The oak tree at the corner of Brisbane and Barcelona in the Huber Village neighborhood is getting a new owner on Tuesday. They also get the accompanying house.

What strikes me about this tree, aside from its obvious dimensions, is that it once stood in an open field. One of my earlier photos of the tree posted to Facebook received a comment from a woman who remembered, as a young girl, climbing the tree with friends and watching the construction of I-270, past cows and horses in nearby fields.

A few photos over the years.

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I’ve spent several years photographing the gravestones of Revolutionary War soldiers in and around Westerville, and the longer I do it, the more I return to certain markers that seem to ask for another look. Only a few have modern stones like this one, for John Williams in Copeland Cemetery off Yankee Street near Sunbury Road. I’ve visited this marker many times, but this is the best photograph I’ve made of it.

I wanted this photo to remain simple, letting time do the heavy lifting. On the surface, it is a grave marker photographed straight on, surrounded by grass and dry leaves. But I was not interested in making a record shot. I wanted the frame itself to give the marker more weight. By letting the stone fill most of the image, I made the text the subject immediately. The leaves at the edges are not clutter. I used them as a natural frame. Their warm oranges against the cold gray stone created the emotional split I was after: life and season pressed against permanence and death.

What mattered most to me was restraint. I did not want a dramatic angle or a forced, attention-seeking moment. I wanted the image to feel steady, quiet, and honest. So I relied on careful placement, soft falloff around the corners, and enough texture in the grass and stone to make the scene feel worn, old, and human.

I was also thinking about rhythm. The lettering falls into clean horizontal bands, giving the image structure, while the leaves break that order just enough to keep it from feeling stiff. The largest leaf in the upper right pulls the eye outward, while the large name at the center pulls it back. That push and pull creates movement even though nothing in the frame is moving.

The slightly dreamy rendering was part of that decision too. I did not want the image to feel purely documentary. I wanted it to feel closer to memory than evidence. That felt right for the subject. A grave marker is factual, but remembrance never is. Memory softens things. It blurs edges. It carries feeling as much as information.

The main lesson for me in this photograph is that mood often comes from control at the edges. I kept the center clear, readable, and stable, then let the perimeter go darker, softer, and more organic. That contrast directs attention without depending on aggressive blur or shallow depth of field.

Color is doing important work here. The orange leaves set the season, establish the emotional tone, and create visual entry points into the image. By getting close and excluding the wider cemetery, I removed distractions and made the marker feel more intimate, almost like a portrait of absence. The top-down viewpoint matters too. It flattens the scene, emphasizes text and texture, and keeps the image grounded.

What I take from this image is simple: fill the frame with what matters. Use edge detail to support the subject, not compete with it. Let warm and cool color contrast carry emotion quickly. Trust a centered composition when the surrounding elements create enough tension. Use texture to bring in age, place, and credibility. Let softness serve a subject rooted in memory. Exclude the wider scene when intimacy matters more than context.

As July 4 approaches, I will share more examples from this project. That feels important to me, not just as a photographer but as someone who knows these markers are never merely historical objects. They deserve to be understood and treated with respect, because they were as important then to the soldier’s family as the markers we place for those lost in today’s conflicts. I know that personally. My son, a combat soldier born in Georgia, lies in a small field near Ohio Civil War soldiers, where they now share the same ground and, I hope, the same respect for their sacrifice.

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I don’t always take my drone with me, especially on days like today when my drone weather app was glowing red, warning of high wind gusts. But I’ve learned it takes very little extra effort to toss the drone in the car, and much less effort than wishing later that I’d brought it when the weather clears for a few minutes, the sky opens up, and I’m stuck doing everything from ground level.

I knew this morning which photographs I wanted to make, and I also knew that if conditions gave me even a small chance, I could probably get them. Not without some worry, but I would still manage to get them. That turned out to be the case.

My strategy was simple. I kept the drone low, about five feet off the ground, as I moved from place to place. The wind is usually much less troublesome there than at fifty feet. And just as important, if a gust did knock the drone around, a five-foot fall is a lot easier to survive than a fifty-foot one.

Once I reached my desired spot, I would raise the drone just high enough for the shot, take a few frames, then bring it back down low before moving on. That method worked well at the Sharp House and at the boardwalk. It also worked at the bridge site and Braun Farm, where fill dirt was being leveled for planting. It succeeded last week as well, when I photographed Millstone Creek Park.

Days like this remind me that a drone doesn’t need to go high to be useful. It doesn’t have to be dramatic to do its job. Sometimes it’s just a raised tripod, a way to get a little separation from the ground and see the scene more clearly.

It also reminds me that overshooting isn’t usually necessary. A drone makes it easy to stay in the air and keep shooting, but having more frames often just means more time editing later. I’d rather know what I want, move into position, make the photograph, and move on.

