I hate alarm clocks.
Itās pitch-black outside, but I know in half an hour the first light will begin to glow, turning the night sky from navy to cobalt, followed swiftly by the first rays of gold.
I scan the sky for clouds. Yes! But perhaps too much cloud? Well, thatās usually better than no clouds at all.
By the time Iāve asked myself that question, I havenāt taken a single photograph. I havenāt even picked up my camera. And yet, if you asked me what the most important part of my process is, Iād tell you itās about dragging my butt out of bed into a dark kitchen for a quick slurp of coffee and getting out there.
We talk about photography as if it lives in the āclickā. Settings, gear, the decisive fraction of a second when the shutter opens and closes. But for those of us who donāt stage our images (who donāt build a set, arrange a subject, or create the perfect studio light) the click is almost an afterthought. Itās the last tiny gesture in a much longer act of paying attention.
Iād estimate that for every photograph Iām proud of, 95% of the work happened before I ever raised the camera to my eye.
The reading
Before the āclickā, thereās reading. Reading the sky for what that cloud cover will do to the light in twenty minutes. Reading a street for where the shadows will fall once the sun clears that building. Reading an animalās weight shift, a personās glance toward someone just out of frame, the particular quality of quiet before something changes. None of this is technical. Itās closer to the way a sailor reads wind on water, or a farmer predicts weather based on the texture of the clouds: pattern recognition built from having been wrong enough times to start noticing.
The waiting
Then thereās waiting, which is not the same as standing still. Good waiting is active – a kind of coiled readiness. Iām not thinking about my settings anymore; I decided those already, half-consciously, based on the reading. Iām always ready to shoot. Iām watching for the thing I suspect is coming, without knowing exactly what itāll look like when it arrives. This is the part that looks, to anyone watching, like nothing is happening. Itās actually the most important part of the whole exercise.
The positioning
Somewhere between the reading and the waiting, my feet are moving. Iām not waiting where I happen to be standing; Iām finding the place where the thing Iām anticipating will actually work; where the light will land, where the background wonāt fight the subject, where Iāll have a clean line to whateverās about to unfold. This, too, isnāt technical. Itās closer to instinct, or maybe just the accumulated memory of every time I didnāt move and regretted it.
And then, almost incidentally: the click
By the time my finger actually presses the shutter, the photograph is basically already decided. The click just makes it permanent. Itās the full stop at the end of a sentence Iāve been composing since I left the house in the dark.
I think this is why Iāve never been much good at, or interested in, controlled photography – still life, studio setups, elaborate post-processing. Those disciplines put the craft after the moment: you build the conditions, then capture them at your leisure, then perfect them on a screen. My favourite kind of photography puts almost all the craft before the moment, in noticing it in the first place. Thereās no redo. You either saw it coming, or you didnāt.
None of this requires better gear or more technical knowledge than the person next to you. In fact, my current camera (a Sony RX-100 VII) fits in my pocket and is a āpoint and shootā. What is required is a kind of attention that, Iād argue, is trainable in exactly one way: by doing it (badly at first) over and over, until the reading and the waiting and the positioning stop feeling like effort and start feeling like instinct.
So, if one of my images ever looks like a lucky accident, it probably wasnāt. Not because Iām skilled, but because the moment had been five minutes, or five months, in the making before I touched the shutter. The click was just where the story happened to end.
