On The Fun of Shooting Video with A Still Camera

Two weeks ago, I shot a bit of video footage for a recent corporate "summer concert" event at work. The goal was to capture some folks with kids, wine glasses and mothers-in-law in tow having fun to post on our internal website. However, back then we were a low-budget/"this is just an experiment stage" kinda outfit. (Hey! this is Silicon Valley baby! We travel on internet-speed: Starbucks fueled, Wall St. observed and "if you don't work 14 hour days how committed are you?" time here! Two weeks is, like, so two weeks ago!) So back then, I didn't have a nifty hand-held company-sponsored video camera. (Do now.) So I volunteered my personal Christmas gift of last year: my Canon G7. It's a digital still camera with video capabilities.

And here's the fun part. When you approach people with a small black hand-held device that looks like a still camera, they think they are gonna have their picture took. Here's the trick: it's set on video. This means you get to capture people adjusting themselves. They unconsciously leak their perceptions of what makes them more attractive, or what they perceive as their "weaker bits." They believe they have a few seconds before you hit the "capture!" button. In those precious few seconds, they will hurriedly futz with what they think needs to be cloaked, hiked forward, smoothed down, covered with bangs, fluffed up, stuffed back, hid sorta sideways behind other people's body parts, centered, tucked in, or dug out of their teeth.

I'm too kind to ever eventually display those embarrassingly human and altogether predictable moves in a video. But I'm apparently not too kind to indulge in pushing the human play/drama just a bit further. In a spirit of clinical observation, ("... and this IS for posterity, so please be honest....") I have allowed people the time they think they need to become "acceptable" before the eye of the camera. Then, I let them wait there just a few more seconds longer than they think it should take for me to hit the darned "gotcha" button with their best wide open smile/spinach-checked-and-probably-artificially-whitened-teeth on display. And then their teeth start to dry out, and their upper lip gets stuck on them as their face slowly un-composes. And then they get cranky. And then I start to chuckle. Because their lips are now surely permanently stuck on their their upper teeth and they are miffed that the camera didn't work when they were so.... perfect!

You know, you'd think you'd get nicer as you get older. But on the trajectory I'm riding, by the time I'm 90, I'll be pulling the chairs out from behind the other old geezers in the cafeteria just before they sit down. Then I'll put the Depends to the test as I lay my head back and laugh until I almost choke on my dentures. And there will be no one to pat me on the back to dislodge them because I've been such a nasty old bird.