In the modern age, people typically fall into one of two categories – those who take pictures of every single moment, or those who forget to capture anything at all. Both examples can mean missing out, and these are unsurprisingly setbacks that most of us would like to solve.
The trouble is that when your family is involved, it’s especially hard to strike an even balance here. After all, you don’t want to be one of those parents with their phones in their kid’s faces for the entirety of every family trip. Equally, you don’t want to put your camera (or phone) away altogether and miss the opportunity to capture your happiest moments.
Luckily, it is possible to get this difficult balance right, and it largely comes down to practicing the awareness that we should always use when we’re getting stuck into tech anyway. Here, we consider just a few of the ways that parents who have found that ideal middle ground managed to do so.
Hone your photography skills
If you’re taking bad pictures, then it’s going to take way longer to capture great memories, while also doubling the time that you spend sorting them at the end of the day. With this being the case, you’re almost guaranteed to spend too much time with your head in your phone letting the reality of that day pass you by. Long photo shoots where you struggle to capture everyone with their eyes open can especially ruin things by leaving the kids frustrated and your partner probably wondering why they bother.
By instead perfecting your photography skills either through a course or just online research (there are loads of great videos for this on YouTube!), you can way better ensure that you cut down photography sessions and end up with only great pictures at the end of them.
Dedicated specified camera times
Often in our attempts to live in the moment we keep our camera phones in our hands and take pictures throughout the day, but this might not be the great solution that we think it is. After all, as well as sending a negative idea to your kids about how often you’re on your phone, this means that you’re going to be dipping out of events throughout the day. And, that’s when you leave yourself the most at risk of missing out on what’s happening.
By instead making sure to dedicate set photo times perhaps once or twice throughout a day out, you’ll therefore be way better able to ensure the lasting memories that you’ll miss otherwise, without totally tuning out. It’s especially worth dedicating perhaps five minutes or photo time when you arrive, when you stop for lunch, and before you leave. Then, you’ll feel like you’ve got a full timeline of the day without requiring you to capture the whole time to make it possible.
Simplify photo sharing
Many of us are also guilty of checking out of the conversation while we get right down to sending our pictures to all of the grandparents, mommy friends, and other loved ones. After all, you’re having such a great day, and grandparents especially will often bank on pictures like these to make them feel part of the fun. But, sitting at the dinner table on your phone when you’re supposed to be out having fun together is both boring and a bad influence on young minds.
As well as streamlining photo-taking itself, you should therefore simplify how you share those photos. Obviously, the most logical way to do this would be to simply share things when the kids are in bed rather than on the day itself, but constant requests for pictures could prove more distracting in the long run. Instead, then, you should think about fast-fire ways to share those pictures with the most amount of people in the moment. Group Whatsapp chats are great for this purpose, allowing you to cover everyone in way less time than you would one-on-one. Equally, if loved ones don’t have Whatsapp, learning how to transfer photos from iPhone to iPhone in a single app like Gemini can ensure one-click transfers you needn’t worry about. Either way, make sure that your head isn’t in your phone doing this for long enough that your kids pick up on your distraction!
Days out are great and it makes sense that you’ll want to capture those memories, just make sure that the memories you’re creating don’t become all about pictures in the first place with the help of these handy tips.
