A photo is worth a thousand words. By this logic, a single video should constitute several million. Filming brought a special change to my life. When I first pressed the record button, the way I viewed the world shifted. Suddenly, every breeze that created rustles on a tree, every ripple on a disrupted lake seemed deliberate. When the red dot appeared, I started paying attention differently. The way someone moved through the grass, the subtle but genuine excitement I could see in their eyes; every detail could be captured and preserved in a video. By seeing through a lens, my eyes learned to adjust to new frames, and through filming every moment, I learned to live in the overlooked intervals of the present and perceive the world in its purest form.
This past winter term, I took a 300-level elective class to learn more about videography. The PLC provided me with a DSLR camera from Canon, and my classmates and I were tasked to film different projects across campus. Despite occasionally forgetting to bring my camera with me to capture a special moment, the DSLR acted as a window to a new angle to view the world from. I stopped viewing moments as isolated images, but as a series of transitions: the process of a smile forming, the pauses between people in conversation, and the way light shifted across someone’s face. Real moments of beauty often lie not in individual moments, but in the seconds in between.
When editing a video, there are several ways in which I shape the final product through an intentional selection of clips. In a software, concepts like time become a material; by slowing down or speeding up a scene, I can make a single second heavy with significance or organized with coherence. I can cut out mistakes, rewind moments, and edit a video into an ideal version of itself. In doing so, I can easily create a variety of narratives. A single shot can make someone appear powerful or vulnerable. Music in the background can shift the mood of a scene entirely. The reality that we see in the news, online, and on social media is often partial, fragments of a truth framed, trimmed, and clipped into an actuality filtered through selection. It is only by considering the clips that were cut out, the angles that were excluded, and the outside of the frame that we can recognize the truth for what it is and view the world without distortion.
Editing taught me that perspective is power. People say that the camera never lies, but I’ve come to learn that it always selects. Every frame excludes more than it includes, and every video leaves something behind. In this realization, I found myself searching for traces of omission in media, trying to grasp the intentionality behind a cut or a frame. In finding the unseen footage, I also discovered the context, the build-up, and the whole story. Applying this to our interactions with others, we can make the deliberate choice to look past first impressions and avoid reducing people down to a single trait, mistake, or moment.
Videography taught me that capturing a moment often meant stepping away from it, and that the act of filming inevitably changed how I experienced it. By standing behind a camera, I failed to fully live the experience, my mind preoccupied with plans for post-production rather than enjoying the fleeting emotions of the present. Over time, I’ve learned to lower the camera when I need to. Not every moment needs to be color-graded to matter. The goal was never to archive the entirety of the experience, but to learn how to notice it.
Now, even without a camera in my hands, I see the world through a different lens. I pay attention to transitions in emotion, to the elements that lie outside of the frame. I notice how conversations shift in tone, the way silence carries weight, and how light affects the mood of a scene in my life. I value the fragility of time—how quickly it moves, how easily it slips away when I am not living in the moment. Life is a film. It is a sequence rather than an image, and it is never the whole truth. Life is a collection of scenes. Its beauty lies not in the individual clips, but in the fluidity of the collective whole.