That might be the real lesson for me here. Keep it simple. Fly low when the wind is strong. Raise the drone only when the shot requires it. Capture just a few frames instead of dozens. The goal isn’t to end up with more files. It’s to come home with the photographs I set out to make.

In total, I made 11 frames with the drone today. All from less than 50 feet off the ground.

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Rarely does a day go by without someone asking, “What’s your final photo for today?”

I try to answer as kindly as I can. The truth is, I don’t have an answer.

Sometimes I point to a photo I made earlier in the day, though it may well be replaced by something I shoot later.

Sometimes I haven’t yet made any photo that feels worthy of being singled out as the day’s choice.

Most often, though, my answer is simpler: there is no photo in my camera yet that I’d be willing to put my name on as My Final Photo, especially if it were truly the final one. Nothing has yet revealed itself as equal to that weight.

That uncertainty doesn’t bother me much. In that sense, I guess I’m like an Alfred E.. Neuman photographer: What, me worry? I don’t worry that My Final Photo isn’t obvious, isn’t yet in my camera, or hasn’t shown itself. I don’t get rattled by the chaos of the search, or even by those strange moments when everything feels silent and still.

I trust that the photograph will appear. No worry.

Note: The image above is AI-generated from a photo of me, Uptown Westerville, and my personal Alfred E. Neuman For President poster.

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I’ve come to think that the photographs I care about most are made in the second act.

In screenwriting, the second act is the unsettled middle, where the story finds its shape through uncertainty. Things shift, fall away, and transform. A person moves through the world not fully knowing what’s being asked of them. The first act gives an entrance, the third an ending. The second act is where you’re tested, following something before you can explain it, and discovery happens.

That is where photography lives for me, too.

Looking at a photograph, people see a finished thing: a frame, a choice, a piece of the world held still. The image can seem composed and conclusive, as if I knew exactly what to do. But that’s almost never how it feels. Photography feels less like an answer and more like moving toward something sensed but unnamed.

Most of the time, I begin with almost nothing. A walk. A corner. Weather. The way light catches a wall, or doesn’t. A figure in the distance. A color that pulls the rest of the street into relation. I look, then look again. I slow down. I wait. Sometimes I keep walking and then stop because some part of me has understood something a second before the rest of me has. I turn back. I stand there longer than I meant to. I try to understand what I’m being asked to notice.

That, to me, is the beginning of the picture.

Not certainty. Not mastery. Not a plan unfolding neatly. More often, it is a low-grade suspense. Something is there, but it hasn’t declared itself. The photograph begins as a pressure in my attention, a slight quickening, a sense that the ordinary surface of things has shifted and that if I stay with it, something may open.

Sometimes things open; sometimes they remain closed. Either way, the process reveals something important.

That matters too. The second act is not where everything works. It is where you remain inside the possibility that something might.

The language of photography often feels wrong to me when it focuses only on resolution. We talk about the captured moment or decisive instant, and that can be true. But those phrases make the act sound cleaner than it is. They skip the drift, missed chances, uncertainty, and the feeling of being led by a scene not yet understood—the time spent hovering near an image before it forms.

When I’m out photographing, I am not collecting conclusions. I am moving through unfinished moments.

A man standing under a clear umbrella in the rain, lit by the pale glow of his phone, does not present itself to me as an explanation of modern life, loneliness, or distraction. It begins more quietly than that. First, there is the odd beauty of the umbrella itself, how it both hides and reveals. Then the way the rain turns visible on its surface. Then the isolation of the figure inside it, carrying his own weather and his own light. Everything outside him softens into blur, and for a second, the whole scene feels both public and private, exposed and sealed off. I do not think these things in words all at once. I feel them gather. The picture emerges from that gathering.

Or a fisherman sits in silhouette against a body of blue water. Seen later, it can look peaceful, nearly absolute in its simplicity. But what I remember is not peace. I remember the distance, the waiting, the strange balance between solitude and activity, between the man’s stillness and the movement implied beyond him. The picture did not seem meaningful. It became meaningful by degrees. It was as if the scene had to keep lowering its voice before I could hear what was there.

That is the kind of experience I trust, and it shapes how I approach my work.

Not because it is vague, but because it is alive. It allows the photograph to remain discovered rather than imposed. It lets the world have some say in the image.

I’ve learned that arriving with too fixed an idea of the photograph flattens the experience before it can become anything. The frame may be competent or strong, but it can already feel closed and resolved. The photographs that stay with me usually interrupt me and require me to adjust my understanding. They do not confirm what I already know—they show me where I have not fully looked.

That’s why I return to the second act. It names the emotional state in which photographs that matter to me are made: before interpretation, before statements or themes, in the middle of attention—still following, still susceptible, still trying to recognize the shape of something as it emerges.

The third act comes later, marking a shift in who interprets the photograph.

