I Stopped Keeping My Favorite Photos on My Phone and Put Them on My Walls
What Going From a Film Darkroom to Digital Photography Taught Me About Actually Living With the Pictures I Take
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I need to clarify something before we talk about this wall.
I’m a photography geek.
Not just an I-take-a-lot-of-pictures-with-my-phone photography geek, either.
I’ve studied photography and digital arts off and on for years.
Back when I lived in California, I took photography classes where we actually shot film.
And I loved it.
You couldn’t take 37 pictures, look at the back of the camera and immediately decide you hated all of them.
You had to trust yourself a little more.
You took the photograph.
Then you developed the film.
Then you went into the darkroom and made the print.
If you’ve never stood in a darkroom and watched an image slowly appear on a piece of photographic paper, there’s something pretty damn magical about it.
Back then, taking the picture wasn’t the end of photography.
Making the photograph was part of photography.
I think somewhere along the way, digital photography made me forget that.
Then Photography Went Digital — And So Did I
After BigDog and I moved to Arizona, I went back to school and took classes in digital arts.
Technically, I’m still a student.
There are some math and science classes standing between me and finishing, and let’s just say I’d much rather talk about cameras than math.
But photography never went away.
If anything, digital photography gave me another way to love it.
And apparently I also developed a love for Sony cameras because somewhere along the way I ended up with about four of them.
See the Sony camera I use → My favorite A7R
Because one camera would have been far too reasonable.
Yes, I actually own these cameras. No, I cannot explain why one wasn’t enough. Photography people will understand.
One of the cameras I use is from Sony’s α7R mirrorless line. I’ll add the exact model here once I double-check which one it is because I’ve got enough Sony cameras that I’m not even going to pretend I remember which damn version is which.
And those cameras don’t just sit around looking pretty.
They’ve traveled with us.
That’s all the selling I’m going to do here because this isn’t really a story about cameras.
It’s about what happened to the photographs after I took them.
Road Trips With BigDog Usually Include a Camera
BigDog and I love a road trip.
And when we travel, there’s a pretty good chance one of my cameras is coming with us.
Which also means BigDog has learned that traveling with someone who loves photography isn’t necessarily the most efficient way to get from Point A to Point B.
I’ll see something through the window.
An old barn.
A landscape.
A building.
Water.
An interesting sign.
An old truck.
And suddenly…
I need to stop.
Not wouldn’t it be nice to stop.
I NEED THE PICTURE.
Photography makes me look at places differently.
I notice light.
Textures.
Lines.
Old buildings.
Weathered things.
Things somebody else might drive right past.
And during our road trips through the Midwest, I found plenty of reasons to pull out my camera.
Some of those photographs are now hanging on our wall.
They’re not stock photography.
They’re not prints I bought because they matched the furniture.
They’re places BigDog and I have actually been.
Then Peter McKinnon Got in My Head
Somewhere along my photography journey, I started following photographer and filmmaker Peter McKinnon.
And he talked about something that stuck with me.
Print your photographs.
The idea was simple.
We spend all this time taking photographs.
Choosing cameras.
Learning photography.
Finding the shot.
Editing the image.
And then what do we do?
Leave the damn thing sitting on a camera, memory card, computer, hard drive or phone.
And I remember thinking:
Well, shit.
Because I was doing exactly that.
I’d studied photography.
I’d invested in cameras I loved.
I’d traveled with BigDog.
I’d taken photographs that meant something to me.
And most of them were living in the digital world where almost nobody ever saw them.
So I decided to do something about it.
I Started Printing My Photographs
And I didn’t want every picture to be a little 4×6 print tucked into an album somewhere.
I wanted to live with them.
I went through photographs from our travels and started choosing some of my favorites.
Not necessarily the most technically perfect photographs.
The ones that made me feel something.
The ones that took me back somewhere.
Some I enlarged to around 16×20.
I framed them.
And I started putting them on our walls.
Suddenly, something I’d looked at dozens of times on a computer screen felt completely different.
It wasn’t just a digital file anymore.
It became part of our home.
More importantly, it became part of our story.
This Is My Wall
This wall would probably drive a professional decorator crazy.
Everything isn’t perfectly symmetrical.
The frames don’t all match.
The photographs aren’t all the same size.
There are photographs I’ve taken.
There are family pictures.
There’s motorcycle stuff.
There are signs and sayings.
There are memories.
There are pieces from completely different chapters of our lives sitting next to each other.
And there’s something else I’ve realized recently.
There’s white space.
I didn’t cover every damn inch.
That’s actually very me.
I like color.
I like interesting things.
I like personality.
I like things that have stories.
But I also need a little breathing room.
Apparently I even decorate my walls the way I decorate my planner.
Give me the stickers. Give me the color. Give me the personality.
Just leave me somewhere for my brain to breathe. 😂
This wall isn’t perfect.
But it feels like us.
And that’s far more important to me now.
Then BigDog’s Brother-in-Law Recognized My Green Truck
There’s one photograph on the wall that makes me smile for a completely different reason.
It’s the picture with the green truck.
I took that photograph during one of BigDog’s and my road trips through the Midwest.
Later, BigDog’s brother-in-law came down from Minneapolis to visit us.
He was looking at the wall when he saw that photograph.
And he recognized it.
On his own road trips through the Midwest, he’d seen the same place.
