Personal purpose

[The_Traveler]

Personal photos I take are really for two purposes; first to try and capture a moment - these are really intended to be picture pictures and I am pretty draconian about culling these so I can shoot for a week or so without getting a keeper.

Second, are photos that are intended to be an aide memoire, to remind me of places that I've been and I am much less willing to discard even the worst of these just because they bring back such strong memories. Often, if I am depressed about something, I'll spend an hour or so paging through old pictures to to bring back the intense memories of travel.

 

[amolitor]

With kids you do a lot of the memory aids, lemme tellya. And everyone with older kids says you should, so I think there's something to that.

I wrote something somewhere in some other thread which broke down my personal purposes too, more or less the same as you. I'm a bit more specific, though. "Personal pictures" are ones I intend to print and put on my wall. Memory aids go out a couple of channels. The endpoint is what matters to me, I find it very useful to have a well defined endpoint toward which the stream of pictures goes, rather than simply "I dunno, I put the good ones up on flickr I guess" or whatever.

That said, lots of people do fine without a well defined endpoint. Simply posting them on a sharing site is enough for some people. I described it as externalizing parts of our interior monologue on my blog, and pointed out that HCB was really doing exactly the same thing, with two minor caveats: his interior monologue contained some pretty sweet observations, and he edited with great ruthlessness.

 

[imagemaker46]

I take pictures of things I want to remember in a day, week or 10 years from now. These are my pictures, and most are just happy snaps, not always from the best angles, nothing I have to think about shooting, they don't need to be. People don't see them anyway.

 

[The_Traveler]

I have to say that sometimes I am almost overwhelmed with, I have no idea what to call it, when I look back at pictures and try to envision that there are people now living with such entirely different lives that they almost cannot conceive how I live and I cannot conceive about theirs.

It is painful to think that I will die knowing only a very small part of how people live. It is uniquely humbling experience to see other cultures. Not that ours is less but that it is so different and we, in general, are so ignorant.

 

[ChaseH]

Bangkok is amazing.

 

[The_Traveler]

Bangkok is amazing.

Agree.
About the only places in SEA that I didn't like were just over the Thailand Cambodian border in Cambodia and Mae Sot which is a border town in Western Thailand; AFAIC, two of the larger crap holes in SEA.
As far as concentrated loveliness, my vote is for Luang Prabang.

Sitting on a terrace at a restaurant at the north end of LP drinking a Beer Lao and looking at the people crossing a bridge over the Khan River was perhaps the most peaceful time of my life.

 

[Nahin]

It's a plenty amazing shot and best one for memorize. Like it a lot looking immense celestial all of these angel. Awesome!