerPoint slide, I blow up the slide to 3,400 KB. That is a 22x multiplier of data.

No one is doing the studies, so I had to make up some stats. I assume that 2% of conference attendees take photos of slides.

“2% of all [conference] attendees take photos of PowerPoint slides.”
– Hans Scharler

Let’s play that out. For every 1,000 attendees of a conference, 68,000 KB of data gets generated by one 150 KB PowerPoint slide. 24 million people went to a conference in the United States last year. Yikes. Almost all of us back up our photos to Google or iCloud. So, now we have photos of slides stored beside photos of kids, significant others, and vacations forever. We will need to build data centers just to store photos of PowerPoint slides.

If you are interested in seeing my slides from my talk, check out SlideShare.