I didn’t plan this series when I sat down to write the first part. I thought I had one post in me about why I bother with a camera at all, and then I kept finding more questions underneath that one. Seven parts later, here’s roughly what I’ve landed on, plus what surprised me about writing it down in the first place.
The question I started with, why photograph at all, turned out not to have one answer. Some days it’s about keeping a record. Some days it’s closer to therapy, a way of getting out of my own head for an hour. Writing that part made me notice how much the reason shifts depending on my mood before I’ve even picked up the camera, which I hadn’t really clocked until I tried to explain it to someone else.
The emotional side surprised me more than I expected. I went into that post thinking I’d talk about composition and technique, and instead ended up telling a story about an A-level music essay and a teacher tearing my taste in Glenn Miller to shreds. Photography and music turned out to be doing the same job for me: reciting the text and then letting go of what anyone makes of it.
Storytelling was the one I found easiest to write, probably because I already think in contact sheets, whole rolls rather than single frames. Identity was the hardest. Writing about whether a camera reveals who you are meant admitting things I don’t love admitting, like the fact I’ve picked up more from YouTube than from thirty years of just going out and shooting. Connection reminded me how much of this supposedly solitary hobby actually happens because of other people: my kids as reluctant first models, a Nantes meet-up where I brought the smallest camera in the group, a photography collective that’s shown me the same streets through completely different eyes.
And impermanence, the last one before this, is probably the part I think about most now, weeks after writing it. Every photo is proof that a moment is already gone. I used to find that a bit bleak. Somewhere in writing it out I stopped finding it bleak and started finding it more like the whole point.
So, what’s actually changed for me, having written all this down? Not much on the surface. I still go out with the same cameras, still get annoyed at the same mistakes. But I think I’m a bit more honest with myself now about why I press the shutter when I do, and a bit less bothered when the reason doesn’t sound impressive.
If any of this made you think about your own reasons for picking up a camera, good. I’m not expecting anyone to agree with all seven parts, I don’t think I fully agree with all seven parts. If you want to tell me where you think I’ve got it wrong, the comments are open, and I mean that as a genuine invitation rather than a polite sign-off. I’ll read them properly.
I once read that if two Germans meet, they’ll form a club. I’m not German, but it’s a fair description of something more universal: the need to belong. Photographers aren’t always the most extroverted bunch, but even the shy ones want to connect with somebody who gets it. When I’m out and about, I clock anyone carrying a camera before I’ve even registered I’m doing it. Brand, make, lens, all of it, filed away automatically. Even a simple nod between strangers is a small acknowledgment: yes, you too. Am I judging them while I’m at it? Sometimes. To err is human.
A film camera round someone’s neck gets my attention faster than anything digital. When I take the Mamiya C220 out, the camera itself becomes almost as much of a talking point as whatever I actually photograph with it. People stop and ask what it is, whether you can still get film for it, or tell me their grandfather had one just like it. That’s the charm of a medium format TLR in 2026: it still gets a reaction.
Photography, and film photography especially, has a bit of a niche, insider feel to it. Carrying a film camera says something: that you’re serious enough to bother, that you know what you’re doing because the camera certainly isn’t doing it for you. We’re artists, therefore superior, or so we tell ourselves for a bit of validation. There’s an argument that film demands more knowledge, and that developing your own rolls proves some kind of dedication. Sometimes. Not always. But it’s a decent opener for a conversation, and it usually leads somewhere, even if the relationship that follows only lasts as long as the chat itself.
There’s also the connection between photographer and subject to think about. For years I was terrified of using a model. I’m an introvert, so small talk plus directing someone plus trying not to make it weird sounded like a nightmare. But I wanted to get past that. Buildings don’t talk back or judge your composition. People are a different animal entirely.
I learned the basics of lighting and then needed someone to point a camera at. My daughter and my wife were the first, unwilling volunteers really, then my son and his girlfriend at the time. After that, unsuspecting friends and fellow musicians, until eventually I had enough confidence to approach total strangers and build that rapport on the spot. Turns out plenty of them were just as nervous as I was. Another thing we had in common.
I picked up some advice from Sean Tucker, who does a lot of portraiture: just have a conversation with your model. It sounds too simple to work, but it does. It puts both of you at ease and lets the model forget they’re being photographed at all, which is usually the whole battle.
Meeting other photographers on purpose
Connection isn’t only the brief kind, a nod on the street, a stranger asking about your camera. Sometimes it’s a proper collaboration with other photographers, which for an introvert like me takes actual effort. At parties I’m the one hanging around the edge of the room talking to the dog. Genuinely good conversations, the dog and I.
Still, I make the effort sometimes and meet up with other photographers. Get me started on kit, lenses, actual cameras, and I’ll talk until the cows come home, well past the point most people have quietly switched off. But hand me an audience that actually cares and knows what I’m on about, and something in me relaxes that doesn’t relax anywhere else.
I can see how it looks from the outside: blokes getting together to obsess over a niche hobby. Sounds a bit much when I put it like that. It isn’t, I promise.
The very first post on this blog came out of a meet-up in Nantes, and it was genuinely one of the better days I’ve had with a camera. Classic male-bonding stuff: everyone else turned up with their biggest body and most expensive glass, like it was some unspoken competition. I brought my X100F, small enough to disappear in one hand. The thinking man’s camera, if I’m allowed to say that about myself. Like my car, nothing to look at twice, but I like using it and it gets the job done without any fuss.
I’ve also worked with Nantes Grand Angle, a local collective that organises outings around the city. In exchange for a free tour or a free visit somewhere, we photograph the day and write about it or post to Instagram. I’ve done a couple of these with them, and it’s always interesting watching other photographers work the same scene. Same place, same light, completely different eye. There’s a genuine feel-good factor in that shared vantage point, even if we all walk away with different pictures.
