I still haven’t deleted any photos of Nicki off my memory card for DSLR. That’s the advantage of external memory; I can always pop in another memory card when the last one is full. Alas, my phone is different. It’s quickly becoming my go-to camera since it’s always near by. It’s full. I had to make more room. But how? How could I delete any photos of my baby? I sat down last night and started the process of backing up everything – in triplicate. I didn’t want to loose anything, not even the near duplicates, not even the blurry half cropped off baby ones.

My hard drive is a mess of disorganized photos. As I was combing through them I re-discovered these.

They brought back a wave of emotion. I remembered how beautiful I felt being pregnant. I couldn’t help but reflect over how I enjoyed our journey together, especially my last trimester. But as much emotion that I had seeing these photos, I hadn’t shared them anywhere. Not on display on my house. Not on facebook. Not here (though I did post a similar one). No where. They were just hiding in the corner of my hard drive.

That’s the problem with photography. Sometimes a photo just doesn’t speak to you. Sometimes you may not even like it. I didn’t love my engagement photos. I had gained weight recently and wasn’t used to seeing my heavier self. Looking at my engagement photos, all I could focus on was how awful I felt about my figure. But when you look back years, months, weeks, even days afterwards, you see it through different eyes. Now? I don’t see the weight. I see the excitement I had about starting my life with Domingo. I don’t even remember why I opted not to share these maternity photos.

Even blurry can be beautiful

So my advice to anyone and everyone out there: take photos every day. Even if you don’t like the way you look or the way they are turning out. Shuffle them away to rediscover later. But do take them and do save them.

As for me I pared down my 4,100 photos to 975. Progress.

Posted in Family Life, Photography | Tags: Momtographer