I don’t know if I’m passionate about life because I’ve been a photographer for 14 years, or if I’ve been a photographer for 14 years because I’m passionate about life (chicken or the egg?). Whatever the order, I consider it not only one of the most interesting, rewarding, useful hobbies in all of life, but I consider it a key pillar of life that every person ought to adopt.

That’s what I’m here to argue today.

Here’s the thing: you reading this pretty much demonstrates you own what you need to get started. Not only that, you can be very happy with the equipment you’re reading this on for quite a long time. How many other hobbies are built into a cellphone? You can’t build a model train with your cell or play ukulele with an iPhone.

This guide is going to be a primer on documenting your life through photography. It’s not going to be the be-all-end-all encyclopedia to the thing because that would take more than I could fit into a single article.

If you don’t have the patience to read this whole thing, skim to the parts that interest you most. I think there’s something for everyone here.

Photography is time-travel

Science-fiction is obsessed with the idea of controlling time: especially travelling into the future or the past.

Photography quite literally is time travel.

When you look at an old photo, in a cosmic sort of way, you have experienced that previous moment in time again. That moment in time didn’t slip by like the billions and billions before and after it. Instead, it will live on as long as that photograph (or a derivative of it) exists.

Poems, movies, songs, stories we tell each other: these are all ways to hold onto the beauty of a moment (or a collection of moments) for as long as we can. A photograph is easily one of the most immediate, permanent means of holding onto the past so it might shape our future.

Why would anyone care?

I once had a friend ask me: What’s the point of capturing all these photos? What am I going to do with them?

If you keep peeling back the layers of this question, you can fall down a pretty deep rabbit hole. What is the purpose of a photo? What utility does it have? Why should I care about a moment gone past?

I can’t answer that, to be honest. Except that photography and all other art-forms are different expressions of the same thing. Why create any song, video, story? Photography is no less and no more. If you can see the value in those, you understand photography. If you think all of those things are pointless and un-utilitarian, I can’t help you much.

Because, then, let’s quickly travel down the utilitarian route. Why is something only valuable if it’s useful to accomplish something else? Well what is that something else useful for? Likely accomplishing something else else, right? So where the heck does it end?

Utility is not the only measure of a thing.

The only explanation I personally have found that quenches any of these existential questions is this: To do something because it is beautiful is reason enough.

We don’t always have to do something because it is useful for something else. If a photograph is useful for keeping us motivated, inspired, grounded, human, emotional, happy: it is reason enough.

Ok: the rest of this blog is going to be a lot more practical, a lot less philosophical. Thanks for sticking that out with me. Let’s keep going.

Why Take Lots of Photos?

We’re going to presuppose you already take photos with your iPhone; you just might do it very sporadically or hardly at all.

Here are the reasons I think you need to start taking more photos of your life than you currently do.

A happier life

I firmly believe gratitude is the only pathway to happiness. Think of the happiest person you know: is it a coincidence they are likely one of the most thankful?

Perhaps the greatest reason of all to take lots of photos is that it will give you a new appreciation and value for your life, which in turn will make you happier. We as people tend to become bored with the familiar. I think it’s a human condition. Photography is the simplest way to inject some new life into your life.

Pull out your phone right now, flip open the camera, and walk around your house with your camera (don’t even snap any photos yet). Experiment with getting close to subjects, backing up, framing something straight-on, dabbling in interesting light, emphasize the flowers on your dining table or the book on the coffee table. Look for bright patches of colour. Kinda cool eh?

You notice that things look more interesting when we’re intentional about capturing them thoughtfully.

Over the course of time, I don’t find this feeling goes away. It ebbs and flows, sure, but like the tide: it always comes back.

I’m not saying your life is going to get better in any tangible way because of photography, but I believe you will flip through your photos and recognize what a beautiful life you have. That’s the part that makes you happier. There’s nothing like looking through a fresh batch of photos. It is kid-on-Christmas-morning every time.

You will begin finding your life, as a whole, is more valuable, appreciated, interesting, beautiful when you pull out a camera. This idea is continued in “People get older” below.

A shifted perspective

No, I’m not talking so much about the physicality of using different lenses (although those will shift your perspective quite literally). I’m talking about the psychology of perception: how you see, interpret, and think about the world.

