As the holiday dates draw ever closer and I start thinking about the places I am going to visit and imagine the sights, the food and most of all what awaits for me to photograph.

My thoughts then drifted to our previous holidays and the people we saw with their long selfie sticks. Holding them high in the air with the phone balancing, just waiting for the moment when it was high enough to pop out of it’s holder and land face down on the floor with a crash followed by the screams of horror as their only means of communication had just turned into a piece of broken plastic and glass.

Its seems that social media has taken the place of those very boring photo albums we ( or those old enough to remember ) use to force our guests to wade through after the holiday. The only difference really is that we now can do this immediately with the press of a button and an internet connection.

We are capturing the moment, or that’s what we say, but what happens after the moment has passed and your up-loaded image is now so far down the list of other moments that no one actually sees it, unless they happen to follow you, in which case they will automatically press the like button and continue scrolling.

So what do you have left? Maybe an out of focus image of yourself or a friend somewhere on a beach or in a bar and you too will forget about the moment and the images ends up in the cloud never to be seen again.

I have taken a few of these myself.

Why not try this the next time you are holding your selfie stick or just thinking about taking a random image… STOP…. look around at where you are, think about what you would like to remember about this moment, does it hold a memory you want to keep and frame or just rather see disappear into the cloud.

After all it has got to be better to have a photo you can look back on and share time and time again, rather than an image you are quite happy to forget.

Remember it’s not always about the equipment, composition or mega pixels but just about the thought that went into capturing the moment.