It belongs to the viewer, to the person who sees the photograph after the searching is over. For them, the image arrives all at once. It is already framed, already selected, already still. They are free to make meaning from it, and they should. A photograph has to live there too, in the act of being seen. But viewing is different from making. The viewer receives the image as revelation. I usually arrive at it through pursuit.

That difference matters because it keeps photography honest. It reminds me that the finished image is not the whole truth. A photograph may look inevitable, but it was born from chance. It was made amid distractions, missed timing, wrong angles, doubts, hesitations, and small shifts in body and thought. Its stillness is real, but so is the uncertainty it came from. In the best pictures, you still feel that uncertainty—not as confusion, but as openness. The image has form, but it has not sealed itself shut. It keeps breathing a little.

Maybe that is what I respond to most in photographs, including my own, when I am lucky enough to make one. Not just composition, not just subject, not just technical control. All of those matter. What moves me is the trace of an encounter. It’s the sense that the photographer did not simply take the world, but met it. Something happened between seeing and understanding. The photograph is what remains of that exchange.

For me, that exchange is personal. It shows how I move through a day, how I notice, and how long I can stay with something before habit turns it back into scenery. The camera gives me a reason to stay in that state longer than I might otherwise.

When I say the photographs I care about are made in the second act, I mean they come from this lived middle ground: waiting without guarantee, following a feeling I can’t yet defend, letting the world become briefly unfamiliar, then briefly legible. The picture arrives as recognition, not as a conclusion.

And often that recognition is brief, lasting only a moment.

Then the street changes, or the light goes flat, or the person moves on, or the silence breaks. Whatever was there returns to the flow of everything else. What remains is the frame, if I was lucky enough to make it: a still image, a finished object. It is something that can now be looked at as though it had always been whole.

But I remember it was not whole when I found it.

It was partial, unstable, and passing. It belongs to that stretch when I was not yet sure what I was seeing, only that I needed to stay with it. That is the most meaningful part of photography for me—not the explanation or interpretation afterward. The deepest part is earlier than that.

It is the moment when something in the world starts to gather, and I feel myself gathering with it.

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I have never thought the f/8 part was the point.

Of course it matters. The camera is set at a practical, competent place, so the photographer isn’t distracted by settings while the moment slips by. There is nothing mystical about it. The phrase endures not because of f/8, but because of what follows.

“Be there.”

That sounds simple until you try to live it out with a camera.

A man carried a young girl across the street in late afternoon light. At first, the picture seemed to be about the two of them, about motion, about the tenderness of a child being carried at the end of the day. But what made the frame happen was smaller and more exact than that. She had just stepped into a stream of sunset light reflected from windows across the street. That reflected light caught her hair, her cheek, and the edge of her dress, lifting her away from the darker background. The father was just outside it. He was still carrying her, still central to the picture, but he remained in a different register of light. They moved together, but the light described them differently.

That was the picture.

Not father and daughter in the abstract, but that brief division cast by reflected sunset. Then, a moment: one figure stepped into the light. The other remained outside that light. It lasted barely an instant. The camera had to be ready. More crucially, the eye even more so. That is what “being there” demands: not just presence, but attention, honed by practice. Vigilance to subtle shifts. A readiness to trust that what matters may emerge quietly.

Other times, the picture asks for less.

Snow falling into red hair. No face. No visible expression. No event beyond weather and color and the simple fact of someone standing in it. The photograph worked because it did not need any additional work. It did not need a larger explanation or a more dramatic gesture. It only needed to be seen and accepted for what it was. There is a kind of discipline in that, too, maybe a harder one. To recognize when the world has already arranged the photograph and when all a photographer has to do is not interfere.

Then there are moments when the world offers something stranger.

A crash scene on a snowy night. Headlights and taillights diffused through blowing snow. Cars at wrong angles. The road is uncertain for everyone. In the middle of it, two figures under an umbrella, one gesturing toward the car. The whole scene was trouble, interruption, cold, and hazardous. But there was also a brief calm in it, something almost lyrical. Not because the crash was less real, and not because beauty excuses danger, but because the weather and the light and the human gestures came into alignment for an instant. The umbrella gathered them into a dark shape against the whitened road. Snow turned headlights into atmosphere. What was chaotic in life became, for a second, coherent in the frame.

That is another way of being there.

Not every photograph asks the same thing of the photographer. What unites them is not aperture. It’s practiced presence. Some rely on catching a subtle shift in light. Some need to see that the simplest thing is already whole. Some require holding steady in confusion, long enough to see that even trouble has form. Practiced presence comes from returning to trust small moments, learning not to overlook the ordinary, and staying with the world until it reveals how a picture wants to be made.

That is why I have always thought “being there” should lead the phrase.

F/8 reminds you to master your craft so it doesn’t hinder your work. But craft is just the start. Deeper work is learning to arrive fully, remain open, and know when a scene asks for attention, restraint, or patience. A camera can be set instantly; seeing takes longer. It demands more of the photographer. It asks for a presence deep enough for the world to reveal not just what happens, but what kind of photograph it offers.

