Sundrenched Summer Photos

By Steve McIlwain

Hubs here.

Summer days are drawing to a close.  In just a couple short weeks (shorter for some) school starts back up again and another crazy school year begins.  For others summer breaks are a distant memory and June through August are merely hotter months.  Regardless, the thought of summer conjures up nostalgic memories of summer break, vacations, days at the beach/lake, camping, and BBQ’s.

One of the best mementoes from the days of summer are old summer photos.  The older they are, the more vintage and sundrenched they look.  You know the type: the one where you’re riding your bike in the hot summer sun when you were nine, with a group of friends at the lake in high school, on a family summer road trip at some obscure monument, holding a sparkler on the 4th of July, with your sweetie at the beach, or a jaw-dropping sunset you just had to take a picture of.

I love looking through old summer photos to remember the places I’ve been and the people I’ve been there with…most notably, my sweet, sweet baby.  Remembering those midsummer moments floods me with spectacular memories with the lady I love most: summer photos of us at Grant Park in Chicago, our honeymoon in Antigua, eating chocolate covered bacon at the county fair, riding Space Mountain at Disneyland, Santa Barbara wine country … aahhh, the good old days.

Have you taken any of those pictures this summer?  The ones you’ll look back on in five, ten, or twenty years and smile.  The ones that will flood you with memories of fun trips, gorgeous sunsets, and spending time with the ones you love.  With digital photos I’m not sure that we’ll experience the same phenomenon of faded pictures in photo albums twenty years from now (although I’m sure there’s a Photoshop filter for that), but we will look back and smile at our current styles, the memories we made, and the people we love.

My office mate at work has a few photos up at his desk, and they are priceless.  I don’t think he planned it, but they’re all vintage, summer photos that he put up because they make him smile when he looks at them.  He’s got one of he and his wife in South America with a spectacular beach sunset as the backdrop, one where his parents are lying on beach towels at a beach in Nantucket, one of he and his wife at the ocean in the Netherlands, and one of his wife and her little brother at Disneyland when they were kids.  And a quick glance at my desk reveals the exact same thing … all pictures with my lady from of our summer time adventures through the years.

This summer Ash and I made our fair share of summer memories … both big and small.  We went to Catalina, the beach, San Diego Zoo, Boomers (arcade & mini golf), Hearst Castle, Hollywood, the fair, and Newport harbor.  Soon we’ll be adding family vacation at the lake and a weekend trip to a city we’ve never been.  Those memories are less than two months old and already I look back and smile.  Twenty years from now we’ll remember these summer memories as some of the best times of our life.

If you haven’t made any of those memories or taken any of those photos this summer, there’s still time.  Hot summer days are fleeting, but it’s not too late to plan something with your honey and make some memories.  It doesn’t have to be extravagant; you don’t even need to leave your city.  But plan something and go make some memories.  Not only do you get to do something fun, but you will create a memory that you two will always have.  Go camping for the weekend, spend a day at the lake, go play mini-golf, travel to a city you’ve never been, go wine tasting, take a local sightseeing tour, bungee jump (be careful), go to the mountains, or do anything that sounds fun to you.  Soak in the sunny season.  Create summer memories together.   And take pictures so thirty years from now you can flip through images, smile, and say with a twinkle in your eye, “Remember when we did that? Yeah … that was a great summer.”

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