I’m trying something a bit different today.

I’m going to talk through a photo, in the moment, as I’m taking it. The process and the narrative behind it.

Right now I’m stood by a wall nervous about having my phone out.

I’ve seen a lot here. It’s an area folks smoke crack, steal bikes and get into scrapes, but it’s morning and there aren’t too many people around.

Something caught my eye as I walked past today.

‘Flag Red’.

I take out my camera and frame the shot. I don’t want any unnecessary clutter and I’m trying to get the 2D flatness I like in my images.

As I’m framing I notice a waft of sweet, almost caramelised, piss.

It’s the brightest day we’ve had this year and the sun’s gently heating up thousands of historical urinations levelled against this wall.

It comes in waves and reminds me of sauna and the heat that ebbs and flows, only it’s piss.

Why I Like This Meaningful Meaningless Mess on a Wall

I like the simplicity and the clean colour palette. The accidental canvas the peeling wall provides.

The writing itself feels meaningful.

I have no idea what it means but it probably means something important to someone.

I’m a teenager sitting in history class. I’m looking at paragraph in a textbook that talks about the Red Scare in the US in the 50s. I don’t know why the memory is lodged in my head but these words trigger it.

It’s not likely a reference to that passage in my old textbook but who knows, it might be. It might also be an instruction of where to place something for a maintenance person, or a tag from a graffiti artist.

A wall and a daubing of unknowns.

In world that insists on labelling and categorising and defining meaning, this moment of uncluttered abstraction and of not knowing, is welcome.

Knowing When Not to Bother Taking a Shot (And Being Cool With It)

There’s a group of three workmen, just around the corner. I am in their blind spot, and they can’t see me, so I luxuriate in the time and space I have to get my tatty wall shot.

When I stop shooting I take another look at my neighbours.

All of them are smoking, wearing grey tracksuit trouser bottoms and yellow hi vis vests. Fogged up sartorial triplets.

Would they make a good photo?

I think about crossing the road to get a picture, but I don’t.

Years ago I would have wrestled with this.

Get the shot, think later. But there’s that slight back of mind, sometimes front of mind, hassley element to street photography.

Maybe hassley’s not the right word. It’s fear of intruding into someone else’s world.

Some photographers are naturally great at navigating this. Others have to cross the mythical 10,000 hour threshold of doing a thing repeatedly until it loses it’s fear factor.

A key realisation for any photographer, or creative (or human for that matter) is the realisation that if your intention is good and you do something confidently, it puts everyone else at ease.

Nervously stealing photos with your camera held at strange angles while your eyes dart back and forth and your body language is stiff and sneaky makes you stand out.

It’s a creep klaxon. At best you look like a spy, at worst a pervert. Trying to game invisibility doesn’t work.

Calmly, confidently and slowly frame your shot with intention in your body and a smile on your face and you become part of the scene. You are unthreatening, you’re not acting nervously. You are meant to be there.

I understand this but I still have a love hate relationship shooting street photos.

From an aesthetic standpoint I’m not a fan of subjects looking shocked or surprised in my photos. It taints the photo for me, because I was part of the process and I end up feeling like a bit of a dick.

The other element is the adrenalin. I don’t always want to drown in that buzz.

With that said I’m obsessed with street photography as an art form. Well done, it’s a blend of wit, surprise, superhuman framing and pure, beautiful happenstance. I just don’t always love doing it.

I say that now, still stood by this pissy wall. But I know I’ll need another street photography hit at some point.

The difference in my photography now, to say several years ago, is that I’m more comfortable assessing whether or not to take the shot.

I still take street photos – especially if I think there’s a potential banger – but I take more time to assess if the background is interesting enough or if there is enough going on in the photo.

That’s what I faced today with my triplet gentlemen. It was a scene that should have the ingredients of an interesting story, photographically.

They had interesting faces. Pockmarked and gnarled. There was some interest from all the smoke.

But the background was too cluttered. A busy road on one side, an ugly hoarding the other.

They were sat and stood around a stone bench (sounds interesting, it wasn’t), phones out. They weren’t angled in an interesting way.

Not Everything Works Better as a Photograph

I knew it wouldn’t make an interesting photo.

It was one of those instances where my eyes saw and then reimagined, something more interesting than I could have captured with my camera.

That’s ok.

Sometimes it’s good to take advice from some of life’s great philosophers.

As Joey from Friends once said: “Take a Mental Picture”.

Know when your eyes and head will do a better job.

I can picture their frowns. Frown lines that said hard living. Frown lines like canyons.

I can still enjoy that they were dressed in matchy matchy outfits in my mind’s eye.

Swarthy men doing something I’d normally associate with teenage girls going to a K Pop concert.

To have captured all that with the camera I would have had to have taken multiple shots. Close ups of their faces with a portrait lens. A wide angle shot of them together doing something interesting – which might have taken half an hour or more.

This isn’t something any of us would have enjoyed. I’d probably end up peeling bits of camera off the pavement and my face.

So I try not to be too hard on myself and you should too.

Not every scene will make a great photo, even if you want it to, even if you feel like it should. Enjoy the moment for what it is. There will be thousands more that will work beautifully behind a lens.

In pursuit of ‘The Quiet Photograph’

The quiet photo, as I pretentiously call it, is want I’ve been drawn to more recently, for the last 5 or 6 years.

It can be a photo of any genre – landscape, urban, abstract, even street – that has an opaque calm to it.

It’s a shape, it’s a sleepy angle, it’s a very still, geometrical tower block. It’s a happy juxtaposition that doesn’t assault the senses.

‘Mondrian and Rothko’s Child’

This was taken outside a corner shop this morning, near where I used to live, which I’m obsessed by.

There’s always something odd going on with this wall.

Usually it’s rubbish or discarded stock left outside, precariously balanced against the wall. Because they don’t have access to a big enough bins or storage everything sits outside.

Painted crates and other items scrape against the wall and so you get accidental minimalist expressionist pieces emerging.

‘That’s a Nice Contrast’

There’s also a graffiti artist, who I’ve only ever seen tag a tiny area in Hackney, who just writes the word ‘THATS’. No context, no apostrophe.