I was getting ready to leave and head back home when I decided I wanted a picture with my dad.
Neither of us was feeling particularly well at the time. We were both having health issues, we hadn’t fixed our hair, and neither one of us was exactly ready for a photograph. None of that seemed important enough to stop me.
I just said something like, “Hey, let’s smile and take a selfie.”
So we did.
It took only a few seconds. I held up the phone, we looked at the camera, smiled, and that was that. I didn’t study the photograph afterward. I didn’t think about the lighting or whether the background looked good. I was leaving, and I simply wanted one more picture of the two of us together before I went home.
At the time, there was nothing unusual about it.
That came later.
Eventually I realized there would never be another photograph of my dad and me together.
Suddenly that quick little selfie wasn’t just another picture buried among all the others. It had become the final one, even though neither of us knew that when I pressed the button.
Photography does something strange with time that I’m not sure we think about while we’re making photographs. We usually know what is in front of the camera, but we have no idea what the photograph may eventually represent.
Sometimes we understand a photograph only after life has moved beyond it.
That selfie certainly isn’t important to me because it represents some great photographic achievement. We weren’t posed carefully. The conditions weren’t perfect. I wasn’t thinking like a photographer who needed to get everything exactly right.
I was thinking like a son who wanted a picture with his dad before he left.
That distinction means much more to me now.
As photographers, we can become very particular about photographs. We notice backgrounds, expressions, lighting, focus, composition, and all the things that can turn an ordinary frame into a stronger one. There’s value in learning those things. I’ve spent years caring about them.
What that last photograph means to me
When a photograph becomes the only one left from a certain moment, you stop worrying about whether you should have moved three feet to the left.
You’re simply grateful it exists.
You may have a photograph like that somewhere. Maybe yours is from a family gathering, an afternoon with someone, a vacation, or an ordinary day that didn’t seem worth remembering at the time. Years later, you look at it and realize the photograph recorded something you can no longer return to.
That realization can hit harder than anything the photographer intended.
And maybe that’s what I’ve learned from this particular selfie. A photograph doesn’t always have to announce its importance when we make it. Sometimes its meaning arrives years later.
Looking at the picture now, I can see two people who weren’t feeling their best. We didn’t look polished. Nothing about the setting was special. If I had approached it strictly as a photographer, I could probably find plenty of things I would have changed.
I wouldn’t change any of them now.
Not the hair.
Not the light.
Not the background.
Not the fact that it was just a quick selfie while I was getting ready to leave.
Because changing those things wouldn’t give me what I really want.
If I could go back to that moment, I wouldn’t ask for a better photograph.
I wouldn’t even ask for another one.
I’d put the phone down.
And I’d stay with my dad a little longer.
More Thoughts
Opportunities Are Fleeting
https://www.moneymakerphotography.com/opportunities-are-fleeting/
The Danger of Nostalgia in Photography
https://www.moneymakerphotography.com/the-danger-of-nostalgia-in-photography/
Photographic Memoirs
https://www.moneymakerphotography.com/photographic-memoirs/