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The difference between Photojournalism/76 photographers and those in the 2026 Best of Photojournalism is bigger than the shift from black and white to color. The deeper change appears in the names themselves.

In 1976, I photographed Gloria Swanson while working as a staff photographer for the Fort Lauderdale News. Like most assignments in a daily newspaper newsroom, it began and ended quickly. Film went into the camera. The shutter clicked. The rolls went back to the office, where the film was developed, prints were made, and the photographs were sent upstairs to the composing room for the next day’s paper.

Months later, my photo resurfaced in a different context. It had been selected for the annual Pictures of the Year competition, the profession’s long-running showcase of the best work produced by newspaper photographers. Eventually, it appeared in the printed volume Photojournalism/76, among the photographs judged to represent the year’s best work in American photojournalism.

Looking through that book today reveals more than a collection of strong photographs. It reveals the profession’s structure as it existed at the time.

The photographers listed worked for newspapers throughout the United States, their affiliations reflecting a map of the regional press: Akron Beacon Journal, Milwaukee Journal, Kansas City Star, Charlotte Observer, Dayton Daily News. These local and regional publications documented community life, each paper reflecting its community’s photographic voice.

Most photographers were staff members. Their assignments followed the rhythm of local journalism: city council in the morning, school events in the afternoon, basketball games at night. Photojournalism/76 features Skip Peterson’s photo of a young evangelist praying with a believer, Stanley Forman’s Pulitzer-winning image of a mother and daughter on a collapsing fire escape, Jay Dickman’s solemn photo of a police officer’s funeral, and Jerry Gay’s lively scene of a couple kissing while a businessman looks on—all capturing the ordinary and extraordinary moments that filled American newspapers.

Those photographs reached their readers through the newspapers that employed the photographers who made them. When images moved beyond their local markets, they traveled through a distribution system that now feels almost mechanical.

Distribution beyond the local readership depended on the Associated Press photo network.

When I arrived in Columbus, Ohio, in 1982, that system was still operating much as it had for decades. Columbus was one of the largest Associated Press newspaper membership centers in the country. Photographers across Ohio contributed substantially to the AP report with stories and photographs. Yet the infrastructure that carried those photos was surprisingly limited.

There were only seven photo transmitters in the entire state.

Most transmitters were in newspaper photo departments and connected by AT&T's leased network to the AP control bureau in Chicago, which managed traffic. Sending a single photograph took about ten minutes.

During those ten minutes, the transmitter was occupied. Every other image had to wait its turn. Editors had to decide whether a photograph justified tying up the machine.

The network worked, but it worked deliberately. Because transmission capacity was limited, most photographs appearing in American newspapers were produced locally by the photographers who worked there, and only a small number traveled beyond their original markets. The limits of that system shaped not only how photographs traveled, but also whose photographs were likely to be seen beyond their own communities.

Changing Priorities

One of the most talented photographers in Ohio during those years worked far from an AP transmitter.

The New Philadelphia Times-Reporter served a small city in eastern Ohio along a north–south highway. It was not a place where dramatic breaking news captured statewide attention. Assignments were familiar to anyone at a community newspaper: high school sports, county fairs, church festivals, parades, and other small-town rituals.

Yet the photographer working there had an extraordinary eye. He could turn ordinary moments into compelling visual stories. A wrestling match in a crowded gymnasium and children running through a carnival midway could transform into an image full of light and movement. Scenes that might seem routine to others became photographs that made editors pause.

I knew these photos deserved a wider audience. The challenge was not the photography. The challenge was the network.

New Philadelphia had no Associated Press photo transmitter. The nearest bureau was in Columbus. If the photographer wanted his work to reach newspapers beyond his town, the prints had to be physically shipped.

So the photographs went on a Greyhound bus.

An envelope containing the prints would be placed on a bus headed toward Columbus. When it arrived at the downtown station, someone from the AP bureau would walk two blocks to pick up the package. The prints were captioned and finally placed on the transmitter. Only then could the photographs begin their ten-minute journey across the wirephoto network.

By the time those images appeared in other newspapers, they were often two days old. Sometimes older, depending on when they were first published locally.

Today, that delay feels unimaginable. At the time, it was simply how the system worked.

Eventually, the system adapted. A transmitter was reassigned to the New Philadelphia newspaper from another Associated Press member’s paper that had stopped contributing photographs to the report. Moving the machine required approvals from several levels of AP management, along with coordination across the technical and telecommunications infrastructure supporting the network.

Once the machine was installed, photographs from New Philadelphia could finally move directly and quickly onto the statewide wire.

The decision proved wise, though the outcome was not exactly what anyone expected. The photographer whose work had prompted the change was soon hired away by a much larger metropolitan newspaper after editors there recognized the quality of his work. In the years that followed, he was named Photographer of the Year several times before eventually retiring from that larger paper.

