I’m not so sure people listen to music nowadays. (I hope this isn’t one of those “getting old” rants, but it surely is.)

When I was young I used to play an album, especially what I expected to be a “serious” album, with the lights dimmed and all of my attention focused on what I was hearing. The dimmed lights made a big difference. It was an experience, an immersion in the music. That doesn’t happen much anymore. Music’s role seems to have changed, more tangental, more of an accessory, the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself.

Of course, that is a gross exaggeration but there is truth there. We have all noticed the same thing. Interestingly, there are commercial venues set up to replicate that dimmed light album experience. A company called Envelop offers such an experience, promising extraordinary sound and an extraordinary listening experience. A bit contrary to my pure music experience, Envelop, like my older brother, is into the whole synchronized light show thing. Maybe it’s not for me after all? There’s one in San Francisco.

Photography is changed, too, by those same technologies. Itty bitty photographs on our social media feeds, far smaller than the 4x5s we used to think of as small prints, fill our visual space. To get those likes you need to make photos that look good at two by three inches and look good immediately—the viewer is only going to give the image a half second and it will be moving, too, during that brief time. Even fullscreen on my phone images are far smaller than I’d ever print them. Look back at my last post of the Owlscape—on a social media feed would anyone even notice the owl, right in the center of the frame?

All of which is a long, get-off-my-lawn sort of way of asking you, the reader to look at these next Random Frame videos in fullscreen. These are only samples, just a minute each. Dim the room lights if you can.

Random Frame (Paths of Glory)

Random Frame (Lolita)

Random Frame (Dr. Strangelove)