Everywhere that I go – I always try to strike up a conversation with a stranger. (My husband hates loves when I do this!)  Whether it’s in line at Wendy’s or the person checking out my groceries… I think it’s fun to not be so robotic about going about my day… and…  you never know who you’re going to meet, right?

Recently, I randomly met someone who eventually discovered that I was a photographer. When we started talking about the type of photography that I do, she immediately told me how “un-photogenic” she was, and how she “hates” having her picture taken and how she always takes pictures of her grandkids but never likes to be in them because she doesn’t like the way she looks.

And I was immediately heartbroken.  Here sat this pretty, middle-aged woman with a great smile, who was incredibly kind, had a great hairstyle and a sweet personality… who was telling me these things about herself.

It killed me to know that she was so hard on herself for no reason… but more importantly… I hated to know that she was not giving herself AND her grandchildren that frozen memory to be able to look at for years to come.  And when I said that to her, I could tell that she had never thought of it that way but just had this insecurity that we all have a little bit of inside of us.   I walked out of our conversation telling her that I hope we crossed paths again when I had my camera so I could photograph her,  SHOW her how gorgeous she was… so that she would never miss an opportunity to be in a photograph with her family again.

Her story is unfortunately NOT a unique one.  All of us look in the mirror and the smallest part of our brain analyzes how we look and tells us that we could look better, be thinner or have whiter teeth.   Take away the mirror and insert  a photographer with her big, bad DSLR camera … and people’s insecurities INSTANTLY come out and start telling me what I’m going to have to photoshop, or what angles to photograph them at.

And listen… I GET IT.  Everyone wants to look their best, and I’m not here to say there’s something wrong with that.  I’m VERY conscious of that with the way that I photograph.   And, personally, I’m no different…   I am one thousand percent guilty of taking a self photo of my husband and I, deleting it and taking another because I didn’t like the way I looked in that particular picture. (Don’t look at me like that!  You all know you do it too!)

But one thing that I will NEVER do is DENY being in a photograph with my husband, my daughter, my family or my friends because I’m afraid of not looking good.  I am not willing to risk the opportunity of being part of a timeless photograph because I had no makeup on, I didn’t have my contacts in or that my hair was in a messy ponytail (or that I just gave birth to a human being the day before and LOOKED like it!!)

BECAUSE IT’S NOT WORTH IT TO MISS THE MOMENT.

It’s not worth it because life (and photography, actually) isn’t ALL about looks.   It’s about moments.  It’s about our families.   It’s about love. And memories. And our relationships. And being able to pass all of that on to our children so THEY can relive our memories too.

I always  think “What if MY Mom didn’t get in any pictures with me when I was a kid because she was afraid she didn’t look good enough?”

Well I know “what”…

I would miss the chance to look at pictures and ask her to tell me the story of what was going on in that exact moment.   Or miss the opportunity to see the absolute JOY and LOVE in her eyes as she played with us on a beach on vacation. Or look at those images now and hope that I am half the mother that she was (and is)

The bottom line is this… we can’t let this world that causes us all to be so self-judgmental to take away things that are as important as memories… ESPECIALLY when it comes to our kids.  Why? Because when they look back on images of us… they won’t care what we look like…. they won’t care what outfit we had on or how many times we’ve been photographed in it… they won’t care if we didn’t “do” our hair that day.

But you know what they WILL care about? If they don’t have those pictures with us.

So let’s not take that away from them, and instead…  remember that in their eyes, we ALWAYS  look good… as long as we’re right next to them.