Most of the time, I pick up my camera not to create a "masterpiece" but simply to record. The afternoon light falling on a windowsill succulent. My partner cooking in the kitchen. Raindrops on window glass blurring the street beyond. These photos may never enter a portfolio or rack up likes on social media — but they are the truest part of my personal history. Looking back years later, ordinary days become precious, almost magical.
For me, photography has never been just about creating beauty — it's a way of resisting forgetting. Those moments I thought I'd never lose eventually fade without photographs. Ten years of carrying a camera around Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and wherever work sends me has taught me that memory is a terrible archivist. It keeps the highlights and quietly deletes everything else. The camera is the only honest record I have.
Every time you press the shutter, you're saying: "This moment deserves to be remembered."
The camera I actually carry
There is a gap between the gear I own and the gear I use. My Canon EOS 5D Mark II lives in the cabinet far more than it should. What gets picked up on a random weekday is usually the little Canon EOS Rebel T3i with a 50mm f/1.8, or, honestly, my phone. The 50mm on that crop-sensor body gives me something close to an 80mm field of view, which sounds like a strange choice for a walk-around lens until you notice it matches how I actually see the inside of my life — close, slightly compressed, and kind to the faces I love.
I stopped calling every outing a "shoot" a long time ago. If I deliberately pack the 5D Mark III and the EF 85mm f/1.8 USM, I have decided in advance that today is about pictures, and that decision changes how I behave around people. The 85mm makes beautiful portraits, but it also puts distance between me and whoever I am photographing, and sometimes a foot of distance is the difference between a photograph and a performance. Half the time I would rather be present and miss the frame.
The phone deserves a fair defense too. Its pictures live in a shared album my family actually opens, and a photograph nobody looks at has failed at its only job. When I want the image to feel like a memory rather than a document, I reach for the small camera; when I want the memory to be shared before dinner, the phone wins.
Why the ordinary photographs survive
A portfolio edit is ruthless. It keeps whatever is strongest, not whatever is truest. I understood this while assembling a set of Hong Kong shots taken from Victoria Peak at sunset — technically the best work I did that year, and I could tell you almost nothing about the evening itself. The frames I can still narrate are the boring ones: my desk in Futian at six in the evening, the way the low sun came through the window and landed on a book I was never going to finish.
Some of those frames come from film. I keep a roll of Kodak Portra 400 loaded in a small point-and-shoot and let it sit for months, shooting maybe one frame a week. When I finally develop it, I get a diary instead of a project. Twelve usable images out of thirty-six is a good return, and the ones that disappoint me are as useful as the ones that don't, because they show me what I was paying attention to when I thought nobody was watching.
The same logic applies to the work people pay for. I photograph architecture and products for clients, and I care about those pictures. But the habit that keeps my eye sharp is the private one — the unglamorous documenting that nobody pays for and no algorithm rewards.
Small habits that keep me shooting
- One camera stays charged and within reach. A body in a bag on a shelf is a body that never fires; a body on the desk next to the kettle gets used.
- I photograph the same subject over and over. My windowsill succulent has been shot in more kinds of light than most of my paid subjects, and that repetition taught me more about exposure than any tutorial I have read.
- Everything syncs to Lightroom Mobile the moment I get home. If editing takes more than two minutes on my phone, it doesn't happen, and unedited files become dead files.
- I back up to three places — a working drive, an external drive, and a cloud folder — because the day I lost a card with a year of family pictures on it was the day I stopped trusting a single copy.
- I print one frame a month. A cheap 6x4 print stuck to the fridge outranks ten thousand files I never open.
If you feel like you have nothing to photograph
Most people who tell me they have run out of subjects are looking in the wrong direction. They are scanning for something impressive — a landmark, a mountaintop, a sunset over Shenzhen Bay — and ignoring the ninety-nine percent of their life that is genuinely theirs. The English countryside taught me this on a trip where I had no plan and no scouting, and a foggy lane behind a rented cottage produced better pictures than anything I chased on purpose.
One exercise never fails me: set a single constraint. Today I only shoot shadows. Or only the color red. Or only what is within three steps of my front door. Constraints do the work an exotic location usually does — they force you to look instead of to travel.
Start with your own kitchen. Photograph the light as it moves across the counter over a single afternoon. Then do it again a week later and compare the two sets. You will learn more about color temperature, contrast, and patience in those two sessions than in a month of chasing spectacular locations.
Photography is not a competition to be in extraordinary places. It is a decision to pay attention where you already are. The ordinary days are the ones that quietly add up to a life, and a camera is the only thing I own that lets me keep them.