I'm facing a great dilemma. I love travelling, even to places that impress nobody else, such as small villages, suburbs or "unremarkable" areas near and far. I love telling stories of my adventures and I absolutely adore taking others on any form of travel, even if it's just biking to the outskirts of the city.
However, taking photos has always caused me mixed feelings. On the one hand, I want to remember everything, and not taking a photo of one particular stranger that impressed me or a dog that served as our temporary companion or a peculiar tree or rock that evoked something... well, it might make me lose that memory completely. I enjoy going through my archives and going Ah! Yeah, I remember that, it was the time we biked all the way up to X, I almost forgot that! It means so much to me!. If I don't snap what's happening around me or what evokes something in me, I fear its meaningless loss and "investment" in that I could share it with others and maybe spark something in them.
On the other... It can of course lead to a certain detachment from it all. The feeling of abundance leading to devaluing. If everything can be memorised by my pocket computer, then nothing needs to be memorised by me. And I'll be honest: I have thousands of photos in my archive that I'm not sure about the importance of. There's something special about going on a trip that will prove... unrecordable. A "hidden" experience that's as interrupted as it is corruptable by human folly and forgetfulness...
So where do you stand? Is snapping photos of everything, especially minor, "only I know why that mattered to me" things, a help in preserving and enjoying the adventures of the past, or is it just pickling things so that we don't have to outgrow them in their digital permanence? How do you deal with forgetting small, endearing things that you haven't recorded in any way, especially from travel? Do you have an issue with not wanting to forget anything? How do you deal with it, if you do?