All-Seeing Eye

Author: JR

  • The Illusions of YouTube

    When I returned to photography as a hobby, after about a decade away from it, I watched a lot of YouTube videos. I really enjoyed them. But I also internalized some ideas that ended up costing me a lot of time and money.

    I started to think that I had to “build a camera kit.”

    I got it in my head that it might be normal to own many cameras.

    I grew concerned about various features—autofocus speed, stabilization, video, weather resistance—that were not really relevant to me.

    Most fundamentally, I acquired the notion that there was a right way to do things, and that it mattered that I do them in that right way. That having been determined, of course, by a large group of YouTubers whom I’d never met.

    It’s taken me a long time to see that it’s all an illusion. The only person who cares about my photography is me. I’m the only one I have to please. Adding in other voices can be helpful, but also distracting. The conversation there is way too focused on equipment, when equipment is pretty much the last thing that’s interesting about photography.

    So I’m cutting back on YouTube, and trying to just enjoy photography itself.

  • Photography for the Long Haul

    Why take photographs? What’s the point?

    When I was growing up, we had a few photographs in our house. A couple small, framed pictures on a shelf. A few boxes of old four-by-six prints. Some albums. We looked through them from time to time. The same old pictures, seen again and again, familiar but still captivating. When we went on a family vacatoin, we’d get the film developed. A few rolls of film, processed by Ritz Camera, yielded around a hundred pictures. Many of them were redundant — multiple shots of the same person or scene. If we’d been more organized, we might have framed a few, or put them in an album. But the pictures usually just sat in a drawer or a shoebox, still in their envelopes. Every so often we’d look through them, shuffling them into a new order, careful not to get our fingerprints on their gloss.

    The way I take and experience my own photography today, in 2025, is totally different. I make pictures everyday, of my everyday life — my family, things I see, places I go, interesting light. I look at the pictures all the time, usually on screens, which are everywhere. I’m always adding more to my online albums. So what I have, instead of photos in boxes or drawers or books, is a river of imagery running parallel to my life, memorializing it in real time, letting me see it as it unfolds. And I can walk back up the watercourse any time I want, to dip into the river as it was a year, or five years, or ten years, or decades ago.

    I have a huge amount of imagery. So much that I suspect I’ll need the help of A.I. to sort it and make sense of it in the years to come. I keep only the best pictures. Still, I have so many that, in the future, I’ll be unlikely to review them all. Only a computer will be able to see them all and “know” what I photographed. I’ll be a tourist in the photographic city I’ve built.

    So, what’s the point, in the long term? The truth is, I don’t know. In the present, I love looking at my pictures. Even pictures I took yesterday. Many, many years from now, how will my photographs fit into my life? I have no idea. I’m just guessing that they’ll be valuable then. I’m photographing for the long haul.