Have you ever tried to take a picture of the night sky? A sunrise, with beams streaking through the trees? The moon reflecting on the ocean?  Unless you use a high-end camera and posses a level of mastery, the results usually come out lacking. Blurry, dark, completely obscured.

Far from capturing the moment, you’ve saved a digitally underwhelming facsimile. You can’t share it with anyone. It doesn’t really help you remember what you experienced. In a day and age when we keep millions of images, you might even delete it.

Fly fishers take pictures of rivers. We take pictures of pools, rushing water, bends, small falls, and contrasts on the streamside. We need a few of these pictures in case we catch a fish in that particular river. We need a few of these pictures in case we don’t catch any fish. Always, we take these pictures because we want to apprehend the moment for posterity.

Why? Because we feel like we have to.

In that situation we’re surrounded by nature. Stepping out from the dense riparian foliage or rounding a curve in the river we come face to face with a breathtaking panorama. Water, rocks, trees, mountains, clouds, sky. There are sounds and there are smells and there are things we feel and what we see is majestic. And we want to do what we can in order to remember it.

So we take out our cell phone and snap.

The miraculous nature of multi-megapixel power within the palm of your hand isn’t anything to sniff at. Some truly beautiful images can be taken.  But any two dimensional image is going to be an inadequate reproduction of what you experienced. Sometimes the results are good, sometimes – like the attempt to photograph the night sky – the results are deletable.

You can be in the right position, have the settings just right, and still walk away with a bad picture. Your camera can be looking at exactly what you are looking at. But the lens is just a lens. It may be attached to a dynamic processor, but those chips and wires don’t hold a candle to you. Your senses and your emotions make the scene something unique and unconquerable.

Like pictures of fish, photos of rivers allow us to retain a slight fragment of the experience. An image of a trout doesn’t communicate the tension on the line, the curve of the rod, or the living vibrancy of the animal. But it helps trigger our memory. Complex beyond science’s grasp, those visual triggers can link to memories of smells, sounds, and even emotions.

So I’ll keep taking pictures. You’ll keep taking pictures. They’ll keep coming out okay. But they will do their job.