You will recognize patterns, colours, scenes, people, expressions, weather, geometry, textures (among others) you haven’t noticed with your naked eye. The flattening-effect a camera tends to have allows you to appreciate the way a tree fits into the sky or a kid fits into a playground. 3D, real-life viewing with our eyes sort of takes that magic away at times.

Photography is as much what you don’t include in your photo as what you do (this is composition). Force yourself to start thinking in this way and your mindset will be rewired in a framework that doesn’t exist without photography.

Your brain might even start thinking about all of the beauty you’ve walked past every moment of your life up until this one. Try not to dwell on it. Start now.

People get older

Here’s a slightly morbid, melancholy reason but a legitimate one nonetheless.

Every moment of your life is gone and never returning. Everything around you is aging. Time is aging. You have never been as old as you are right now, but you’ll never be as young as you are right now ever again.

Photographs are the best way to look back on a moment. Like I said, photography is time travel. The beauty of every day life doesn’t have to end. We can take something beautiful and hold onto a piece of it forever. In this way, photography becomes gathering beautiful moments. Who wouldn’t want that?

What do I Shoot?

Everything.

Seriously.

You gotta stop believing some things are lame to shoot and other things are incredible. While some of that may hold water, I’ve long believed the following to be true:

The mundane moments of your life deserve to be captured. You will one day realize they were not so mundane after all.

Watch a movie, read a book, follow an Instagram account: many of the reasons we’re drawn to these things is because they are different than our current reality. They might be completely different than any reality we’ve ever experienced.

Do you remember how I said that we, as humans, are mostly interested in things when they’re unfamiliar and become bored with them when they aren’t anymore?

Shooting the “boring” moments of your life is going to make the familiar unfamiliar. It’s going to spice up your life and—wait for it—change your perspective on the world around you.

Your walk to work? Your regular barbershop? Your favourite corner store? Evening bike ride? Glass of wine on the back porch? Have your camera out. You never know what you’re going to see. Be ready like a boy scout with a butterfly net. Beauty could appear and disappear in the blink of an eye.

Organize & Backup Your Photos

If I can convince someone to follow me up until this point, this is usually where I lose them.

Being able to access your old photos is as important as taking new ones.

Read that again. I can’t overstate it.

When I got my first DSLR in 2008, I began a hard drive archival procedure which I highly recommend.

First, every new photo shoot (or batch of photos if you’re emptying a memory card after a week or two) should be put into it’s own folder. My personal favourite naming convention has a whole list of folders that goes:

YYYY-MM-DD Description of Photo Session / Keywords

This way, when your photo folders are sorted alphabetically (the default everywhere), they will be sorted chronologically. The keywords are helpful so that you don’t need to open every folder and skim what’s inside (obviously).

Inside that folder, I personally have 2 folders (eventually). At first, there’s a folder called RAW which has all of my unprocessed images inside. Eventually, I’ll have another folder called YYMMDD_DescriptionOfPhotos which are my exported, post-processed image (of the same name with a numerical sequence at the end of the file name.

If you should find your raw files taking up room (they will!), delete them after a while. Unless you’re inclined to re-edit years-old photos, there’s little point in saving old raw files.

I could write an entire essay on this topic but the most important takeaway is this:

If you can’t access old photos quickly and easily, they may as well not exist.

I believe that wholeheartedly.

While hard drives are a great place to store your photos, hard drives will inevitably fail. Cloud / online storage is more robust for the average person, but not without dangers of its own (locking yourself out of your account, stopping your subscription, the service you’re using ending, or user-error deleting the photos you backed up yourself).

For best results, in this day and age, store your photos online. I use Smugmug.com (it’s been our gallery host for probably 10 years now) but even things like Google Drive, Apple iCloud, or Dropbox will work. Just be aware that Smugmug is cheaper than all of those (for the average person), it has unlimited upload space, and it’s specifically geared towards photographers of all skill levels. The other services I recommended are intended to host more than just photos, and can be sort of clunky and obnoxious from time to time.

The necessity of post-processing

Ok, here’s another fall-off point for the average person.

Most amateur photographers are pretty unsatisfied with their photos (especially if they put effort into the process and bought a real camera). They compare their photos to those of established professionals in a particular genre, and the amateur feels defeated that they aren’t quite as good as they’d hoped.

2 things:

1. Welcome to the club. There will always be a gap between your work and the work of those you admire. For best results, learn to live with it, and find a way to turn that into motivation to improve yourself. Eventually, you only want to be better than your old self. This is the most consistent person to compete with. But it takes time before you can accept that deep in your soul.

