There is a scene in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty where Sean Penn plays a photographer who expounds about sometimes wanting to be in a moment so much that he doesn't want to be distracted by taking the picture. I think about that scene a lot, which is surprising because I have never actually seen the movie.
As part of my ongoing first world problem of talking myself into and out of buying a camera, I decided to run a little experiment: Take pictures at a school event with both my ancient DSLR and my phone and compare the results.
Of course, somehow this effort was sidetracked by suddenly deciding I needed to reorganize the thousands of image files on our network drive. So I laboriously moved files around for three days before I got around to looking at the pictures.
The result: I couldn't tell any difference. They were equally terrible photos. But the image quality was the same.
The arguments for using a dedicated camera instead of one's super-computer-smart-phone tend to talk about the "experience" instead of image quality. That there is something about holding an object designed to do one thing, fiddling with dials and knobs, clicking an actual button that is better than tapping the screen on your phone and letting the processor do all the hard parts. A nice camera is a beautiful thing, a well-made machine that becomes an extension of your eye. But then again, this is likely just the consumer urge to own something. There is something about the object that also tells other people to pay attention to you.
Back to Walter Mitty. Thinking about the idea of a moment reminded me of all the vacations where I lugged around the DSLR. I’d often have projects or goals of pictures to take. Some of them were fun, but most ended up being files among those thousands that sit on a hard drive. I thought about that movie scene and wondered how much I was missing a moment because I had my eye pressed to a viewfinder trying to capture the same moment.
I enjoy taking pictures. It would be a stretch to say I'm any good at it, but there is a joy one can find in capturing an image that conveys the sense of a moment. But I'm starting to think the best pictures might be made of the ones we never take.
True for me. When we watch the elk bugling we take a lot of pictures at the beginning of the vacation. Towards the end, we are just watching and taking it all in to enjoy.