Photography can feel like a solitary thing, and plenty of the time it is. But there’s more connection hiding in it than people give it credit for: the nod between strangers, the collaboration with other photographers, the quiet trust you build with a subject in front of the lens. None of that happens if you’re not paying attention to the people around you as much as the light.
I don’t know that photography needs to mean anything grander than that. Every so often it puts me in a room, or a street, or a Nantes side alley, with someone I wouldn’t otherwise have talked to, camera or no camera. That’s plenty.
A photo doesn’t just show you what’s in front of the camera. It shows you something about whoever’s holding it too. What you point it at, what you wait around for, how you frame the thing, all of that gives you away eventually, whether you meant it to or not.
The selfie question
Take the selfie, probably the most modern version of self-expression going. For some people it’s genuine. For a lot of people it’s a carefully staged little performance for Instagram, hashtag lifestyle, hashtag ootd, hashtag me-myself-and-I. I’m not knocking it exactly, but it does make you wonder how much of it is really self-expression and how much is just performance.
That’s not really what I mean when I talk about photography reflecting who you are, though. Photography’s the one art form where you get to look through the exact same hole I looked through when I pressed the shutter. You’re seeing what I saw, in that instant, and depending on how I’ve edited it afterwards you might catch a bit of whatever was going on in my head at the time too.
Picture two people either side of a coin held up between them. One’s looking at the head, the other’s looking at the tail. Neither of them is wrong, they’re just seeing half the thing. A photograph works a bit like that. What you take from it depends on where you’re standing, and more than that, on everything you’re carrying with you before you even looked at it.
What a photo says about me, whether I like it or not
There’s a shot I took at one of the anti-government demonstrations in Nantes a while back. Someone looking at that could reasonably assume I’ve got strong feelings about French politics. Truth is I was about as neutral as it’s possible to be, I was there for the photograph, not the cause. But the viewer fills that gap in with their own assumptions, and there’s not much I can do about that once the shutter’s gone. I do the same thing looking at other people’s work, so I can hardly complain.
Then there’s the question of why I press the shutter at that exact split second and not a second before or after. Cartier-Bresson had a whole theory about the decisive moment. Mine’s less elegant: I try to clear the frame of anything distracting, get my subject exactly where I want them, or just wait until they walk into the right spot. Means I miss plenty of shots. That’s fine, it’s part of the deal. Has it turned me into some miserable perfectionist? No, thankfully. Do I still push for that extra bit of effort anyway? Yes. Not for me particularly, more for whoever ends up looking at the photo afterwards. Call it professional pride if you like. If you’re going to bother doing something at all, you might as well try and do it properly.
Have I actually changed, though?
I’m honestly not sure my subject matter’s moved on as much as I have. Am I still taking roughly the same photos I always did? Probably, yeah. But I’ve picked up plenty along the way, mostly off YouTube if I’m honest. Forty-odd years since I started, and I’m still learning new things every year, more in the last ten than most of the decades before that. I know more about film now, how to shoot it and develop it properly, and I’ve got a lot better at editing. Worth mentioning I trained in desktop publishing back in 2003, of all things. Twenty-odd years ago, Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXpress, the works. Feels like a different life.
New gear and different lenses got me properly into wide angle for a while, enough to get it out of my system, or so I thought at the time. I’ll probably go back to it again at some point, knowing me. Either way it changed how I look at a scene, and I know how to use the distortion now instead of fighting it. It gives a photo a different kind of impact, something a bit more unusual than the standard view, and it’s occasionally the thing that makes a client notice a shot.
Confidence has come the boring way, just from doing it over and over. Getting out with the camera is still the only trick that actually works. Some people might say I lean too much on gear. Maybe. But I’ve put the hours in too, and at some point that earns you a bit of trust in your own eye.
Do I take the same photos now as I did in 1987? In some ways, yes, because whatever’s essentially me still comes through in the picture. Back then I was purely obsessed with nailing the exposure, and I didn’t have a fraction of the technique or the visual references I’ve got now. I was also fifteen. I’m over fifty now. The core of it hasn’t moved much. Everything around it has, same as it would for anyone after thirty-odd years.
Thirty years in France
Something people might not know: I’ve lived in France longer than I lived in the UK. Has that got into my photography somewhere? Maybe. Probably, actually.
France gave the world Cartier-Bresson and Doisneau, and their street work still gets me every time, that deceptive simplicity that looks effortless and clearly wasn’t. I’d be lying if I said that hasn’t rubbed off on me. It’s there in how I look at Nantes, walking around with a camera, feeling like they’re somewhere just behind my shoulder. Subject matter shifts country to country too. The UK and France don’t hand you the same photos at all.
Doesn’t stop there either. I’ve picked up just as much from photographers online. Sean Tucker, Thomas Heaton, James Popsys, Mango Street, Peter McKinnon, and Jamie Windsor, that lot have all left a mark one way or another. Not a single Frenchman on that list, which says more about me than about French YouTubers. I speak French all day at work and everywhere outside my front door. By the time I’m home I want my own language back. That’s a me thing, not a them thing.
So does the camera show who I am? Some of it, probably more than I control. My photos say something about how careful I am, or I’m not, about being fair to what’s in front of me, about which places pull at me, Nantes streets, French light, and about which photographers I’ve let get under my skin. I don’t think that adds up to some tidy answer about identity. It’s more that every roll I shoot is a little bit of evidence, and I’m not always the one who gets to read it. Maybe that’s the interesting part. I’ll let you decide what mine says about me.