Transitioning To Color

Technology shaped not only how photographs traveled, but also how they appeared in print. Most photographs moving through the Associated Press were black and white, as color photography, though available, was used sparingly. Printing color required adjustments in the pressroom for ink registration and reproduction, so newspapers scheduled color pages only on certain days when presses were configured accordingly.

Black-and-white film fit the rhythm of the newsroom. It could be developed quickly in the darkroom. Prints could be made and transmitted with relatively little delay.

Color was another matter.

Before digital transmission, delivering a color photograph required sending three separate images. A color print was mounted on the transmitter. A scanning head moved across the photograph while colored filters separated the image into its components.

First cyan, then magenta, then yellow. Each pass required about ten minutes. A single color photograph, therefore, occupied the transmitter for roughly thirty minutes before receiving newspapers could reconstruct the image for printing.

Editors had to decide whether the photograph justified tying up the machine for half an hour.

Change began with the launch of USA Today in 1982 and its daily color photographs. The deeper shift came in the mid-1990s, when the AP’s Photostream electronic darkroom allowed photographs to be scanned, captioned, and transmitted digitally. At the same time, digital cameras entered newsrooms.

Once photos could be captured electronically and transmitted by computer, decades-old barriers fell. Color photography quickly became standard.

But the most important change was not color.

A Wider World in the Winners List

Open the Photojournalism/76 book, and most of the photographers come from American newspapers. Their affiliations read like a map of the country’s regional press: the Akron Beacon Journal, the Milwaukee Journal, the Kansas City Star, the Charlotte Observer, the Dayton Daily News. The names reflect the same geography. The photographers were embedded in communities across the United States, documenting the events and rhythms of local life.

A few photographers in the 1976 contest were affiliated with organizations that operated beyond the boundaries of local newspapers, including international wire services and magazines such as National Geographic. But even those contributors were often American photographers whose careers had begun in the same newspaper system as their colleagues.

Fifty years later, the winners’ list tells a very different story.

The 2026 Best of Photojournalism contest is published electronically and distributed instantly across the internet. The photographers represented there come from many parts of the world. Their names reflect a wider range of languages, cultures, and backgrounds. Their affiliations include international wire services, global news organizations, and independent photographers whose work travels through digital networks.

Exceptional photographers have always existed in many places, but the systems that distributed their work were once narrow and slow. As those technological barriers disappeared, photographers working far beyond the traditional American newspaper system gained ways to bring their work to editors, audiences, and contests that they would never have seen.

The result is a broader view of the world, shaped by photographers bringing their own experiences and perspectives to the stories they document. It is a view assembled from many more places, many more cultures, and many more lives than the old newspaper network could ever show.

The camera remains the same instrument it was fifty years ago. What has changed is that more photographers can now use it to show the world to the rest of us.

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Observation is the starting point in photography. To truly capture someone’s routines or rituals, take time to watch carefully. Notice how their actions happen, the order they follow, and how these actions influence their mood, behavior, or environment. Patterns become important through repetition and rhythm. Whether it’s making morning coffee or following a ceremonial tradition, careful observation helps us see each moment more clearly. This is how meaningful images begin to form.

Routines and rituals provide our lives with structure and predictability. Routines are activities we do regularly, often automatically. They bring stability and comfort, especially in uncertain times.

Rituals are routines with special significance. They are often tied to personal or cultural traditions and mark important moments or life changes. For example, in many Latin American cultures, a quinceañera is more than just a party. It celebrates a girl’s transition into womanhood and connects her to her community. The Japanese tea ceremony, with its deliberate steps and long history, provides a chance to pause, reflect, and feel connected. Rituals like these help us experience a sense of belonging and remind us of what we share as humans.

Photographers can reveal the emotions, meanings, and connections within everyday routines and rituals. To do this well, spend time with your subjects and participate in their experiences. For example, if you’re photographing a family’s Sunday breakfast, being there allows you to notice the quiet comfort of the meal, the small conversations over coffee, and a child’s laughter. By being present in these moments, you can capture not just the scene, but the deeper bonds they share.

When we join our subjects’ routines and rituals, we better understand their significance. This helps us see and capture the small details and moments others might overlook.

By fully immersing yourself in these experiences, photos can show more than just actions. They can reveal the feelings and meanings behind them. Imagine the quiet before a favorite hymn begins, or a grandmother’s hands kneading dough. These moments are filled with emotion. Through them, your photos can express the comfort, significance, and connection in daily life and special ceremonies.

It’s important to be involved in your work. By engaging with others in their routines and rituals, you reveal their true depth and meaning, creating photos that connect with viewers. Respect and sensitivity are also crucial. Often, being invited in provides enough permission. Instead of stopping the moment with a formal request, watch your subject and their actions closely. This helps you understand and connect more deeply. Trust happens naturally, and your photos can tell more honest, meaningful stories.

