Why Photography Is the Perfect Retirement Hobby
Taking on photography as a retirement hobby can help you immortalize what’s meaningful to you. It can also provide you with a powerful way to express yourself, share your unique vision of the world, explore new places, engage with your environment, and see the world in new ways.
Here are just some of the key ways photography makes for a perfect retirement hobby.
1. It sharpens your cognitive abilities.
Photography can help keep your mind sharp and help slow or stave off mental decline by keeping your mind engaged and your body active.
Photography always involves an element of learning, whether it’s in learning how to use a particular piece of equipment, how to capture an image the way you see it in your mind’s eye or how to discover out-of-the way places or faces to photograph. It also engages your memory as you view your photos and recall the time, place and people in them.
2. It’s an excellent form of exercise.
Not only does photography help to keep your mind healthy and active; it also can do the same for your body.
Photography is a great way to incorporate more movement and activity into your life by encouraging you to leave home and go out walking in search of moments to capture on film. This promotes greater joint, muscular and bone strength, balance and coordination. It also promotes deep, cleansing breathing while gently increasing your heart rate, which supports a stronger heart and better heart health. Being out of doors and exposed to fresh air and natural sunlight is a balm for the whole body.
3. It helps relieve stress.
Photography can be a form of meditation. Spending time exploring and appreciating your environment can relax your mind and eliminate stressful thoughts. It allows you to visualize new possibilities and see things from different perspectives.
Photography is not simply a solo activity. It can bring you into contact with an array of people, with whom you will share your hobby in one way or another. This will add something new to your social life and take you even further away from that social isolation, which is a common risk for older people.
4. It can help you document your family and your life.
Retirement is often a time for reflecting on one’s past and considering how one wants to be remembered. It is a time for passing down knowledge, experience and memories to younger generations to help keep the spirit of your life alive. Photography helps you do just that.
It helps you tell the stories of your life through pictures rather than just words. In doing this, it saves the details of special events and helps you record small and big moments of your life to pass on to family and friends. What’s more, it helps you to express your unique view of the world. Those photos are not only for others; they’re for you, too. When you take them out to look at them, you will revisit the special moments and people in your life and remember them quickly and clearly.
5. It promotes confidence and self-esteem.
Photography allows you to feel a sense of accomplishment every time you capture a beautiful image or a meaningful moment in time. It engages your creativity, challenging you to take the raw material of your environment and capture it in a unique and meaningful way, whether it’s to conjure an emotion or tell a story.
As you expand your skills, knowledge and experience, as you learn and experiment with new photography tools and techniques, and as you step outside your comfort zone to explore new subject matter, you continually build up your sense of self-satisfaction and self-esteem.
6. It’s easy to get started.
One of the greatest advantages of photography as a retirement hobby is how easy it is to get started. All you need is a camera, which you will even find on your phone. Start viewing your retirement as a way to view the world through a whole new lens – pardon the pun!
Our picture-perfect and friendly Life Plan Community in East Windsor, NJ provides an engaging independent living lifestyle surrounded by nature and filled with moments of personal growth and social engagement.
