Right at this moment, I’m sitting here at my desk with a cup of coffee and trying to decide what is more cringe-worthy…

Looking at old pictures I took when I had no clue what I was doing

Or

This book I have from the 2nd grade where I and all of my classmates (all 19 of them) wrote about the loves of our lives and who the cutest boys/girls were at the time.

It’s a toss-up even though Kenny Rogers makes an appearance in one of them.

My oldest asked for a photo shoot the other day, just like the one I did for my uncle in Nashville.

And when I framed it, I started looking at all the photos in that frame… all stacked behind one another in a 16×20 glimpse of the past.

I was so proud of these baseball pics…

Blah colors, zero composition, and you can hardly see her face. What’s not to like?

Or this one. There’s enough grain in this photo to feed a third-world country.

At least whatever is wrong with this photo, I ignored on purpose because I just plain like it and Maggie was cooperative.

Oh – and here we go. Ah yes, the pride and joy of my tiny little point & shoot. I thought I had something here. And don’t get me wrong, I will always love this photo but professional, it is not. Even WITH the super-cool text at the bottom.

Look – you can actually tell what color her eyes are in this one! Yay for light!

I wouldn’t be so embarrassed by these if they were truly just snapshots that I took. But I was trying.

Oh well. That’s what practice is for, right? And I still win because I will have all of those too-dark, too-grainy, too-everything photos forever and ever.

And recently, I tried to go backwards and recreate a photo I took more than two years ago…

You may remember seeing this photo of my father-in-law just before he passed away. The other day when we were pulling the irrigation reel, Shelby plopped her brother on this tractor and inspiration struck.

So now I have this one framed… a recreation of that accidental shot that I took when I didn’t know anything about aperture, ISO or white balance.

Whatever might be wrong with those old photos (and even the new ones), I’m so glad I never deleted anything.