**From The In Between: A Trip of a Lifetime by Jim Bruton**

The sun was setting and if I was going to catch the green flash, I’d have to act now. Blink my eyes at the wrong instant, and I would miss it. Years of practice staring at the world through a camera’s viewfinder had given me the patience for this task. I was ready.

Then unexpectedly, almost three hundred miles from civilization, I heard the low hum of a car’s engine. Then several. Still focused on the lowering sun, I allowed myself the momentary distraction of peering with my other eye at the line of undulating sand dunes. As the rumble of cars grew louder, I awaited the arrival of both events simultaneously, keeping my primary gaze on that magical moment when the sun’s angle, the earth’s atmospheric refraction, and everything else in between my eye and that burning star, would align perfectly. Synchronicity. Rare perfection.

I was a “seeker,” a chaser of unusual things, and hoped to capture one of the most memorable natural phenomena–a burst of green light before the sun sank below the horizon. But the increasing volume of those four-wheel drive vehicles was maddening. A minute more and I quickly realized today was not going to be the day the green flash would appear. However, the caravan of vehicles did, topping the dune’s ridge and heading straight for me.

It soon became clear that the lead car was driven by one of the local park rangers I knew. Frustration forgotten, I watched with interest while his car and those following came to a stop a few feet from my camera. I walked up to the ranger to ask what brought him here. It turned out his party in tow was a Disney film crew, scouting locations for a future movie. As he and I talked, I saw the team pull some cases out of the back of one car and open a folding satellite dish. Eyebrows raised in curiosity, I walked over to them and watched as they plugged a series of cables into a large metal box, including a telephone handset. I asked what this device was, and they explained it was a satellite telephone. Then they punched in a long sequence of numbers. I considered how remotely situated I was, in the middle of nowhere in a country called Namibia, which itself means “The Big Nothing.” And here I was, in that big nothing, watching people use a telephone that could talk to anyone, anywhere, instantly.

I loved the small satellite dish–it looked like something from a science fiction movie, positioned atop the sand dune. I asked one of the crew if anyone had ever pushed video over such a system. They didn’t know. This was 1993, and with the recent advent of the World Wide Web to give some order to the internet, right then and there I considered the possibility of going live with video from similarly remote locations. I could see so many uses of such a capability, from augmenting my wildlife film work with a “Live from the Waterhole” component, to how live news feeds could change, to connecting school children around the world, to building a sense of global community. In that moment, I knew I was going to solve this problem.

My name is Jim Bruton and this is my story.

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