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Do you remember the box of pictures at your mom's or grandmom's house that you loved to rifle through? It was full of all those unwanted photos doomed to ‘the box' because they were blurred, overexposed, underexposed, off center, torn, or the subjects exhibited distorted expressions, bad hair days, twisted clothing, or some other anomaly.

I may be talking ancient history to some of you. Nowadays our pictures are stored on disks. But there was a time when it used to cost for the film and developing, and since there were only 24 to 36 exposures per costly roll, we were more selective in what and ‘how many' pictures we took.

Things have changed. I recently took four hundred—that's 400—pictures of my two granddaughters, (age three and four) playing and interacting at a backyard pool party. That's more than three shots a minute. It's a virtual movie of the afternoon.

However, there is one picture taken that afternoon that concerns me.

Granddaughter #2 (the younger) came and sat on my lap. I happened to be holding Granddaughter #1's blanket which meant that GD#2 was soon leaning on said blanket to the great concern of #1.

GD#1 came up and said, “That's my blanket.”

I should have noticed her concerned look but I was talking to the mother of GD#2 and didn't.

GD#1 repeated, a bit louder and with her lip beginning to tremble, “That's my blanket.”

This time I heard her distress. She is very attached to the blanket, and I knew this. Why else would she bring a quilted blanket to a backyard pool party? I began to reposition GD#2 on my lap to free the blanket when GD#1 decided she had given me enough warning. She took hold of the blanket and yanked. In the photo her facial expression is that of warrior freeing it's beloved. I know this because I was not the only picture taker that day and the picture was shared with me minutes later. I got the whole slide show, of GD#1's first attempt to alert me of her distress, all the way through to victory.

The point being, in the ‘olden days,' when fewer pictures were taken, I might have been left with just the one picture to represent that day. The one with GD#1's face in a fury of righteous indignation and GD#2 with the look of a scared rabbit, knowing that something unpleasant has taken place but not sure what it was or if she were somehow unwittingly responsible.

Fortunately, that's not the case. I have 390 more. And every other one of them expresses joy and love and laughter and sharing and giving, and a myriad of other wonderful thoughts and emotions.

How does this relate to the pictures we take of each other?

I propose that for every bad picture we carry around of others (I'm speaking figuratively now, so follow me on this), there are at least 399 more wonderful pictures we could take of them but for some reason we are choosing not to. It's like we're are afraid it's going to cost us something.

It may profit us to ask ourselves why we choose to hold onto bad photos of others when there are so many good ones available.

The film is free now folks. If you have a bad picture of someone, please, press delete and try again.

Alison Moore Smith is a 61-year-old entrepreneur who graduated from BYU in 1987. She has been (very happily) married to Samuel M. Smith for 40 years. They are parents of six incredible children and grandparents to two astounding grandsons. She is the author of The 7 Success Habits of Homeschoolers.