I never really cared about cameras. And I scoffed at the folks that brought a bag of camera equipment to events and fussed about with that rather than being in the moment.
I know you moved on from this statement, but it makes me want to riff on it, because I hear it a lot from folks who are younger than me.
I would submit that viewing a scene through a good optical viewfinder is as much "in the moment" as standing there trying to comprehend an awesome natural scene all in one go. For a lot of things I photograph, a moment isn't enough.
And then there's issue of memory. Those moments that we are in...fade. The photographs bring us back to them. We may think, when we are young, that we would rather be creating new moments, but as you have learned with your boys, important moments can't be recaptured and adding new ones doesn't mean we are no longer interested in old ones.
I've pretty fit at age 63, and can run five miles routinely and hike 10+ miles without a care. I can (and did before Covid) travel 40 weeks a year and not get exhausted. I've spent time in every state of the U.S. and in a number of places around the world, and I'm constantly adding "moments". Just last week, for example, I hiked to the top of Sadie Knob on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska--not a place that is particularly easy to get to for anybody, even residents of Homer, which is just across Kechemak Bay. That was a
moment, and I was definitely
in it. But I can be
in it again because of the photographs I made while I was there. I might even be able to share some aspect of it with others. Will I be just as fit and capable when I'm 83? If I'm still able to think, I'll be able to rework and re-express those photographs again, and that may take me to the limit of my capabilities at that age. My father lived until he was 92, and when he died, those photographs of
his moments became suddenly precious.
Rick "moments are ephemeral; photographs are not" Denney