We went to fam­i­ly fav-place Long­wood Gar­dens last night for New Year’s eve. It was cold but the lights on all the trees were beau­ti­ful and the fire­works were loud and fun. Going around I kept think­ing about how many cam­eras were around. I took a few pho­tos of course, but I real­ized I’m start­ing to devel­op a reac­tion to Obses­sive Pho­tog­ra­phy Dis­or­der. How many fuzzy pic­tures of long-ago fire­works do peo­ple need to store on their hard drives? 

A few weeks ago I took an eye-opening pic­ture at a wed­ding. It was a quick pho­to of the bride and father walk­ing down the “aisle” (it was more a space between tables in a small ban­quet room). I must have had squirm­ing Fran­cis in one arm, the cam­era in the oth­er, because it’s all blur­ry. The light’s bad, there’s red eye, it’s total­ly not some­thing to send up to Flickr. But what’s haunt­ing about the pic­ture is the back­ground: behind the bride you can see four peo­ple. From left to right, they are: tak­ing a pic­ture, hold­ing cam­era at neck lev­el ready to take a pic­ture, lean­ing back from the cam­era screen set­ting up a shot, and look­ing down at a dis­play review­ing the just-taken pic­ture. This is a wed­ding and it’s the dra­mat­ic part: the bride’s just entered the room and is about to be giv­en away by her father (it’s a sec­ond wed­ding so I can’t take the sym­bol­ism too far, but still this should be a holy moment).

Many Friends Meet­ings ban cam­eras in wed­ding cer­e­monies and I should­n’t have relaxed my stan­dards to take my own pho­to­graph of the wedding-in-progress. There are times where our pres­ence is much more impor­tant than any doc­u­men­ta­tion. I dare say that none of the two-dozen or so walking-down-the-aisle pho­tos tak­en that day are worth devel­op­ing or print­ing. I use my picture-taking for mem­o­ry’s sake and love look­ing at old shots of the fam­i­ly, and a few of the pic­tures I took that day are def­i­nite keep­ers. But us com­pul­sive shut­ter bugs need to know when to put the cam­era down.