take the picture

So often I hear people say things like “oh I don’t wanna be in that, I look like crap,” “my hair’s a mess,” “I’m not wearing makeup,” “eww delete,” etc. and yes — I’m part of those people. Today I was looking through some old photos and realized I used to take a lot more pictures than I do today (yes I know, hard to believe). I’ve been sucked into it. Sometimes I’ll catch myself thinking if it’s not perfect and post-worthy, I don’t need to take it or I should delete it. What the hell is that? I’ve built an entire photography business around capturing the messy and imperfect and I’m over here doing the exact opposite?! I’m here to tell you and to remind myself to take the damn picture.

It’s okay if you’re hair is a mess. It’s okay if you’re without makeup. It’s okay if that one eye is squinting more than the other. It’s okay if your body isn’t where you want it to be right now. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. The more we pick at ourselves for these things and allow them to be reasons not to get in the frame, the more we’ll allow ourselves to use other reasons not to get in the frame until we wake up and realize we only took curated perfect photos or worse — we didn’t take any photos at all. Life isn’t curated. Life isn’t perfect. There’s an entire life behind the Instagram squares and the Pinterest rectangles and that life is worth capturing just as much as the curated life. Content creation is fun, professional photoshoots are fun, creating a really beautiful image is fun, we can do all of that and we can do the imperfect messy stuff too.

When you look through photo albums, what pictures are your favorites? The weird ones. The ones where you’re like “what was I doing there?” “Why am I dressed like that?” Those are the pictures that you stare at and laugh at and love to look at. In 30 years, you won’t care that something was off, you’ll just be happy you have the photo. Take the picture.