Capturing A Moment
This moment is just as valuable as the next.
Recently, I have started to develop an interest in photography and videography. In essence, these skills are about capturing life as we experience it.
Through photos and videos, we can capture an experience, a group of people we care about, or a place that changed our lives. We capture the essence of what that moment was for us. It’s a pretty powerful ability.
Over the summer, I started to take pictures of the surrounding town. This interest faded toward the end of summer, but I found it coming back a few days ago as I was browsing through YouTube. The skill and creativity people have in their videos is amazing. You have one or two people creating 15-minute videos once or twice a week that have visuals and editing equal to that of a movie. That is so impressive!
The video creators capture the world around them. For 15 minutes, they invite you to look at the world the way they see it or maybe the way they wish it was. They often show you their lives, their emotions, and their approach toward the world.
I think this idea of capturing moments extends far beyond photos and videos too. Each day, we wake up and start our morning routine. We then proceed to go through the rest of our day. The question is how much of our day are we present for? Unfortunately, I think a lot of us are not as present as we could be.
I wish I was more present. I do my best to enjoy each moment of the day and truly appreciate it for what it is, but I still breeze through plenty of things. I still put on my shoes without thinking about it and I brush my teeth without much thought. During these moments, the day is slowly slipping by. I’m losing some of my most valuable resource: time. I’m never going to get it back.
The importance of photos and videos is they preserve whatever you want to preserve about a situation. They take that moment and allow you to see it and experience it again later. On the other hand, when we don’t make an effort to appreciate what is great about the moment we’re in, we barely experience the situation. Once the moment has passed, we can’t get that time back. It is lost forever. A lack of awareness leads us to live purposefully for maybe a quarter of the day.
Conclusion
We don’t all have to be photographers and videographers, but maybe it would help to take a moment here and there to think like one. Our lives are a combination of big and small moments, we can either go through most of them unfocused and unaware or we can try to capture them whenever possible. The photographer would try to capture each moment they could.
