On shooting with intention

There’s a version of photography that’s reactive — you wander, you see, you shoot. It produces a lot of frames and occasionally something arresting. I spent my first few years doing exactly this, accumulating hard drives full of near-misses.

The shift happened when I started leaving the camera in the bag more often.

Seeing before shooting

Not taking a shot is a skill. It requires you to look at something, assess it honestly, and decide it isn’t worth the shutter actuation. That sounds easy. It isn’t — especially when you’ve just hiked two miles to get somewhere and the light is doing something interesting but not quite right.

The photographers I admire most talk about this. They walk a location, sometimes for hours, without shooting. They’re building a mental library of angles, of how the light moves, of what the scene looks like when nobody’s in it and when somebody is. The photograph happens before the shutter opens.

Constraints as a tool

Shooting on film forced this on me. Thirty-six frames is a budget. You start asking yourself — seriously, not rhetorically — whether you want to spend one on this. The cost isn’t just financial. It’s the weight of knowing you can’t delete it later.

Digital eliminated that constraint, which is largely a good thing. But it’s worth imposing artificial versions of it occasionally. One memory card. One lens. One hour. Limitations make you commit.

The frame you don’t take

The best photograph I’ve never made is of the corner of 16th and Valencia on a Tuesday evening in November. I’ve walked past it dozens of times and I know exactly what it looks like — the way the light from the taqueria spills onto the wet pavement, the particular angle of a fire escape. I’ve raised the camera twice and put it down both times.

Maybe it’s better as a thing I’m still waiting for. Maybe I’m wrong and I should have shot it. Either way, the deliberation is the point.