How do you take a good photo? People often answer by pointing to the finished image: strong composition, clean technique, pleasing color. Those are real qualities, and they matter.
But for me, the crucial part happens before that—out on location, in the moment of working. How do I arrive in a scene? What do I pay attention to, given the conditions as they are? Those questions are less about achieving a predefined result and more about staying true to the process.
I’m not trying to hit a checklist. I’m trying to let a route toward an image emerge. I don’t start with a “target photo” in my head. I start by being receptive. I look at what’s there without forcing it toward a predetermined conclusion.
Even when I set out with ideas, they often fade once I’m on site. The light isn’t what I expected. The animals don’t show up, or not where I imagined. Something in the frame pulls attention in the wrong direction. The weather shifts. The scene sets its own priorities, and my job is to respond.
Of course, I bring experience, knowledge, and technique with me. But they don’t decide in advance what the picture will be. They’re tools I can reach for when they’re needed. Where the situation leads is part of what I’m there to find out.
I think of this as an interactive triad: nature, perception, and design.
Nature provides the raw situation.
Perception determines what stands out—where my gaze lands, what I ignore, what begins to matter. It reduces complexity, condenses, and keeps shifting the center of gravity.
Design is my answer. Technique is part of that answer, but it’s in service of the image that is forming, not an image I’ve already decided on. Because I don’t lock myself into a fixed outcome, chance has room to enter—and it often shapes the work more than any plan.
The first photograph doesn’t conclude anything. It becomes feedback. The image returns to perception, changes what I notice next, and nudges the following decisions.
The three situations below show this triad at work. They are not staged examples; they arose on location. In each case, the interaction becomes visible in the way the photograph is made.
One night, temperatures dropped hard in my hometown. I got into the car without a destination and decided on the way to visit a park pond lined with bald cypress.
The water had frozen. Ice, branches, stumps, patterns, snow—there was detail everywhere. Then a single leaf, locked into the surface, caught my attention. I took out the camera.
My first image showed the delicate crystal structure of the ice—but the leaf still felt stranded, not really connected to what surrounded it. The relationship between subject and surface wasn’t clear yet, so I started working on that.
I pulled out a flash, added a wireless trigger, and placed the flash directly on the ice to bring in low, side light. Small changes in position changed everything. I moved it, checked the result, moved it again—watching the image evolve on the display.
As the light began to make sense of the surface, I added an LED to open the shadows slightly. Again: test, reject, adjust. And then, by accident, the flash slipped and aimed more directly into the ice.
I only noticed it on the display—but suddenly the leaf separated from the surface in a different way, and structures beneath the ice surfaced as well. The whole scene shifted. From that point, the image was no longer just “a leaf on ice,” but an exploration of leaf, ice, and light as one coherent system.
I drove to a nearby lake where I had photographed dragonflies not long before. I arrived with that memory—and with the expectation that I might repeat something similar. But the conditions had changed.
What drew me in first was the reed grass in backlight. The sun was low enough to make the stems glow. I sidestepped, then returned, searching for an angle where the background would fall dark so the glow could carry the frame.
As I worked with the reeds, dragonflies kept cutting through the scene—appearing, vanishing, reappearing. The combination of light, motion, and structure took over my attention and pulled me into a kind of focused waiting. I framed with space for the insects to enter and set a very fast shutter speed. Dragonflies don’t hover politely.
For a while, nothing decisive happened. I switched to continuous shooting. I also stopped “staring” through the viewfinder; I let my gaze soften so movement would register sooner. Whenever I sensed a dart of motion, I fired a burst.
Between bursts, I reviewed the images. The dragonflies were almost always outside the focus plane. So I went to manual focus and stopped down the aperture, trading some background softness for a deeper zone—covering both the reeds and the corridor where the dragonflies tended to pass.
Then more waiting. More bursts. Out of hundreds of frames, one finally brought focus and position together.
In autumn woods, not everything announces itself. At first, nothing in particular held me. I photographed anyway—trees, leaves, mushrooms—checking the display repeatedly. The images were feedback, but none of them had weight.
Then, in one frame, I noticed fine, threadlike structures on a fungus: slime moulds. I hadn’t truly seen them in the moment; the camera showed them to me first. I moved closer, sat down on the forest floor, and tried to bring this tiny world into the frame deliberately. The air smelled of earth.
As I spent time with it, I began to notice small swellings at the ends of the threads. They kept reappearing and gave the scene a center—something to orient by—so my attention tightened around them.
When I switched on an LED light, the scene changed immediately. Shadows formed, slid away, returned. Light, blur, and structure began to interact more intensely. I checked the display, adjusted, continued. Frame by frame, this small world pulled me deeper in.
These three situations are very different, but the underlying logic is the same. They show how attention shifts—and how decisions grow out of that shifting attention.
For me, what carries a photograph isn’t the faithful application of rules. It’s the moment when seeing and choosing start to work together. Technical competence helps precisely because it gets out of the way: the more fluent I am in composition and technique, the less I have to think about them on location. That leaves room to respond to what is actually happening.
Rules, experience, and technique are tools. They support the work, but they don’t define it. I use them when they serve the image—and I drop them when they become a constraint.
That’s why the triad remains central to me: nature sets the scene, perception directs the gaze, and design responds. And every now and then, a small piece of chance shifts everything.
