Reclaiming Lost Moments

Recently, I was going through a box of old photos – some of them duplicates, some of them discards that didn’t make it into the family albums for one reason or another. I ran across a picture of Mollie that I had long ago forgotten about.

When your toddler hands you a bunch of ANYTHING that they hand picked and says “these flowers are for you, mom”, trust me, they are no longer weeds.

In the photo , she is very little – maybe only 3 or 4 years old. We had gone to a friend’s party and there were no other little children there for Mollie to play with. But she has always been very capable of entertaining herself so she wandered into their backyard and began to pick “flowers”. I think they were actually weeds – the ones with the tiny little white blooms on top – but when your toddler hands you a bunch of ANYTHING that they hand picked and says “these flowers are for you, mom”, trust me, they are no longer weeds. Anyway, as she crouched in the grass picking flowers, she was so focused on the moment.  It was one of those moments that on the surface, doesn’t really mean anything but for some reason, it stays with you and it becomes meaningful. 

Fortunately I had my camera with me that day so I snapped a quick picture of the moment.  This was pre-digital camera era and when I had my film developed, I was disappointed that the photo didn’t really capture that moment in the way that I remembered.  It was a bit out of focus, Mollie was sort of a tiny element right in the center of the photo (bad composition), and due to a summer haze that day, the color was sort of… blah. It was a very different moment in my mind than it was in the photo I held in my hand. Through the years, I held on to it for sentimental reasons but at the time, I wished  it could be better.

And there it was...almost 20 years later...my memory.

When I rediscovered the photo the other day, I realized that with photo editing software and apps available now, maybe I could revisit that photograph and coax it back to the image that I held in my mind’s eye. So I snapped a photo of the photo with my iPhone and applied some simple editing with various apps. I cropped the image so Mollie was no longer sitting in the center and she became a larger point of focus. I bumped up the saturation so that the haze wasn’t as evident - making the greens of the grass more vivid. I applied vignetting around the edges – soft focus and darker edges – that again, helped to make Mollie the focus of the image. And…there it was…almost 20 years later…my memory.

For me, the beauty of photography has always been the ability to capture a single moment in time. You can then hold that moment in your hand and as your memory fades, just a glance at that photo will transport you back. When we all took pictures with film, it was a hit or miss game for many. We held the moments in our minds, and were often times disappointed with the results captured with our camera. Do you have a box of old photos laying around? Some of those disappointments that didn’t really capture the moment in the way you hoped? If so, set aside an hour or two to dig through and maybe you will rediscover some lost moments. Or better yet, maybe you will be able, through modern technology, to reclaim some moments that you thought had been lost forever.