How I felt when I saw pictures from an old trip

I was looking for an old photo and I ran into a folder of travel pictures, specifically one I made to Patagonia, Argentina, in 2010. Do you know those memories you know they exist, but you haven’t accessed them for years? Then I started looking at the photos and, when I realized it, I had totally lost the focus on why I got there. I do not know how much time passed, but it was more than an hour contemplating that jewelry I found. I could conclude that I spent an hour looking at old photos, but I’d rather think I got a lovely time, which made me travel back to that lovely place and to whom I was back then.

Looking at the pictures I missed the place. But I did not miss that time. Even so, it was so important to remember. It was a tough but important time in my life. I like to make these trips to the past. I learn a lot about myself every time I remember what brought me here and how was my path. Like reading an old diary, we discover so many things that we change and so many others that we did not even know existed for so long inside us. I was thrilled and inspired. It’s incredible how there are opportunities for us to grow, learn and be inspired everywhere, it’s just to keep aware.

Seeing those pictures I realized several things. One of them is how important it is for me to have good travel pictures. It may seem silly a photographer talking about that and of course I have beautiful pictures of my trips. But at the time of this trip to Argentina I was not yet a photographer and maybe that’s why this memory touched me so much today. I had just bought a superzoom compact camera and was starting to practice, super excited. Beginning to discover photography.

It’s also incredible how we forget details and how our memory changes as the time pass. What I expected to find in this folder were photos ok, or that would have the potential to be good, many that I would do differently today and some good ones (does anybody else have tendencies to think it is worse than really is?). And that would be okay. After all, I did not have much technical knowledge at that time, neither practice nor super equipment.

To my surprise, I found many good photos and many pictures that tell a lot about me, something difficult to explain. I realized that photography also has a lot of inspiration and intuition. I was photographing what inspired me and a lot of what inspires me today is still the same. But today I know how to classify, give names, say why it inspires me and why I think it is beautiful, what angle and what light I prefer. At that time I did not know why, but I already thought it was beautiful. I already knew what touched me. And I was thrilled to see that I already felt inspired by the same light that today is my favorite (I just did not know it yet).

On this trip back to the past, one of the photos made me thrilled. It does not have anything special photographically but represents a lot. When I looked at it a movie went through my head. At that time I was working in a job I hated. I felt trapped in him but did not know how to get free because I did not know what I would do with my life either. When I came back from this vacation I put this picture as a background of my computer at work. It was to remember me that there was a whole world out there. To remember that I had so much to see in life. That the world was not just about that work and that unhappiness. That I could feel alive and happy, exactly how I used to feel when I was traveling. Traveling was my escape, it was when I used to feel alive. It stayed there for a little over than a year, until I was brave enough to quit that job.