Name: 3 Minutes and 58 Seconds of Darkness
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T05:27:18.000Z
Duration: 3 min 59 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

You're looking at the sky above Indianapolis last night?

I've been thinking a lot about what cameras see and what they don't.

To my eyes, the sky last night looked bright.

Light pollution bounced off the clouds as they blew slowly Southwest.

The camera can't see the crisp edges of the clowns or the glimpses of Venus behind them.

On the other hand, set a camera still and let it take in light for a long time, and it will see much more than the eye can.

Before we started making YouTube videos in 2007 I'd never actually owned a video camera.

In fact, I almost never took pictures of any kind.

I only have about a dozen photos of myself from between the ages of 18 and 27.

When I got that first video camera, I quickly learned that while 2007 Kem quarters were good at capturing static spaces built by humans, apartment walls, bookshelves, car interiors, they became utterly overwhelmed by the actual world.

Even a few leaves fluttering in the wind to turn my 2007 camcorder into an Impressionist painting.

You try to keep the light study and the background noise steady and the camera study outside.

And even though we repeat to ourselves mantra like that, the images we see online are only a tiny sliver of a person's experience.

It's harder to be aware of the distance between what you see and what the camera sees.

I remember photographing myself and Sarah in the vast and empty salt flats of Utah, being careful toe angle the camera so that it wouldn't capture the many other people photographing themselves in the vast and empty salt flats of Utah.

But even though I know that people only film the moments they want me to see, even though I recognize that pictures don't capture reality so much as crop it, I can't help but feel like images are really riel.

Images are proof these images prove it was cloudy last night in Indianapolis, but images are also necessarily distortions.

This isn't the sky I saw last night, not really, but it's also the only record I have of that sky way, way before Instagram or Snapchat, Susan Sontag described in her essay on photography.

Quote the cameras, Twin capacities to subject, devised reality and to objectify it.

How do we hold those twin capacities in our mind together?

How do we look at an image and see that it is both riel and distorted?

How do we remain aware that whether we're talking about the night sky or instagram feeds or video blog's, no matter how much the camera captures it, will always fail to capture almost everything?

I could know this stuff intellectually, but as a practical matter, I am overwhelmed by the power of images.

My mind can't help but believe with the camera sees.

Santa also wrote that quote needing tohave.

Reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs, is an aesthetic consumerism toe, which everyone is now addicted.

I sometimes feel like something isn't really really unless I've documented it as if my memories and even my life itself will just slip past like the clouds through last night sky.

More than anything, I take pictures as a way of trying to fix myself in time, a way of saying I was here.

But the pictures won't last either, of course, and The risk of seeing everything through a camera is that you miss everything the camera doesn't see.

But you can see tonight's it won't photograph well and it won't last and you won't remember it forever.

But it will be beautiful and important nonetheless.