{"id":18652,"date":"2017-10-11T16:11:45","date_gmt":"2017-10-11T20:11:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=18652"},"modified":"2017-10-11T16:11:45","modified_gmt":"2017-10-11T20:11:45","slug":"brocks-banter-life-through-a-viewfinder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/brocks-banter-life-through-a-viewfinder\/","title":{"rendered":"BROCK’S BANTER: Life through a viewfinder"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

Do you ever get the feeling that you\u2019re missing out on a part of life?
\nI\u2019d put money on the possibility you\u2019ve probably experienced that feeling one way or another. It might come in the form of regret over a decision taken, or perhaps not taken. It might come from an opportunity which, in hindsight, has the patina of an opportunity squandered.
\nMaybe it was a project on which you didn\u2019t quite push your kids hard enough, or maybe pushed them too hard, leading them to duck under your arm into another direction; or a situation that would have turned out wholly differently if you had the ability to answer that age-old question, \u201cIf I knew then, what I know now\u2026\u201d
\nOkay, so we\u2019ve probably all experienced one or a combination of these things but recently I have been wondering whether the elements of life I have been missing out on have been right in front of my eyes.
\nThe cause? Right there in my left pocket.
\nI didn\u2019t quite understand it at the time.
\nIt was 2007. I was in Rwanda on a journalism exchange through Carleton University with a group of approximately 12 of my fellow journalism students. Based in Kigali, we were fanned out through various media outlets in the developing country to carry out a variety of tasks during the weeks but the weekends were largely our own.
\nA popular activity for any groups of visitors to the country was trekking up the mountains to get up close and personal \u2013 and a respectful distance \u2013 with a rare population of gorillas. They were excursions taken by our groups in shifts, groups often leaving every week or two.
\nOne day, around the midpoint of my internship, we saw off a group of three or four as they set off for the well-worn path up the mountain.
\nAs each trip produced different results we encouraged everyone to take as many pictures as they could.
\nMost did, except for one of my female contemporaries.
\nShe came back with just one or two shots in her camera.
\nMost of us were aghast and peppered her with questions. Although I can\u2019t remember the full barrage of questions she faced, they can perhaps be best summed up in a double-barrelled shot: \u201cThis was a once in a lifetime opportunity? Are you crazy?\u201d
\n\u201cI wanted to experience it,\u201d she said calmly. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to just see it all through my camera.\u201d
\nMost of us brushed this off as nonsense, but I\u2019m starting to think she was ahead of her time \u2013 well, ahead of our time.
\nThe older I get, the closer I am coming around to her side, and this feeling has really come to a boil over the last few weeks.
\nThere have been plenty of opportunities to drive this point home.
\nThe Toronto International Film Festival was one such example which gave me pause.
\nThrough the ticket system this year I was lucky enough to score tickets to some of the special premieres at which the stars, directors, writers, and some of the other cast and crew members would be in attendance. I was particularly excited to see individuals along the lines of Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland plug their latest flicks up on stage right before my very eyes.
\nThe time came, of course, and so did the excitement. As it did, my iPhone came out, as I frantically thumbed my way to the Video option to capture it all for posterity. Mission accomplished. I had plenty of raw material to toss up online, but they were in short vignettes of maybe 20 \u2013 30 second intervals.
\nI could have gone whole hog and recorded the events in their entirety, but as I recorded I was surprised to find I was giving myself a mental dressing down.
\n\u201cYou\u2019re such an idiot!\u201d I told myself in a tone that would have been more than caustic had I actually given voice to my words right then and there. \u201cYou have these legends of stage and screen standing right there before your very eyes and you\u2019re watching them through your phone like some cheap, blurry YouTube video.\u201d
\nYou know, I had to admit I was right.
\nAnd yet, I didn\u2019t quite listen tto my own wise counsel.
\nThe phone went down for a few minutes, my eyes took in what was actually before me, but I still felt the need to capture events here and there for posterity. I couldn\u2019t imagine hurrying back into my phone to watch it any time soon and yet the compulsion was there.
\nThe same thing happened a few weeks later during the Invictus Games, albeit under slightly different circumstances. In this case, attending the Opening and Closing ceremonies, I had a particular request to do a Facebook live here and there for those who were unable to attend \u2013 or happened to be outside the country.
\nThe same feeling washed over me. Here I was, immersed in an experience, but again looking at it through a phone.
\nThis was lathered, rinsed and repeated in between the Opening and Closing ceremonies when covering the debut of York Region\u2019s fully accessible washroom trailer at Fort York during the archery finals. Again, it was thrilling to experience the competition and watch Prince Harry interact with athletes from around the Commonwealth and beyond with my very own eyes. And yet, I watched a good chunk of it through my viewfinder.
\nI suppose it is a hazard of the trade. As an editor and reporter it is my job to be at any number of events a Town like Aurora can throw at you, whether it is taking a picture of men, women, girls and boys initiating a particularly exciting project, getting that perfect shot at a ribbon cutting, or that candid moment that sums up some otherwise intangible display of human emotion.
\nCase in point: Dancing with the Easter Seals Stars Aurora-Newmarket on Thursday night.
\nDancers from across both municipalities were giving it their all on the dance floor, busting particularly ambitious \u2013 and achieved \u2013 moves that they probably thought otherwise impossible at the start of the summer just passed, but what a show they put on!
\nThat is, I just wished I could have experienced it further.
\nWith different coloured lights piercing the air to lend the event a certain ambiance, coupled with fog machines doing their job from all corners of the room, imparting a dramatic atmosphere for the dancers, they came together to provide a difficult challenge for this particular photographer. And, it was a problem conquered only by two particular camera settings and snapping away continuously during a performance.
\nIn the end, I captured everything , but, in another respect I missed so much. Judging by the other phones craned upward trying to do the same for their own favourite dancer, I certainly was not alone, but it gave me pause.
\nHow much of life are we actually experiencing with our own eyes, and how much are we actually merely \u201cexperiencing\u201d through a viewfinder? In this day and age where smartphones and other technology are becoming increasingly ubiquitous is this simply the new status quo, or do we need to reclaim our own reality?<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir Do you ever get the feeling that you\u2019re missing out on a part of life? I\u2019d put money on the possibility you\u2019ve probably experienced that feeling one way or another. It might come in the form of regret over a decision taken, or perhaps not taken. It might come from an opportunity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-opinion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-4QQ","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-20 14:57:59","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}