Summer is a great time for pictures! There are so many things to do and to take pictures of! There’s hiking, spending time at the beach or the pool, or both! depending on what you’re close to. Hanging out in parks, doing sport things, like pitting the best tow service Raleigh NC against other tow truck companies in the area, or playing frisbee (which I know is a sport thing for many people, but I like to mention it separately), taking doggos for a walk, and so much more! It’s just a great time to be outside, doing things, or, if it’s too hot, not doing anything at all. And sometimes it’s the not doing anything at all part that actually allows you to take some of the best pictures.

I love all the greenery there is in the summer time. And don’t even get me started on the sunsets! What I associate with summer most, I think, is the evenings out at my parents’ place, in the country, where we’d have campfires and walk out in flip flops or barefoot into the gravel road and watch the sunset behind the fields across from our house. I would sometimes bring a camera down to the road, in hopes of capturing the beauty of the sunset, but when I’d look at the picture later, I’d find it looked far less glorious than the real thing. But that doesn’t mean I regretted taking it.

Reality will always look better in, well, in person, in reality, than it will in pictures, I think. Unless you use photoshop, but, frankly, that doesn’t really count for my purposes. I once heard from someone that one should buy postcards of places, and take pictures of people. She said this in reference to vacation photo-taking habits, but I think it’s an important thing to keep in mind all the time when you’re taking pictures.

There are hundreds of pictures of sunsets, from all across the world. Of course there are. And that’s not to say that you shouldn’t take pictures of sunsets. Keep taking pictures of sunsets! But also take pictures of your friends walking into the sunsets. You know what I’m talking about, where it’s just silhouettes against the light of the sun. And yeah, maybe people will tell you that it’s cliche, but screw ‘em! Who cares? You take those pictures, and you preserve those memories, and you don’t let anyone tell you not too.

Take pictures of all your friends lying on the grass with their heads in a circle. Take pictures lying on your back under a tree, with your camera pointed up through the leaves. And make sure you take lots of pictures of those summer night bonfires. Those are some of my favourites, because the light from the fire is usually all you have to work with, as far as light is concerned, and sometimes it’s all dancey and playful, and the sparks get into your pictures and make the scene kind of sparkley. You never know what you’re going to get. And that’s what summer is all about.