2. It doesn’t always have to be that way. And what I’d argue specifically is one of the biggest differences between an amateur and a professional is that a professional curates and edits his photos after taking them.

The act of pressing the shutter is not where photography ends. Post processing is just as important.

Most people aren’t willing to commit to editing their photos. If that’s you; I have little alternative. Maybe get a Fujifilm camera and try to tweak the straight-out-of-camera jpegs to your liking. But even then, I’ve never found that’s enough for me.

Editing photos can feel daunting, but it’s where your vision for that photograph is fully realized. Post-processing is a gift, and you’d do well to treat it as such if you want to last a while in photography.

Is this step for everyone? Arguably not. But know that your work is only ever going to reach a certain level if you’re not willing to put any more work in after the fact.

iPhone VS Real Camera

I’ll frequently get questions from friends and acquaintances: What camera should I buy?

It’s a hard one to answer. Chase Jarvis (photographer turned…motivational speaker?) wrote a book called “The best camera is the one you have with you” which is exactly what it’s about. The camera you understand the best, and the one you brought with you wherever you’re going, is the one you should use to capture the moment.

I agree with that sentiment, but I would still encourage you—if you own a real camera—to actually take it places. Cameras weren’t intended to live in little padded bags in the bottom of a bedroom closet. They’re intended to be used, beaten up, taken around.

I’m happy to recommend cameras to people, but if you don’t care enough to learn for yourself what camera would suit your needs, I’m going to wager you aren’t committed enough to learning the craft / justifying the cost of a camera beyond your iPhone.

Use your iPhone if you know this is just a passing interest for you. You won’t feel defeated by the technological limitations. You won’t need to learn how to transfer photos from an SD card to your computer to a hard drive to social media. You can make use of them immediately.

Don’t get me wrong: I am all-for a real camera. I absolutely believe it’s going to yield better results than a cellphone. But unless you’re willing to drop a bit of dough into a specialized camera + lens (not just the kit lens that was included when you bought the camera), you’re going to feel underwhelmed with your camera or the shooting experience (oftentimes for good reason).

GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome)

There’s another tongue-in-cheek-but-kind-of-serious reason not to overvalue a real camera over an iPhone: you quickly fall victim to GAS and use it as an excuse to not take photos until you spend more money.

Make no mistake: professionals use professional gear because they (should) know how to utilize it to their advantage. Professional gear gives the photographer the control to get the exact image they want that might not be possible with other gear.

But gear is no substitute for eye. It cannot make up for a lack of vision.

Here’s what I promise you: if you can create an image you love with the gear you currently have, I guarantee you’re going to be able to take a photo you love with even better gear. But if you’re unhappy with the gear you have and you blame it, you fail to realize the problem is not (entirely) the gear: it’s also your perspective. No amount of gear can change that.

Make Use of Your Photos

If you’ve followed me to this point (and I hope you have), know that it’s still not enough to maximize your interest in photography.

Share your photos. Not just on social media.

Print your photos. Hang them on the wall. Make albums. Gift them to people. Send them to coworkers. Change your phone’s background. Reminisce.

A printed photo doesn’t require a battery to view it. There’s something special to be said for that.

Photos were intended to do more than live in a folder on a hard drive, or be swallowed up by the scroll of a social media feed.

The more you enjoy your photos (and you see the people around you enjoying them), the more inspired you’re going to feel to take more.

I love social media, but it has no respect for photos anymore. Not even Instagram, which started out as a solely iPhone photo sharing platform. Not just the platforms themselves, but the way we as users (myself guilty also!) use them.

This is why, above all, it is about making yourself happy when taking photos. This is one of the few areas of your life I’d argue it’s permissible—in fact, encouraged—to be as selfish as you can be when indulging.

When you enjoy what you capture photos of, you care less (or should begin caring less) what anyone else thinks. If you find yourself only doing it for the glory, the street credit, the fame: you should’ve chosen a different hobby.

A hobby like no other

I’m convinced photography is going nowhere. While our technology evolves and video becomes more prominent every day, it serves a different purpose than a photo.

There is no easier way to begin holding onto the important parts of your life. In fact, a camera will help you see the mundane parts of your life as they really are: important.

Stop making excuses. The article’s over. Go take some photos. You’re never getting the next hour of your life back.

Document Your Mundane Life