standing quiet in the rain

A picture is somehow truer than real vision.

Photographs capture a moment in time, or more to the point, the space between moments.

The space between...

Sounds like a bad album title.

Anyway, a picture will stop time at that one particular instant, freeze it, and capture it forever.

But that's not how it's meant to be.

We're supposed to live in the moment, not in the spaces between them.

Humans are designed to focus on the big picture. We're not good at thousands of details; our feeble minds fall apart when confronted with such. We can't comprehend something just being in existence for one split-second. We depend on the constant input of a stream to make our decisions. We can see a million things happen at once and grasp it, but we can't isolate it and analyze it from an outsider's point of view.

Take a rose. It's constantly growing, whether it's alive or dead. It's either enlarging from it's life or shrinking from decay at all times. When we see a picture of a rose, it freaks us out for a second. It knocks us off course.

It should be moving. Imperceptibly, to the conscious mind, but it's there.

People are the same. I can look at a picture of a person, and it rings false to me. Something's not right.

It's not the lighting or the focus. It's not the shutter speed or the exposure time.

It's not moving.

It's too real. It's stopped, and things in the real world don't stop. They may look like it for a moment, but truly, they're active.

Pictures freeze time like a pause button gone mad. Did you ever notice that when you watch a movie and have to pause it, the picture doesn't look right? The illusion of motion that makes a movie relies on the spaces between. If you make them small enough (say, one-thirtieth of a second), you don't realize it. If you expand them, with a pause button like a camera, it doesn't look right. Something doesn't click.

Click.

Click.

Like so many flashbulbs in a frenzy of light, isolating the spectre from the ether, confining the image to the film like a trapped demon in a reliquary.

Pictures are too real. They tell too much for too little.

Pictures lie.