Title: “I Time-Travelled with a Camera… Sort Of”
- gear4greatness
- May 11, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Nov 14, 2025
Title: “I Time-Traveled with a Camera… Sort Of”
Category: Creative ReflectionPosted by: Gear for Greatness
I didn’t set out to time-travel — I swear I didn’t. ⏳🎥 It just kind of… happened. One moment I was walking through downtown Winnipeg with the DJI Pocket 3 clipped to my backpack strap, and the next, the world around me felt like it was speeding and slowing at the same time. Cars blurred into streaks of color, clouds raced like time-lapse ghosts, and every step I took stayed steady while everything else dissolved into motion. It felt less like filming and more like drifting between seconds — like I was remembering the moment as I was living it. That’s the strange power of cameras. They bend time without trying. They let you experience life in ways you can’t with your own eyes. And the more I film, the more I realize that every clip I shoot becomes a little portal into a different version of me. 🌫️✨
The first real “time slip” happened during a hyperlapse. I wasn’t aiming for anything dramatic — just a simple downtown walk, golden light brushing off the buildings, people crossing streets, wind flicking at my jacket. But when I played it back later, everything transformed. The city moved like it was in fast-forward, but I stayed calm and centered in the middle of it — the eye in a storm of motion. Cars zipped like comets. Pedestrians flickered like memories. Clouds spun above me like a clock unwinding. It didn’t feel like a recording; it felt like a moment pulled out of my mind instead of my camera. Like the footage captured what it felt like to remember that walk, not what it looked like in real time. 🌆🔥
Then slow motion came along and changed everything again. My cat Arlo jumped off the window ledge one afternoon — something he does a dozen times a day — and I filmed it at 4K 100fps with the Insta360 X4. When I slowed it down later, I saw details I’d never seen in my life. The way his muscles shifted under his fur. The tiny hesitation before the leap. The awareness in his eyes as he commits to the jump. It was intimate, delicate, powerful — a reminder that every “fast” moment we live is actually packed with meaning we never get to notice. Slow motion didn’t freeze time; it expanded it. It showed me what exists between the moments we rush through. 🐾💭✨
But the strangest kind of time travel is when I go back through old footage. Just last week, I opened clips from Kingston — the waterfront, boats drifting, tiny waves tapping the shore. 2019. Osmo Pocket 1. A different camera. A different place. A different me. Watching it felt like reaching through a window into a life I can’t touch anymore but still feel in my chest. The light in those clips hit differently because it belonged to a time that doesn’t exist now. And yet, because I filmed it, I can step back into it whenever I want. That’s the secret nobody tells you: the camera doesn’t just remember the world — it remembers you. 🌊🔗
And then there’s 360. The first time I used the Insta360 X4 to make a Tiny Planet hyperlapse, I genuinely laughed. The entire city curled beneath me like I was floating above a miniature universe. My path looked like an orbit. Streets bent. Buildings curved. I felt like I had stepped into some strange wormhole where physics gave up and creativity took over. That’s the moment I realized cameras don’t just capture reality — they let you rewrite it. Time, space, perspective… with 360 editing, it all becomes clay. And once you reshape the world even once, you never look at a sidewalk the same way again. 🌀🌍✨
Sometimes I think filming is the closest thing we have to bending time — not in the sci-fi sense, but in the emotional sense. Hyperlapse shows how fast life moves. Slow motion shows how full each instant is. Old footage shows who we were. 360 footage shows how subjective reality can be. And when you put all that together, you’re not just a creator — you’re a sculptor of time, carving meaning out of moments that would’ve slipped away unnoticed.
Title: “I Time-Traveled with a Camera… Sort Of”
📦 Buy on Amazon USA
🌄 Final Thoughts
There’s something hauntingly beautiful about realizing you can step in and out of time just by hitting play. 🎥✨ Every clip becomes a timeline, a memory, a version of me that only exists inside those frames. And when I watch them, it feels like I’m experiencing my own life in layers — the real moment, the memory of the moment, and the new meaning it holds years later. Filming doesn’t just record; it preserves the emotional fingerprints of who I was, what I was feeling, and how the world looked through my eyes on that day.
Digging through old footage has taught me that time isn’t a straight line — it loops, it echoes, it comes back in flashes. 💭🌙 There are pieces of myself trapped in old sunsets, old street corners, old sky reflections that I didn’t appreciate until years later. Cameras let me revisit those versions of myself, not out of nostalgia, but out of gratitude. They remind me that even the “ordinary” clips had a piece of my heart inside them.
And the moments I create with hyperlapse and slow motion feel symbolic — like the camera is teaching me how to live. 🌍🌤️ Hyperlapse whispers, “Life moves fast. Pay attention.” Slow motion whispers, “Slow down. Don’t miss the beauty hiding inside the small things.” And 360 videos whisper, “Reality is flexible — don’t be afraid to bend your world until it inspires you.” These aren’t just tricks; they’re reminders of how to see life more fully.
Maybe that’s why filming feels like time travel. Because every time I hit record, I know I’m capturing more than visuals — I’m capturing the version of myself who stood there in that light, at that moment, feeling that thing. And long after the moment fades, the footage lets me find him again. Maybe that’s the real magic of cameras. Maybe that’s the real reason I keep filming. ✨
Comments