Take the challenge and get involved. Let your photos tell the stories of routines and rituals that shape our lives. To start, try photographing your own morning routine. Spend five minutes capturing the steam from your coffee, the quiet of early morning, or sunlight streaming through your window. This simple exercise helps you build momentum and turn inspiration into action. By beginning with what you know, you’ll be prepared to explore others’ routines and rituals with care and understanding.

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Why doesn’t photography get easier?

You study. You read about light as if it were a language you could become fluent in. You examine contact sheets from photographers whose work feels effortless. You memorize rules of composition. You learn how focal lengths alter distance, how depth of field isolates or includes, how shutter speed can freeze or dissolve time. You understand file sizes, sensors, dynamic range. You learn how your camera sees. You prepare carefully, believing that knowledge will close the gap between what you imagine and what you make.

And yet, when you stand in front of a real moment, it still resists you. A person shifts their weight. A glance appears and disappears. Light moves across a face in a way that feels significant but impossible to hold. You hesitate. You press the shutter. Or you don’t. Later, reviewing the frame, you feel the distance between what you sensed and what you captured. The gap remains.

It is tempting to believe that gap is technical. That if you reacted faster, knew more, owned better equipment, it would disappear. Modern cameras reinforce this hope. They promise precision. They can record dozens of frames in a second, preserving every flicker of expression. Nothing is missed. Every fraction of time is stored. But preservation is not understanding. You can gather a hundred variations of a moment and still fail to recognize which one mattered. The machine can capture everything. It cannot tell you what carries weight.

Nothing you do will make the photographs easier. They become familiar.

Familiarity is not mastery. Mastery implies control. Familiarity implies relationship. Relationship is built through repetition. You return to the same streets, the same rooms, the same light at different hours. At first, you are searching for obvious drama, something that declares itself as worthy. The world feels like a catalogue of visual opportunities waiting to be arranged. Then repetition begins to change you. You miss moments you were sure would succeed. You make technically flawless frames that feel empty. You misread situations. You approach too soon or wait too long. The unkind lessons accumulate alongside the kind ones.

Over time, the world stops presenting itself as simple. You begin to sense how much is happening beneath the visible surface. A pause carries history. A posture carries fatigue. A glance carries restraint. You recognize these things because you have lived them yourself. The distance between you and the subject narrows, not physically, but internally. What once looked merely interesting begins to feel human.

This is where empathy emerges, not as sentiment, but as steadiness. Empathy is attention informed by experience. It is the awareness that the person in front of you is not there to complete your composition but is living something independent of you. When you photograph from that place, your behavior changes. You wait longer. You watch more carefully. You feel when a gesture resolves into something meaningful. Pressing the shutter becomes less about reacting and more about recognizing.

The resulting photograph may not be dramatic, but it carries density. The viewer may not know why it lingers, yet they feel that it was made with patience rather than appetite. They sense that the moment was understood, not simply taken. That density comes from experience layered over time, from having stood in enough real situations to sense what is fragile, what is guarded, what is about to surface.

Photography never becomes easy. The uncertainty does not vanish. But it becomes familiar. You recognize the feeling of standing at the edge of a moment, and you no longer rush to escape it. You trust your instincts not because they are perfect, but because they have been shaped by repetition. Technical knowledge remains important. Equipment remains important. Craft always matters. But these are foundations. Meaning grows out of relationship.

Only through the density of experience do you become a better photographer. Not because the task has grown simpler, but because you have grown more attentive, more patient, more human in the way you see. The photographs do not become easier.

They become familiar.

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Future people count. There will be a lot of them. Whether their lives are better or worse depends, in part, on how well we think today, because today’s decisions compound. Newspapers once helped citizens make those decisions with context.

For a long time, the newspaper functioned as the daily operating system of civic life. It told you what happened, why it mattered, who was responsible, and what might happen next. It connected actions to consequences and gave you context before outrage.

Then the internet arrived, and instead of adapting carefully, newspapers panicked. The early promise of online distribution was seductive: give it away for free, reach everyone, and make it up in digital ads. Exposure would replace subscription. Scale would replace scarcity. It sounded inevitable. It was also wrong.

To understand what broke, you have to understand how newspapers actually worked. The size of a paper was never determined by how much news existed. There was always more news than could fit. The real determinant was advertising. Ads set the page count and determined how much room remained for reporting. Section fronts, stock tables, sports agate, editorials, comics, and obituaries all had pre-assigned column inches. What remained depended on how many ads were sold, how large they were, where they could legally or contractually sit, and which stories could not appear next to which sponsors. It was a strange ecosystem, but it funded something serious.

