My husband and I frequently bicker about taking pictures. He—a man eight years older than me, mind you—believes that regular photographs are obsolete. In his view, all we should ever take is video—long, cinéma-vérité videos that relive it all, from the kids opening Christmas presents to the falling of a pine needle to a shaky pan of our trashed kitchen and living room.In my view, nobody wants to sit through great stretches of our non-essential family life, and, further I love the capturing of a single moment with single photograph—one that doesn't re-live it all but let's me do that job, in full color detail, in the my head.

A few weeks ago,a n ordinary guy named Mike Matas put up some of his vacation shots on Vimeo. He went to Japan with his girlfriend and took 4,000 (!) sill pictures. Then he spliced them all together into what appears to be a running video—except that it's not, the film jerks a bit in between pictures, reminding us that it's made of stills—as you can see:

One Week In Japan from Mike Matas on Vimeo.

What I love about this is that it subtly reminds us that every film is series of separate, discrete moments—as is, for that matter, this running experience called life that we're all trying so desperately to capture as if it were fleeing us instead of part of us. Each jerk between frames wakes me up the image and the particular experience, blinkering out: hot sweet potato; steam off the mountain; fish in a green tank. Which is exactly what I want to do as I walk around off-camera—stop for millisecond and notice it each thing that comes, even my brand-new yellow highlighter. Perhaps Matas shares this desire to pause along the way with me. Note what happens each time a still of his girlfriend pops up—the whole film seems to slow as if, in his world, time had stopped.

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