Moments That Miss the Eye
Posted on June 28, 2025
Some of my favourite shots are the ones that nearly didn’t happen. The ones where instinct fired just before logic caught up. Where the camera was already halfway to my eye before I realised what it was that I was reaching for. I walk through the city not with a plan, but with a mood. And that mood is usually quiet. Not passive—but quietly alert.
I’m not searching for spectacle. I’m tuned in to something gentler. I look for moments that slip beneath the surface: light folding itself into shadow, a figure framed by a flicker of glass, an alleyway that breathes like it's remembering something. The city hums, and occasionally, it sighs—and that’s when I press the shutter.
There are corners I return to over and over again. Not because anything ever happens there—but because something almost does. I’ve stood on the same pavement for forty-five minutes, camera ready, heart still. It’s not about hunting. It’s about waiting, like a needle suspended just above the groove of a record, knowing the music will begin again if you’re patient enough.
And when it does—when that frame appears, and everything aligns—the image often looks quiet. Understated. A shadow. A man leaning. A bird lifting. But what it carries is the texture of attention. Of having been noticed by someone who didn't need a reason to care.
People ask me why I shoot in places that others walk past without a second glance. I think it's because I don't want the image to shout. I want it to whisper—to feel like a thought that almost got away. There’s a kind of emotional archaeology to it. You sense that something just happened here. Or maybe it never did. That ambiguity is the whole point.
Some days, nothing comes. I walk for hours. My feet ache. My mind wanders. But even then, I don’t feel like I’ve failed. Being there—being open—is the work. You’re listening to the tempo of things most people don’t stop for. You’re learning to trust your inner metronome, that quiet tick that tells you, “Now.”
“Photography isn’t always about what’s visible—it’s about what you feel when nothing is happening.”
This image wasn’t staged. It wasn’t expected. But it felt true the second I clicked. A man waiting by a wall. A reflection catching just enough detail to anchor the moment. The way his weight settled into the frame like punctuation. That’s what I chase—not perfection, not clarity, but a kind of emotional weight you feel before you understand it.
We’re all moving too fast. But the camera asks you to slow down, to look twice, to care more deeply about ordinary things. And when you do, the ordinary becomes something else entirely. Not magical. Just... honest. And for me, that’s enough.