The phone was already recording when rswfire began working the question aloud. He was outdoors at Siltcoos, the dunes and the trees standing behind him in whatever arrangement the front-facing lens happened to allow, and the first thing he did was correct himself mid-sentence — landscape, no, portrait — the two words arriving nearly on top of each other, the way a thing does when the hand has already made a choice the mouth is still catching up to. He was back to something. He named it as a return rather than a decision, which meant the question had been open before this and had come around again.
He stated the problem cleanly: portrait mode is not the best for nature. The land he was standing in did not fit the shape he was holding. A vertical frame takes a slice of the world and discards the horizon, and the horizon was the point, or at least part of it. But he did not stop there, because the frame was doing two jobs at once and only failing at one of them.
The other job was the eye. In portrait, he said, it looks better looking at me — it feels more natural, like when I'm looking at the camera it looks like I'm actually looking at whoever's on the other side of it. He put the receiver in the sentence explicitly. Not the camera, not the recording, but a person on the other side of the glass, someone he was addressing. And in landscape that address kept slipping. He said he never seemed to do that very well when the phone was turned. He said he didn't know why. He said it was weird.
Then he found the mechanism, and it was small and physical and entirely sufficient: the little camera lens on the side of it. Turn the phone horizontal and the lens migrates off the vertical axis, sitting now to one side of the screen, while the eyes go where eyes go — to the image of himself, to the face in the mirror the device is holding up. The offset between the lens and the gaze becomes visible in the footage as a person looking slightly past you. He named the habit without flinching from it: I'm trying to look at myself in the camera, you know. The screen is a mirror before it is a window, and the geometry of the device decides how far apart those two things sit.
So the device was both instrument and subject in the same recording. He was inside the apparatus he was examining, using it to document its own limitation, the front-facing lens capturing a man describing the exact reason that lens was not doing what he wanted. The nature he was filming for was behind him and out of frame. The receiver he was speaking to did not exist yet. Both of them were being weighed against each other in real time by a man standing in the dunes holding a phone.
He did not resolve it. I don't know if I will, you know, I don't know about the orientation. Let me think about this. The pace never quickened and nothing hardened into a rule. He set the question down where he could find it again, still holding both terms — the land wants width, the eye wants the lens on axis, and the same rectangle cannot give him both — and left it standing, marked as under consideration, still turning.