It’s my turn, it seems. If you pop “instax” into the search on the Viewfinders page, post after post after post turn up. It’s good company to keep, indeed. The love affair with these little snippets of light and time is true and deep for a lot of us over here, and I’m no exception. In fact, it’s part of why I’ve written and deleted this kind of a post on so many occasions! Maybe it’s all been said before.

We just got back from a quick little spring break road trip (complete with multiple snow storms) to the Black Hills in South Dakota. Sure, I brought along my big-girl camera (Nikon D750), a film SLR I’ve been playing with lately, my new little GoPro, my phone and my Instax 90. More than enough (but, really, I had to have them all…. right?). As with some other recent vacations, I managed photos from my big camera that I love, am still waiting on some film from the trip, but there’s something about those Instax photos that just tug so hard at my heartstrings.

I try to snap them off and shove them in my pocket to let them show up, not pulling them back out till we’re done with a particular episode of our travels or our day, letting them just pile up in my pockets. Then, back at the car or at home, I’ll pull them out and carefully flip through them. Sometimes they’re plain old not good, other times the blur or the super-flash enhance the memories of those moments.

There’s been a bit of a learning curve – knowing when to turn the flash off, that if I’m going for a selfie, I need to turn it to macro mode, and I haven’t really even played around with the double exposure mode at all! So much left to be discovered. I almost always have my Instax with me, and it’s become kind of my go-to “we were here” selfie camera. We stick a lot of those up on a bulletin board full of pictures in our entryway and every time I see them, it makes me a bit itchy for our next adventures, and what kind of Instax-magic I’ll find.

Alison