Little Moments of Light

When was the last time that you sat down, drank your coffee in silence at sunrise, and watched as the golden light moved across your home, shining light through different areas of your space, reflecting off of otherwise mundane objects in a beautiful way, or highlighting stuff that you’d normally probably ignore?

If you’re like me, it’s probably been a while. And I definitely don’t do it enough.

As a freelancer and someone who’s been terminally online most of their life (before swiping on a phone, it was endless Wikipedia rabbit holes on a laptop), it can be pretty hard for me to get up and focus on the analog parts of life. Gotta check the email to see if anyone’s reached out about work. This morning I was temporarily sucked into the phone life after getting what’s probably another fake inquiry from The Knot, because who sends an “I’m interested in booking you for our wedding” at 4:43 AM?

Then on top of that, there are the dozens of notifications that we wake up to from friends sending you reels after you put your phone down for the night. Or Facebook pinging you because you might know this person, a surefire sign that you aren’t on it enough, so it has to do something to drive some engagement for those precious, precious ad dollars.

But I digress.

The mundane morning light.

If you pause long enough, you realize that it isn’t really mundane at all. The way it filters through wine glasses on a hanging rack, casting gentle shadows and further diffusing the gentle orange of the sun onto the wall, making a visual that you’d be hard-pressed to recreate in any meaningful capacity.

Sometimes it’s the way a sliver of light breaks through the curtains or blinds, highlighting a feature on a sleeping dog, or slowly moving past a coffee maker as steam rises out of it, made visible by the soft rays of light as they march eternally forward. Or just the highlight of an old Jurassic Park toy that would otherwise blend into the mass of rubber, plastic, and metal that comprises the kid’s toy bin.

I find myself scheming shots of atmospheric b-roll out of all of these things, all the time.

The kinds of shots that naturally occur every day, that cinematographers and professional gaffers use thousands of dollars of fancy lighting to recreate for movie scenes (in this instance, I’m not arguing real is better, it’s just incredibly difficult to reproduce, and you can’t expect a movie production to do the one take perfectly in the one moment of light where it feels how the filmmakers intend it to).

But these things are moments that you can feel in your soul every day, all around your own home, representing the most cinematic version of your own existence.

And the thing that keeps me from shooting any of it is because these are all things that are individualized. They mean something to me because this is my home, but they won’t really mean anything to others. But you probably have these sorts of things in your own home that, if photographed at those moments, would create that same feeling for you.

The other thing that keeps me from capturing them and sharing them is selfish.

It’s my house.

My dog.

My kids’ toys.

My morning.

My little pieces of light.

The way that I seek light and immediately brainstorm a photo or video idea comes from two places. One is healthy, and one is less so (to be talked about another time).

The healthy one is from the short film Dark Side of the Lens by surf photographer Mickey Smith. In it, he talks about seeking little moments of light and magic that other people don’t see. That it’s a natural thing for him to do, and how shooting those through his camera helps him interpret and translate the world.

That has spoken to me since the first time a buddy shared it with me, because I’ve found myself existing and thinking in the same way.

I’m not sure if I trained myself to do that, or if I always did that and it’s how I wound up in this career field, but it is how my mind works now.

Everything is looked at as a shot.

The moments riding a bike, where you look up at the blue sky and see a jetliner streaking across the sky, moving in the opposite direction of you, while you lock your eyes to a palm tree that’s silhouetted against the sky. The gentle motion of grass or leaves blowing in the wind, moving in eternally unique ways by the invisible and all-powerful nature of weather. A kid’s helmet hanging off of some handlebars, swaying gently at sunset.

These things pop out at me all of the time.

Forever.

And I want to capture them all.

But sometimes I don’t have a camera. Usually I don’t have (or make) the time. Sometimes I feel that I don’t have the skillset required to match the vision to what I see in my head. And sometimes I just want them for myself, to live in my memories rather than through a viewfinder.

That’s probably one of the stranger parts of doing visual work for a living. You start to see everything as potential material.

Every shaft of light is b-roll. Every quiet moment is a possible frame. Every small piece of beauty or humanity becomes something you can use, shape, shoot, edit, or build into something bigger.

But like Sean Penn says in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, not everything needs to be taken.

Sometimes the best thing that you can do is notice it.

Sit with it.

Drink your coffee.

Watch the sunrise move across the room.

Watch as it drifts across the pieces of your life, highlighting them one by one.

Those moments of light are everywhere.

And most of the time, we’re too busy staring at a glowing rectangle in our hands to appreciate what is already there.