the passing of time...

The other night I thought I'd try a creative project. You know one of those projects you really don't have time for but you're really not in the mood to do the things you really should be doing so you gladly invite additional work as a short lived aversion to the more important task before you.

Don't act like you don't do this!

Well my project was to try and use HDR (high dynamic range) photography to capture a sunset. HDR photographs take an odd number of pictures (usually 3-7 pictures) and compresses them into one, so you get the best single photograph possible. The images are a couple of examples from this evening.

I climbed out onto the roof, set up a fisheye lens on a tripod, and then let it snap a series of 5 images every 30 seconds. This started as the sun was approaching the horizon and we captured images all the way till it was dark (roughly 4 hours later).

This experiment taught me a few things, first capturing 10 pictures every minute for 4 hours gives you way too many pictures.  Second, compressing these photos into 148 single images takes some serious time, but most importantly even with all this time invested the video is still too short to actually mean anything.

I invested 8 hours or more in the making of this silly thing and at the end of the day I think it's still lame.

I've seen some amazing HDR time lapse videos over the past year. Videos that are jaw dropping and inspiring. But my video, all 8 hours of investment, is not so. I'm realizing the amazing videos are not 8 hours of work, but hundreds of hours of work. Not 1400 photos but a hundred thousand photos.
My 8 hours and 1400 photos produced no movement, or point, or climax, or resolution. It's just clouds moving with some music and nothing happens.

If we're honest life has these moments. Moments where you feel you've given a really good effort to something but what you're getting in return is just junk, just meaningless effort.

I'm realizing our lives need time. Our visions and dreams need time to them, lots of time. They need more then what we think they do for something of meaning, lasting meaning, to really happen.

What would happen to marriages if we all took not a short view but a crazy long view, a view that said this story is gonna develop over decades not years. What would happen to our children if we committed to a story longer then just "this season" of life? What would happen to relationships with co-workers, neighbors, family members if we saw the current tension or stress or aggravation as just part of the big story?

At the end of my creative project I realized it's just not worth it to me to invest what it takes to make an amazing video.

But when I think of my marriage, my son, my work, it is worth the investment, it is worth the years and hours and seasons necessary to make something amazing of it.

So if you feel you've given enough and it's time to cash in your chips to see what you get, Don't! Keep pushing, keep investing, keep on keeping on. Cause the world doesn't need another lame excuse for a video, or more importantly a lame excuse for a marriage, a family, a career.

Your life is capable of something amazing. Don't stop short.