A-Live Photos

Confession: I really love reels on Instagram. 

I don’t mean making them, because that’s terrifying (and also fun, but in a terrifying sort of way.) 

What I mean is I love watching them. I love seeing all the ways people take one audio clip and make it apply to their “thing.” I love the dance videos that make me want to get up and move my body. I love the expertly filmed scenes that make me wish my life was more beautiful than it is. But I also love how you can take content from an average person like me, pair it with good music, and suddenly your life looks like a super fancy movie trailer. I mean, wouldn’t it be great if we all had a sound engineer adding a soundtrack to our days? Is this something celebrities have? I need to look into this. 

The problem is, I am not in the habit of taking video, and I’m concerned about this. Call it morbid or call it good planning, I just don’t feel like there would be enough footage to work with if one needed to make a compilation video of my life in the near future for, let’s say, at worst–my funeral, or at best–my Pulitzer Prize award ceremony (do they do montage videos there? They should. I know the writer’s life is not as exciting as, say, a figure skater, but we work just as hard. Make it happen.) So, in January upon coming to this realization (perhaps after watching too many year-in-review reels on the ‘gram), I decided this would be the year that I would be more intentional about collecting video. 

And then I promptly forgot. That checks out. 

The thing is, I’m great at photos. I take photos all day–the sunlight moving around my house, my kids in a rare sweet moment I don’t want to forget, my plants just being amazing (so many plant photos.) My camera roll is always full, so much that I had to buy extra Google storage just to hold it all (don’t come at me with all your brilliant photo storage systems. I won’t follow through. Just let me be.) So the problem is not the act of documentation, but how. I take photos, but rarely video. I’m just too often focused on getting the perfect shot, that I forget to press record and let the moment play out.

Vacation moments though? I’m good at that. I slam that red circle button all day like a proud dad at the dance recital. Look at us, we're driving in the car! Look at us, we're walking down the street! Look at us, we’re waving at the camera, kids wave at the camera, WAVE! There you go, HI!...and…cut. 

It’s not difficult to understand why. Getting out of our ordinary day to day always heightens the senses more. It’s why we travel, after all. Everything just feels more precious, more interesting, more memorable. So we snap snap snap away. And yet, despite our best efforts to remember it all, we know those photos of the mountains never turn out the same way as they do in person. But, you turn on video mode, capture the moment when the kids come around the bend and see the mountains in view for the first time, and that moving picture becomes a magical scene stealer. Compile all those video moments together, and you’re a film producer. Add in music and you just turned your vacation into a box office hit. Pass the popcorn. 

I recently pulled together one of these montage reels from our time visiting our cabin. As I scrolled through the videos tab, I was surprised to find so many more videos than I remember taking. Not long 20-30 seconds videos, but short 2-3 seconds moments here and there–Elliott giving me a thumbs up approval of pancakes, Caroline giggling about the fish she just caught, Leo constantly dancing himself into a pose (always with that one.) And then it occurred to me (something I probably should have known long before but let’s remember I’m a grandma millennial)–the photos I had on my camera roll were Live Photos. This means they weren’t just a still shot, they were also a video. 

Insert mind exploding emoji. 

Now in my defense, I knew these videos were there. I knew you could hold your finger down and see the 2-3 seconds around the time of clicking the shutter button. I just always used the feature as a way to scroll through the still photos to find the better shot. It never occured to me that these tiny videos were actually worth something. 

But as I started to add them to the video, I learned I was wrong—there was something in those small moments. If a photo is a word then a small video is a sentence. Pull those sentences altogether and you have a story—a story that illustrated so much more than the scroll through a slide show of pictures.

Does this mean, I can hear you ask, that video is always superior to photography? Of course not. You can’t put a video in a photo album, can’t place it behind a frame and hang it on your wall. There’s even something magical about a memory frozen on a two dimensional space, as if we have finally uncovered the capability of stoping time like we’ve wanted to do ever since Zach Morris made it cool. 

Should we bring Mary Oliver into this conversation? I know, I know, I use her far too often. But as the line goes in Love Actually when Emma Thompson’s character gushes over Joni Mitchell–”I love her, and true love lasts a lifetime.”

So what would Mary Oliver say about all this memory keeping?

I’m not certain how she feels about photos versus video. I think Mary might tell you to do neither and instead you should write about it. I do and I will, Mary. But even a writer can admit that words cannot always hold the weight of a moment. 

Look, and look again.

That’s what she says–Mary–in her poem “To Begin With, The Sweet Grass.”

This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.

It’s more than bones.

It’s more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.

It’s more than the beating of the single heart.

It’s praising.

It’s giving until the giving feels like receiving.

What I hear her saying here is a moment is more than just the structure of an image, the bones, if you will. It’s not just a little thrill for the eyes. The moment has a heartbeat. It’s alive. 

Maybe that’s what makes these little videos hidden behind the still photo so magical. I scroll a grid of photos and I see memories. I look again at the video behind the moment, and the memory comes alive. I see the wind brushing his messy hair, watch the slow curl of a smile when he catches my eye, hear the sound behind the grin of a girl growing into her own confidence. Inside those squares there is a whole life–a movement, a look, a dance. There’s a story to be told. 

It’s easy, though, to find a story to tell of a great family vacation, but what about the rest of the story? What about the ordinary moments in between the big stories?

Sure enough, I go back through my camera roll and I find many of the pictures I’ve taken are Live Photos—moments behind a picture just waiting to be uncovered. Holding down my finger over the still frame, I watch the photos comes alive, as if my finger is a magic wand (or a Zach Morris “Time In” cue.) A grin becomes a giggle. A pose becomes a dance. A hand holding becomes a hand reaching. They were ordinary moments before, just photos holding space between the bigger moments. But behind the still photo is a story I forgot to tell.

Look and look again.

There’s no reason to save video montages just for vacation recaps, award ceremonies and funerals, I think. I find a song, I start scrolling the videos I didn’t know I had, selecting one small moment at a time. Clip by clip, my everyday life starts to look a bit more like the movie trailer kind of life. Nothing is expertly filmed, but it’s beautiful all the same when celebrated in this way.

So is that secret, you ask? The answer to paying attention to our life is to simply create a reel with the latest trending TikTok song? (Mary is ready to leap out of her grave at the thought.) I’m not certain about that. But I am reminded there’s a beating heart behind the ordinary, and that feels like a pretty good way to live a life. 

Or, as Mary continued with her poem…

You have a life - just imagine that

You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe

still another.

Take the videos. Look behind the photos. Find the story. Then tell about it. (In poetry or reel. The medium is up to you.)

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Ordinary Inspiration".

PS. For more words on finding inspiration in the ordinary, be sure to sign up for my Raise & Shine Letter! There’s always a good story or two, probably something about Taylor Swift, and lots of artfully curated GIFs.