It paid for reporters, and it paid for photographers. A reporter explains; a photographer proves. Written reporting answers who, what, when, where, why, and how. A photograph answers a different question: Did this really happen? Images anchor events in memory. They turn abstraction into evidence. Wars, civil rights movements, disasters—these are remembered not just through words but through images that endure long after the article itself fades. That endurance is not sentimental. It is structural. Photographs become part of the public record.

When papers rushed online and gave everything away, the advertising engine collapsed. Those dollars had funded newsrooms, editors, foreign bureaus, printing presses, trucks, office leases, and health insurance. In the shift to “free,” the industry undercut the mechanism that sustained expertise and documentation.

Expertise is the point. Old newsroom culture was not about being the world’s top authority on a single narrow topic. It was about being expert at learning quickly, understanding under pressure, and asking the first unavoidable questions. Reporters were experts at finding experts. Photographers were experts at witnessing. Both were trained to produce work that could withstand scrutiny. Readers trusted that someone had done the work.

That trust matters even more in a world designed to keep people scrolling rather than thinking. Algorithms suggest content; they do not verify it. They optimize for attention, not truth, and they reward what confirms existing beliefs. Engagement is not understanding. If future people count, then the way we process information now counts too. Short-term thinking destroyed the old business model. Short-term incentives now shape the flow of information itself.

What replaces it is not nostalgia for print but a structural correction. A serious newsletter can function as a container: a defined space that holds context, explanation, sourced expertise, and documented evidence. The schedule matters less than the standard. Publish when the core questions have real answers, not when the feed demands motion. When a reader opens such a publication, they should know that someone has already done the intellectual heavy lifting.

That includes photographs, and it includes attribution. Attribution is not decoration. It is responsibility. A serious publication names its sources, links its documents, and identifies its experts. The same discipline must apply to images. A photograph without attribution is just an image. A photograph with attribution is a record. Who took it? When? Where? Under what conditions? Was the subject posed or observed? Those details shape interpretation and signal accountability. They remind the reader that someone was present, that choices were made, and that the work can be questioned.

Social feeds tend to strip away that context. Images are copied, cropped, and reposted until credit disappears and accountability with it.

A newsletter can restore that chain, but only if it treats attribution as non-negotiable. Long-term thinking requires knowledge that can be traced. Future readers will ask how we knew and who documented it. Attribution keeps those answers visible.

That standard is demanding. It means publishing only what can be sourced, marking uncertainty clearly, and revising when facts change. Expertise is not certainty. It is a method. Traditional newsrooms enforced that method through editors. Independent publications have to enforce it themselves, through clear sourcing, careful framing, and explicit limits on what they can claim.

If future people count, the habits we build now matter. Information shapes decisions, and decisions compound over time. We do not need more volume. We need containers strong enough to hold weight, with words that explain, images that prove, and attribution that ensures the record can be trusted long after the scroll has ended.

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What We Knew Then. What We Know Now.

On February 22, 1976, I wrote a column for the Fort Lauderdale News about color correction filters. At the time, getting the color right wasn’t an aesthetic choice. It was a deadline requirement.

We used to shoot color transparency film, usually Ektachrome, for newspaper reproduction. Whatever you exposed was what went to press. There was no safety net.

If a photograph was perfect in every way except for the color balance, it was still a failure. Too green. Too blue. Too yellow. No matter how powerful the moment was, failure was not an option for a newspaper photographer.

Color correction after processing was slow and disruptive. Newspapers operate under strict deadlines. Each department works in sequence. If one department delays, the next edition is at risk. If the color was off because the photographer misread the light, the responsibility was clear.

So the correction happened before the shutter was pressed.

You studied the light. You identified the source. You mounted the filter that would neutralize the shift. You adjusted exposure to compensate. You made the decision in real time because there was no second chance.

Today, the process is reversed. We capture RAW files that retain much more color information than film ever could. White balance can be adjusted after exposure. Temperature and tint can be refined with accuracy. Individual hues can be shifted, muted, or completely reconstructed. Mixed lighting can be balanced in post-production. What once required physical filtration at the lens is now a flexible choice made on a screen.

The constraint is gone. The possibilities expanded.

But that shift changed the mindset. In 1976, color had to be solved in advance. Now it can be interpreted later.

The column that follows reflects a time when technical accuracy at exposure wasn’t just good practice. It was mandatory.

Originally Published February 22, 1976

Fort Lauderdale News

Light has a strange characteristic of hot and cold color. It appears under daylight, fluorescent light, and tungsten light. Each appears white to the eye, but there are subtle differences that color film can see.

Daylight film exposed to tungsten light will have a reddish tone because the blue tones are not emitted by the bulb’s filament. If a color film designed for tungsten light is used, the color appears normal. Even then, the colors may not be completely true because each bulb varies in color due to age, power supply, and manufacturer.

Fluorescent lights tend to shift the color toward green. Correction of this shift can be quite easy if the type of bulb is known. Manufacturers generally mark the type on one end of the bulb. Because each type emits a different color of light, each requires a different filter to correct the color shift.

