Process on Art Imitates Life

The best camera is the one you have with you (but that's not the whole story)

Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The saying goes: the best camera is the one you have with you. Chase Jarvis popularised it, Apple built an entire marketing campaign around it, and in practice it’s hard to argue with. The phone in your pocket has made more genuinely good photographs than most dedicated cameras will ever see.

And yet. There is something that happens when I pick up a large camera — a smallish Fuji, a heavy Leica — that doesn’t happen when I reach for my phone. Something slows down. Not just the process, but me.

Before you delete that frame

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a reflex in photography that runs so deep most people never notice it. A blurry frame: delete. A grain-heavy shot from a push-processed roll: probably delete. The moment you missed by a fraction of a second, the image where the focus landed just behind the subject’s eyes: delete, delete, delete.

The reflex is corrective. It assumes the photograph is trying to be something precise and clean, and anything short of that is failure. Wabi-sabi — the Japanese aesthetic sensibility built around imperfection, impermanence, and things as they authentically are — suggests this assumption is worth questioning.

The Three Shot Framework

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The three-shot framework is a concept often used in storytelling and filmmaking that encourages (in our case) photographers to approach a scene by capturing it in three distinct ways: starting with an establishing, wide vista shot, then a mid-shot, and finally a detailed shot.

While it isn’t a strict rule that you must force upon every single scene, it serves as a highly effective exercise in varying the distance between yourself and your subject. By intentionally changing your perspective and distance, you develop a more dynamic photographic eye.

How to Stay in One Place

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Most street photography advice is about movement. Walk slowly. Change your route. Put yourself in interesting areas. Stay alert.

There’s another approach that points the opposite direction: stop moving, find something with potential, and wait for the photograph to build itself around you.

It’s slower, more uncomfortable, and — once you get used to it — significantly more productive.

Why most photographers move too much

When a photograph doesn’t happen immediately, the instinct is to go somewhere else. Different street, different neighbourhood, different light. Keep moving until something hits.

The Faded, Worn Jeans

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There’s an analogy worth sitting with before trying to shoot like your favourite photographer.

You can buy jeans pre-faded — already worn, already broken in, already carrying the creases and bleach marks of years of use. Or you can buy a new pair and wear them every day for five years. The fade ends up looking identical. But only one of them is yours.

Photography has the same problem, and Daido Moriyama is where it shows up most often.