• 09 Dec, 2025 *

you got into photography as a teenager- well, that’s not quite right. you first got into photography as a child, when your dad found a camera at work and gave it to you, a terrible sony mavica with probably a number of pixels you could count on both hands and feet if you wanted. it took pictures onto floppy discs - something that was insanely cool to you as a child and still pretty neat to you as an adult, maybe twelve pictures to a disc - and produced images that looked, in the gentlest words possible, quite bad. still though, you found a kind of love for the layer of digital scunge on the pictures it took.

when you got back into it, this time as a teenager, you kept a sort of resolution against using anything too nice. maybe it was some kind of hatred against the sort of photographer that just seems to be collecting gear, maybe it was cope for being too broke to afford anything actually good, but whatever it was, you used to love the crusty low-resolution photos you took. maybe almost more than real life, maybe as some kind of crutch; you loved to see the world through your eye of glass and silicon.

but you’re an adult now, and good digital cameras are getting cheap, so you thought, why not indulge a little. you found a used sony a7rii on marketplace for a good price, and in a brief fit of impulse you found yourself the proud owner of forty-two whole megapixels in your hands.

and you immediately didn’t really like the photos. 42 is a stupid amount of resolution, far beyond anything you were doing with it, far beyond anything you wanted to do with it. you kept using it, but stayed true to your resolve, that there was no real point to it.

but this camera also had something else you’d never had before, 4k video. video about as clrisp and cear as anything you could see with your own two eyes. it took you a while to warm to the world of shooting video, but you soon fell hard into it, almost obsessively shooting things, documenting things, trying to document everything.

but what to do with it all? you’re not a filmmaker, despite your best efforts, the thought of editing video gives you a bit of the sick feeling in your head. but you’d hate to just leave your footage on a hard drive somewhere, untouched. you’d hate to see it all go to waste.

so one evening you sat down, curled up in your blankets, and put on a long-form documentary, shot, produced, and viewed all by yourself. it became one of your rituals, sitting down every few evenings by yourself to watch your latest bounties.

you could never leave good enough alone, could you? you could never escape the desire, the urge to document. a few weeks in, before you got yourself cosy, you set up your camera on a cheap tripod your dad gave you, hit play, then hit record. strangely enough, they became some of your favourite videos to watch back over - the dark room, the flickering light from the tv on your face, the way your eyes seemed to glaze over in reverence at the screen.

the show was never actually that interesting in the first place, was it? you spot your gaze wandering over to make eye contact with the camera, and it never really left. it’s funny, how you can only seem to love yourself in hindsight.