A photo that wasn’t meant to be a photo

Not every photo I take is meant for a portfolio or a blog post. Some are just notes to myself — a way of remembering how I saw something, without much thought for whether it’s any good.

This one’s a black and white shot of my son in a lift, and it wasn’t planned. It happens to land close to the rule of thirds, but that’s luck rather than intent. The detail I actually like is my own reflection in the mirror behind him — I hadn’t noticed it until I looked at the photo properly afterwards, and now it’s the part I keep coming back to.

I don’t think there’s a grand lesson in it. It’s a small, ordinary moment: my son’s expression somewhere between curiosity and mild boredom, me half-visible in a mirror I forgot was there. But it’s stuck with me more than plenty of photos I’ve actually planned out, which is probably the point of taking these kinds of notes in the first place — they catch something the planned shots don’t.

The following photos, or should I say visual notes, were taken over two September Saturdays with my Fujifilm X100F. Nothing more calculated than that.