Autumn VanSolkema

Some of the photos I took this October.

19,687.

To this date, that is how many photos I have taken over the past two years.

Ever since I was little, photos have been a constant aspect of my life. My parents have a file folder on our hard drive with photos from every month of each year with hundreds of pictures filling them up. I have photos from the day I was born, when I lost my first tooth, and even my soccer phase. Everything. 

I love looking back on all of the memories and reliving them in my brain as I click through the photos, seeing snippets and moments of my life come and go with the slight push of the “next” button.

Now, as I go through each day, I always try to capture the moment and live it. If I see a beautiful sunset, I take a picture to remember it. Whenever I’m with people I love and care about, or don’t see often, I will take a photo with them to look back at whenever I miss them or want to relive our memories. 

Some people have told me that constantly taking photos ruins the moment, but I don’t feel that way at all. 

I don’t take hundreds of photos of just myself, or of the same thing, but of things that will remind me of that day later on. For example, when I went to the beach, the whole time, my friend and I kept talking about this bright red car that kept appearing, so we took a photo with it to remember it.

Capturing the moments of my high school career has helped me live it as fully as I can. 

People always say to embrace high school because it’s the last four years of your childhood, and trust me, I’ve been working on it.

My friends and I have a goal this year to take one photo every day of junior year in the same spot. So far, we’re 45 images strong and have only missed one day because we had forgotten.  

By the end of the year, we will have an almost complete gallery of junior year. I will put it into a video, and we can watch the days flash by, one after the other. 

Photos are an embodiment of your life; they help you remember and reminisce on moments in the past. I can’t express the number of nights where I have laid in my bed scrolling through photos and smiling about those days that I can only live again through the snapshots I have taken.  

One of the memories I always scroll through is the mission trip I went on earlier this year to West Virginia. It was one of the best weeks of my life. We took around 1,000 photos throughout the week, and I’m so grateful we did. I love looking back on them and laughing about the memories that I will never forget from that trip.

Am I out of iCloud storage? Yes. Will I stop taking photos? Never.