Whatsup everyone, my name is Brad,
From the bay area of CA, first born of my hippie parents. During my youth, my parents were very adventurous. We spent a great deal of my upbringing outside of my actual home and touring the west coast line. All over Northern California as you go up the coastline, there are rich, lush green forests that run up along sandy beaches on the edge of California all the way through to Canada. I spent much of my upbringing camping with my family, hiking, backpacking all throughout Northern California with my mother and father documenting our vacations through camcorder footage and snapping pictures with vintage Polaroid cameras, and moving up into the different types of ways to capture pictures all the way throughout their life into the digital camera age.
My parents still love to go on vacations and capture pictures documenting their life travels, but they also passed on this trait to me. Now, I am a photo freak and love the way that cameras have the ability to document moments of my life experiences each day.
Throughout the week, I will sometimes try to snap a picture in a specific environment that I think is a pivotal part of my day. I have come to notice that there is often a single pivotal moment every day that changes who you are as a person more than the other moments. When I realize I am at that moment of my day, I will try to snap a picture that can help me distinguish the important moments of my day. Whenever I have time at the end of the day, the following day, days, or weeks after, I will look through the picture or pictures I took that day and reflect on the experiences that I had.
Throughout the perils of everyday life, sometimes I have found it very hard to reflect on the days that I have experienced without a distinct memory of what I did that day, else, it falls back in my memory and becomes another forgotten day in the life of Brad. Over the last few years, I have become very punctual in my attitude towards working on my personal development, and one of the aspects I am taking into account in that is that I will try to reflect on how I felt about my day and if I was successful in what I had hoped I would be able to accomplish during the day. By having the help of digital imagery, the photo is able to help me distinguish exactly my days events.
Some people may think that there is not much time in a day, I feel different, when I am looking to capture pivotal moments in a day, occasionally I will take a picture early on in the day believing that this could very well be one of the most important aspects of my day, and although it happens early, it helps me critically think about my days event and set a bar for myself when critical moments in my life are occurring, and how to recognize that. One particular quote that has stuck with me over the last few years was spoken by Andy Bernard, of The Office, played by actor, Ed Helms. It was in the final season of the show, and he says, “I wish there was a way to know you are in the good ol’ days before you actually left them.” One of the fears that has grown throughout my life was regretting what I had failed to know, and what I had failed to do in my life. I never wanted to feel regret in my life, and realized to recognize whether or not my daily actions were monumental or degrading, it was important to reflect on my days. Each day waking up, I try to realize the importance of taking one day at a time. Especially in today’s world, people hardly live a daily life, and most of their thought process is thinking about the past, and wishing for the future, rather than recognizing that they are in the present, and there is so much that they are experiencing right at this moment.
Sometimes, in heat of moments, people may act, or say something in a manner that they could regret later in their life. Something I have learned throughout puberty was the importance of being able to recognize, and manage your emotions, while being able to recognize and see more than just myself in the world. Often, it was easy to get caught up in an argument that there was no need for, or a conversation that was beginning to derail, or even just recognizing you are doing something foolish, unnecessary, or something that you wish you did not do.
Regret is dangerous, and it often is the reason for so many people developing depression at some point in their lives because they were unable to recognize the circumstances of their day, and fret over their problems in the past, or worry about their future problems rather than taking the necessary steps to do something better every day. I have noticed that when I capture a picture in a negative pivotal moment of my daily life, and reflect on that situation at a later time, the picture helps bring my back to the emotions I felt, and the complete memory of the experience. In doing so, it helps to be able to think about the situation from the outside looking in and analyze why my emotions were the way they were, why somebody else felt a certain way, and if there was perhaps a different way I could change my actions and feelings in a situation that would have produced a better outcome. I’ve noticed that if something happens once in your life, the chances of it happening again are incredibly likely. By reflecting on each situation, when it arises again at a later point in my life, it helps me recognize the state of the situation, can more quickly analyze, and then I can choose my actions more accordingly with what I had learned by analyzing my past life situations.
With today’s technology, there are such a wide variety of ways to capture imagery in life, and I think learning different ways of partaking in activities, and understanding technology ahead of the curve dramatically contributes to self growth. Technology is able to help us better ourselves from the day before, and I am one to certainly understand that I want to take advantage of it.
Through my own childhood, teenage years, and adulthood, I have admired the growing world, and am beginning to appreciate more and more my opinion on living life. I am one who is certainly excited with every day that I wake up, and realize that perhaps there is something that changed today and I would like to learn from it, or maybe I can change the way that I think somehow today.
This website in particular will go over different ways for people to think about the available technology, one’s self, as well as tying in my feelings about picture taking, and video recording devices, as well as a few that I certainly think are quite neat.
Hope you enjoy your time on this website!