After my recent throw everything I own in the garbage moment, I find myself evaluating what to keep moving forward.I tossed my personal art photo album.that was a momentarily emotional loss. All my artistic photography from the days when the cameras used film and you waited weeks or months to take 24 or 36 shots, and then send them away to be processed before you could see the results results.New generations will never grasp the emotions involved in an eyes closed portrait or a blurry focused photo of a life event you’ll never duplicate. Each picture cost more than $1 from film to photo. We might only take less than 50 pics a year.My family shot some silent 8mm movies and a lot of pictures as slides. Slides were 1 inch pictures in paper frames that would be projected onto a screen or wall. Looking at your party, holiday or vacation photography was an event. People might carry a few pictures of their children, loved ones or pets in their wallet, but if friends wanted to see more, they usually had to visit someone’s house.The side effect of this was that viewing pictures was something significant and special. The good photographers were known, and somewhat respected.Finding old pictures from a decade ago was fun. Laughing at big hair and odd fashion choices.I always felt the photos that didn’t include a face were a waste. Capturing people returns you briefly to that memory. They literally are snapshots of that moment in time.Unless it is artistic in its own merit, scenary photography with no human or emotional attachment doesn’t transport me anywhere. 100 slides of a place I’ve never been are useless to me. 1 photo of my mother standing next to the same mountain has value.Now I have no photography of my life before camera phones. I have 20,000 photos in my cloud accessible from any connected device in the world but nothing before 1999.What I realized is, we hoard photos now because we can. They’re free. On this plane trip today, I’ve taken 10 pictures out the window of the tiny landscape below or cute clouds, but inside I know the truth.Nobody will visit me. After a single one day post of a reduced selection online, nobody will ever see them again. Life is now all photography. People stand at a $300 music concert with their phones in the air watching a 6 inch screen recording.Life is captured so constantly that two week old pictures are gone. I view hundreds of new pictures a day. Who has any time for yesterday.We don’t even have to look good, or take a good picture. The phone will adjust the lighting, change the background, remove my blemishes and contour my face. The memories we’re scolling though are not even capturing what we see.I think that free quality photography and video might have quietly changed the world more than even the Internet itself. We share pics so much, they tell our stories for us.I did not see that coming.

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