Growing up, my parents took hundreds of pictures of me and my brother. When I was a baby they always took me to a photo studio to take a bunch of random pictures. As I got older my dad took pictures of every event I had, graduations, birthdays, vacations and everything in between. I guess after growing up around cameras and pictures it started to rub off on me.

Around Fifth grade, my dad bought a new digital camera. It was a silver Casio Exilim camera with 10.1 mega pixels. My dad was always the photographer in the family and he absolutely loved the camera! He wouldn't let anybody hold it for more than a few minutes because he was always afraid they were going to drop it. But during seventh grade, he started letting me take the camera with me to school during special events. During eighth grade my dad actually let me take the camera to school every day! I started to take pictures of everyone and everything that I saw interesting at school. This camera really symbolizes my dad's trust in me. Now a days, he doesn't even bother to ask about the camera because he trusts me so much. And I'm glad that he trusts me to take it around with me everywhere. Even to this day, I'm still surprised that he lets me take care of something that's very important to him. But now it isn't only an important part of my dad, it's an important part of me too.
For as long as I've had this camera, it has stayed in perfect condition as if I just got it the day before. When I'm not using my camera, it carefully sits in a leather case with the strap sticking out of it and dangles from my wrist. The unique sound of the shutter as I click the button is so familiar to me, even when I'm not taking pictures I can still hear it ringing in my head. I love the slim shape and the sleekness of the silver color. I find myself constantly tracing the name "Exilim" that's engraved on the front and the circle that's around the shutter. There are also so many times where I've been blinded from the flash because I forgot to turn it off. I love every little detail about this camera.

As I start to grow up with every passing second and the weeks turn into months and months into years, I started to realize how important it is for me to keep taking pictures; because I never want to forget all those times I spent with my friends at the movies, those wild moments during break, that time eating ice cream at the park, the stop motion videos or the field trip Disney. Every single one of me and my friends' goofy and somewhat weird moments are all captured in this tiny silver square. As I click through the pictures in my camera, it's almost as if I'm seeing a slideshow of my life. I'm truly grateful for it because it's my only remembrance of the past, it's the only thing that keeps me from forgetting all those good times I had with the people I cherish as much as this camera! My friends always tease me about how I always have this camera with me and how I always take pictures almost every minute I can but I just laugh it off because I know that years from now, I'll appreciate all the significant little fragments of my life that I captured. The purpose of this camera is to preserve the memories I create with the people around me, but in a way, the camera itself is a memory.