I thought that was so funny.
Here was this photograph I’d taken because something about that scene made me stop.
I brought it home.
I edited it.
I printed it.
I framed it.
I put it on our wall in Arizona.
Then somebody walked into our house from Minneapolis, looked at my photograph and essentially said:
I know that place.
Two completely different road trips suddenly crossed paths on my wall.
And I love that.
Because if that photograph had stayed buried on a memory card or hard drive, that little moment probably never would have happened.
That’s what changes when you take a photograph out of the camera.
It gets another life.
Photographs Change Even When the Picture Doesn’t
There are family photographs on this wall too.
Those are different.
Because photographs have a strange way of becoming more valuable as time passes.
The actual photograph doesn’t change.
We do.
Kids grow up.
Grandkids get bigger.
Dogs get older.
We move.
We travel.
Families change.
People we love die.
There’s a photograph of my dad on this wall.
When a photograph like that is first taken, you don’t necessarily understand what it might someday become.
It’s just Dad.
It’s just Mom.
It’s just the kids.
It’s just the dog.
It’s just another picture.
Until one day it isn’t.
Sometimes a photograph becomes one of the few ways you can walk past somebody you love every single day.
That’s a hell of a lot more important than whether the frame matches the couch.
Maybe That’s Why I Still Love a Physical Photograph
I’ve lived through both versions of photography.
I’ve shot film.
I’ve stood in a darkroom.
I’ve watched an image appear on paper.
And now I can take hundreds—or thousands—of photographs without ever buying a roll of film.
Digital photography gave us incredible freedom.
I love it.
I wouldn’t give up my Sony cameras.
And I’m certainly not giving up the camera on my phone.
But I think we lost something when photographs stopped becoming things we could hold.
There’s something different about walking past one of your photographs every morning.
You notice it.
Someone asks about it.
It starts a conversation.
It takes you somewhere.
It reminds you of who you were with.
And sometimes a guy visiting from Minneapolis looks at a picture of a green truck on your wall and says:
“I’ve been there.”
That’s pretty damn cool.
Your Best Wall Art Might Already Be in Your Camera
Now, I’m not telling you that you need a Sony mirrorless camera.
You definitely don’t need four of them.
Trust me.
That’s the photography-geek part of this story.
You don’t even have to consider yourself a photographer.
Your best photograph might have been taken with your phone.
Look through the pictures you already have.
Your travels.
Your parents.
Your kids.
Your grandkids.
Your pets.
The house you used to live in.
The vacation where everything went wrong but somehow became one of your favorite memories.
The person who isn’t here anymore.
That ridiculous picture that makes you laugh every time you see it.
Those pictures deserve consideration before you go shopping for something generic to fill an empty wall.
Not because they’re technically perfect.
Because they’re yours.
My Boho Dream House Is Becoming an Autobiography
This whole Boho Dream House series is turning into something I didn’t expect.
I thought we’d be talking about decorating.
And we are.
But apparently we’re also talking about our lives.
The motorcycle picture over our loveseat isn’t there because it coordinates perfectly with the gray furniture.
It’s there because BigDog and I were motorcycle riders.
The photographs on this wall aren’t here because Pinterest told me I needed a gallery wall.
They’re here because we went somewhere.
We saw something.
I stopped the car—or made BigDog stop the car.
I took the picture.
We brought the memory home.
And now we get to live with it.
I’m starting to think that’s my decorating philosophy.
Don’t decorate a house. Tell your story.
If You Want to Start Your Own Wall, Don’t Overthink It
You don’t need to create an entire gallery wall this weekend.
Start with one photograph.
Pick one that makes you stop scrolling.
Print it.
Maybe make it a little bigger than you normally would.
Put it in a simple frame.
Hang it somewhere you’ll actually see it.
Then live with it.
Eventually, maybe another photograph joins it.
And another.
Let the wall grow with your life.
And please don’t spend three weeks worrying about whether all your frames match.
Mine don’t.
We’re all surviving.
A Few Simple Things I Use to Get Photos Onto the Wall
You don’t need anything fancy. The photograph should be the thing people notice—not how much you spent displaying it.
Print the Damn Photograph
I still have thousands of digital photographs.
That’s not going to change.
I’ll keep taking pictures with my phone.
I’ll keep dragging my Sony cameras on road trips.
I’ll probably continue acquiring photography equipment that I can absolutely convince myself I need.
Sorry, BigDog.
But I’m also going to keep pulling some of those images out of the digital world.
Because I’ve finally understood something.
It took digital photography to give me thousands of pictures.
It took remembering the darkroom to understand that some of them deserved to become photographs again.
The green truck deserved to get out of the camera.
Our Midwest travels deserved to get out of the camera.
My family deserves more than living inside a phone.
And BigDog and I deserve to walk through our home and see reminders of the life we’ve actually lived.
So take the photograph.
Use your phone.
Use your fancy camera.
Use whatever you’ve got.
But when you make one that means something to you…
Print the damn photograph.
Put it on your wall.
Give it some breathing room.
Let somebody ask you about it.
Let it remind you where you’ve been.
Because the best art in our house isn’t necessarily the art we bought.
It’s the life we’ve lived.
Don’t decorate your house just to make everything match. Fill it with enough of your life that somebody walking through it can figure out who you are.
