My phone has somewhere north of three hundred video clips I've never posted. I film fairly often. I publish rarely.

For a while I thought this meant I should either post more or stop filming. Having sat with it, I don't think either.

What the filming is actually doing

Here's what I noticed. On days I film, I see more.

It's not subtle. If I'm half-looking for a shot, I notice the way light comes through the gap between two buildings at a particular hour. I notice that the fruit seller stacks sweet limes in a spiral. I notice a dog that has clearly decided a specific step belongs to it.

On days I'm not filming, all of that is present and I walk past it.

The camera isn't recording my attention. It's causing it. The clip is a by-product.

Why posting changes it

The moment I'm filming to post, a second question arrives mid-shot: is this good enough. And that question is poison for the first one, because now I'm not looking at the light, I'm evaluating the light.

Worse, the posting instinct narrows what I point at. Things that will read well to someone else, in nine seconds, without context. That's a real craft and I respect it, but it's a different activity from noticing.

The compromise

I've stopped treating the three hundred clips as a backlog of failures.

They're a notebook. Nobody feels guilty about a notebook with no published entries. The writing was the point; the notebook is just where it went.

Every so often something genuinely wants to be shown, and I post that, and it's usually better than the things I filmed in order to post.

The one thing I'd change

I'd label them. Three hundred clips named IMG_4471 is a notebook with no index.