Of all the life skills we learn in school, there are two daily tasks that should be part of every curriculum, but generally aren’t. Money and photography. By comparison, the only time in years that I dredged my memory for chemistry facts was at last Tuesday’s trivia night.

Where I naturally spent money and took photos. Like every other day. Go figure.

Our iPhones are always with us in ways that the film SLR’s of the past never were. And their small size makes them perfect for candid and street photography. So how do you master the iPhone quick draw?

If I hear one persistent complaint about Apple Photos and iCloud, it’s the ease with which you can unintentionally remove entire memories from your life. Precious photos deleted and gone.

But, ironically, it’s also what makes the Apple Photos experience so remarkably good.

For most of us, Summer is the great social experience of the year. And thanks to the iPhone, it’s ultra easy to collect a whole story in photos and video to keep those moments alive. Often, those excursions are as guests with friends or at a special event like a wedding. Whatever the occasion, there are some easy ways to say thanks with photos that will delight your hosts.

Great movies almost always have great B-roll. The moments that set the scene or hint at an unspoken desire without benefit of dialogue or actors. A cityscape, beach, cafe, or local details that set the location apart and give background to the story. The stories we tell with our photos can be just as powerful.

Every now and then I have to remind myself that photography is nothing more than painting with light. The scene we face is a rich palette of colors from brilliant to drab that we use to excite photo-sensitive camera pixels in one way or another and come up with some interpretation of the scene itself.

Summer is officially here.

So now is the perfect time to look at your photo strategy and get ahead of the curve. For many of us, June kicks off the annual photo “season” that starts with graduations, weddings, and travel events, and dissolves into Fall and Holiday festivities.

Here are six ways to approach Summer photos that will enrich your memories without adding overwhelm and turn you into a better photographer. It's like summer school without the deadlines, and you grade yourself.

I got the news recently, in an email, that they don’t want me anymore.

That hurts. Sort of.

But, I get it. Relationships are a two way street and I guess I dropped out. Didn’t pay at-tention. Things got in the way.

So there it was.

“It’s been awhile since you logged in . . . Due to inactivity, your account is scheduled for deletion on March 1, 2023”

If you visit any large city and photograph tall buildings, you quickly understand the problem of perspective. Unless you are about half a mile away (just try that in New York) you have to shoot up and use a wide angle lens to fit it all in. The inevitable result is a building that looks like it's falling backwards. And if you're shooting 2 buildings side by side, it looks like they are going to hug.

What professional photographers don’t tell you is how bad they really are. Even the best of them fail most of the time. Which is to say that the images they show are only a fraction of the images they create. The rest? Just digital debris. So success, ironically, is largely a matter of hiding their mistakes.

It used to be, with film, that there were only two kinds of photos. The Keepers and the Discards. Either a picture was worthy of printing or it wasn’t. The iPhone changed all that. Here’s how to manage your Photos Library and keep it under control.

This is a year of years in so many ways. It's changed the way we live. Changed the way we see the world. And it's changed photography in the process.