Put the phone down: travelling without photographing everything

I should start by admitting whose side I'm on. I love photographs. I'm the person who climbs back up the hill because the light shifted, who has eleven nearly identical frames of the same doorway, who genuinely believes a good photo is a kind of memory you can hold. So this isn't a sermon against the camera. It's a confession that I once stood in front of one of the most beautiful sunsets of my life and barely saw it, because I was too busy trying to keep it.

It was a ridge in the Atacama, the sky going from copper to violet over a valley I'd walked all afternoon to reach. And I spent the whole thing crouched behind my phone, chasing the exposure, wiping the lens, checking the shot, retaking it. By the time I lowered the screen, the colour was already draining away. I had forty photos. I had almost no memory of actually being there. That gap — the one between capturing a moment and living it — is what I want to talk about.

The thing where you film it instead of feeling it

There's a name researchers have given this, and I'll say it carefully because the science is still young: the « photo-taking impairment effect ». Some studies suggest that when we photograph an experience to preserve it, we can actually remember the lived moment less well — as if handing the remembering over to the camera quietly lets our own attention off the hook. It's not a law of nature, and the picture is more complicated than headlines make it (other work finds photographing can sharpen what you notice, when you're engaged). But the rough shape of it matched my Atacama evening exactly: I'd outsourced the sunset to a sensor and kept none of it for myself. And underneath that, there's a tiredness I think a lot of us recognise now — the low hum of capturing to prove, the reflex to document a meal, a view, a street, less because we want the image and more because some part of us feels the experience doesn't fully count until it's been recorded and, eventually, shown. That's exhausting. It turns a journey into a shoot.

« A photo keeps the picture. Sometimes the price is the memory of having actually been there. »

Here's where I get to be honest about the irony, because I sell connectivity for a living and I'm about to tell you to switch it off. The thing is, a good connection is exactly what gives you the choice. When you're not scrambling for a flaky café Wi-Fi, when an eSIM has quietly kept you online since you landed, airplane mode stops being a sacrifice and becomes a decision. You put the phone away because you want to, for an hour, for a sunset — not because the signal failed and forced your hand. Being reliably reachable is what makes being deliberately unreachable feel like freedom instead of loss.

What I do now: the one-and-done rule

I haven't stopped taking photos, and I'd never tell you to. What changed is that I started choosing. My rough rule is: take the shot, one honest frame, and then put the phone away and let the moment be the moment. The picture is for later; the being-there is for now, and now doesn't come back. The other half of the rule is that some things I just don't photograph at all. The best meal of a trip in Oaxaca, I ate without touching my phone, and I can still taste it. A street musician in Lisbon I listened to with both hands empty. There's a particular pleasure in a moment that stays unshared — that exists only for the people who were there and nobody else. It feels almost radical now, it costs nothing, and it's yours in a way a posted photo never quite is.

Choosing, not abstaining

I want to be clear this isn't an anti-photo manifesto, and it definitely isn't about guilt. Photographs are a real, lovely way to hold onto a place; I have notebooks full of them and I treasure them. The point is just that capturing and living are two different acts, and we've drifted into doing the first one on autopilot. All I'm suggesting is bringing the choice back — deciding, moment by moment, when to lift the camera and when to simply stand there with your own two eyes and let the sunset happen to you.

What to remember

Take the photo if it matters, take it well, and then lower the screen and rejoin the world it came from. The camera is a wonderful tool and a poor replacement for presence. Some sunsets are for keeping; some are just for watching. Coming from someone who sells you the connection to share it all, here's the honest version: the best souvenir I brought home from that ridge wasn't a single one of my forty photos. It was the evening I finally stopped shooting and just let the colour land on me.

— Inès, who still takes too many photos, just fewer of the ones that matter most.