Max Stansell Photography Hey Everyone! Hope your week has been as good as mine.  This weeks topic is about making memories with your camera. When we take a photograph we freeze time. You can go back to old photographs and you can see everything as it was back then. Going through your mom's shoebox that is full of old photo's you can see how life was way back when. You can see the clothes , cars and how people lived when the photo was taken. This is very cool. But if you didn't take the photo or if you were not there you don't have the memories. But if you look at a photo that you took years ago you can remember everything about it. The smells, the weather, the sounds the things that you can't see on the photo. This is one of the things that I love about photography.  The hobby of photography offers things that other hobbies don't, Memories. When you look at one of your old photo's the memories flood in . 

How do we preserve the memories? Well back in the film days it was easy we sent our film to be processed and got back prints and negatives. But now a days everything is on a disc of some sort. My advice is to print some way some fashion. I print books usually at the end of the year or for film projects. This year I'm doing a film project and I'm actually having 4x6 prints made of the keepers of each roll. So that takes care of my photography themed stuff but what about family and friends that you take with your smart phone. What about the memories that you have on Facebook? I answered that and went with a company that goes onto your facebook and puts into a book all of your photo's . You can cull out the bad ones and rearrange them the way you want but its a great way to save all of the family photo's that we have now on Facebook or social media.

My camera gets me out and about. I heard that your camera is a passport to life. Meaning that without the excuse of taking some photo's we would just stay at home and not explore the world around us. That was certainly the case for me. When I got back into photography at the dawn of the digital age I took a lot of photo's at home and in my back yard. Still lifes, Macros and the such. But after a while that gets old so I started venturing out to the state parks. There was one only 10 mile from my house that I had never visited before and now I'm there 3 or 4 times a week. Actually it got to all of the state parks in North Carolina. I started hiking and visiting all of the state parks , camping and exploring all along the way. I then joined the camera club in our town that even got me out and exploring even more.  Now I travel up and down the eastern sea board and even took a trip to Utah a couple of years ago. Great memories made one every thrip. None that would have been possible without Photography. When someone names a place that I have gone before the memories flood in of the times when I was there . I can go back and see the photo's of trips I have made, the clothes I was wearing, my weight, what job I was working at the time. All of these memories flood in like it was yesterday. So to me Photography isn't just about the images we make but the memories that we take with us along the way. Well that's it for this week until next. Get out and Shoot! And make some memories.