The chart includes the six most common types of lamps and the filters or combinations of filters necessary for correction. The exposure compensations are only for cameras without behind-the-lens meters.

The type of filter used is a Color Compensating (CC) filter. Available in gelatin squares, the filters are placed in a filter frame and mounted on the lens. Gelatin filter frames and holders are not expensive, but they are not absolutely necessary. If gelatin filters are used only occasionally, they may be held in front of the lens. I prefer to use the holder because I don’t like the inconvenience of using one hand to hold a filter in place.

The two numbers in the filter designation indicate the density of the filter. The letter indicates the color. For example, a CC40M filter would have a density of .40 and a color of magenta.

The letter designations are simple to learn. The others used are Y (yellow), C (cyan), R (red), G (green), and B (blue).

The density designation can be tricky. A density of .40 does not refer to the thickness of the filter, but to the absorption of light. The decimal point is not included in the labeling or designation. It is assumed to be placed in front of the first number. For example, a filter with the designation CC025Y has a density of .025, not .25.

It is best to buy one filter with the proper density rather than use two or more to build up sufficient density. Each filter adds two surfaces that can collect dust and scatter light.

The most outstanding feature of gelatin filters is their price. Depending on the type and variety of filter, they are one-half to one-quarter as expensive as standard filters. A photographer can easily afford to add filters to a gadget bag if they are gelatin.

A word of warning: gelatin filters are very susceptible to heat and humidity. They must be stored in a cool, dry place.

Fifty Years Later

Thinking back, the pressure was always there. Almost getting it right didn’t count. You either nailed the color or you missed it. If you misjudged the light in 1976, that mistake was printed as is. There was no RAW file to adjust or white balance slider to save you before a deadline. The slide on the light table was the final say. If it was wrong, you owned it.

Now, that pressure has changed. We can fix white balance after taking the shot. It’s possible to tweak tint in small steps, adjust single colors, and fix mixed lighting that would have ruined a transparency. Today’s workflow is all about flexibility. It lets us refine, revise, and sometimes even completely rethink an image.

This flexibility is a real advantage, but it changes how we work. When you can fix things on the computer, there’s less pressure to get everything perfect when you take the photo. You can fix it later, and often you do. The responsibility isn’t all on that one moment when you press the shutter.

But the main challenge is still there. Light still brings color, and it still changes depending on the source and surroundings. It still shapes how a photo looks and feels. The need to notice it hasn’t gone away.

Fifty years ago, our tools made us pay close attention. Today, our tools let us get away with missing things.

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I watched him sharpen the knife. His hands gripped it just enough to keep the blade firm, steady against the grinding wheel, careful not to let pressure show in his fingertips. He could feel the blade being moved by the force of the wheel, toward him, into his hands, into him if he slipped or misjudged the tension.

He stayed calm and steady. He didn’t fear the dangers of knife sharpening. In fact, he felt the opposite. For him, it was a moment of Zen, beginning the moment a customer handed him a rough blade.

He studied each one carefully, its weight, size, shape, density, and heft. But he sensed something else, too: the story. What had this blade done to become dull? What had it seen? Where had it been? He didn’t always know, but he had sharpened enough blades to understand that every one of them carried personal history.

Sometimes, customers offered brief explanations.

A father’s knife, passed down but never kept quite as sharp.
A whole kitchen drawer’s worth, brought in just to put everything on the same plane.
Sewing scissors, ready to be passed from grandmother to granddaughter.
A Boy Scout knife, rediscovered in the back of a drawer.
A utility knife, chosen for a five-day mountain hike with close friends.

He felt these stories as he worked, blending each edge into the wheel. He understood the metal, how it had been forged, how it came into the owner’s hands, how it dulled, and how it would dull again. He couldn’t exactly see the edge eroding, but he could feel it, smell it, hear the shift in sound, and watch the changing sparks. He knew when it was ready. When everything unnecessary had been ground away like a large slab of marble, revealing Michelangelo’s “David.”

There was no ruler, no scale, no micrometer. Just the quiet sense that it was right.

And when he passed the knife back, it was more than a sharpened blade returning to its owner. It was a reconnection with a family, with memory, with usefulness. With time.

I think about the knife sharpener often. About his daily moments of Zen, the connections he makes with people and their lives, and the stories he silently joins.

And I think about him when I’m making photographs.

Because the act of photographing is, for me, an act of presence. It is not about capturing something beautiful or interesting. It is about entering into the rhythm of someone else’s moment. To photograph someone well, you have to stand where they stand. You have to observe what they are doing with enough patience that you begin to feel it yourself. Their concentration. Their repetition. Their care. You begin to understand what the work costs them, and what it gives back.

That kind of seeing is not passive. It requires attention, but more than that, it asks for humility. You cannot impose your own meaning on the moment. You wait until it reveals its own. And when it does, you are not just photographing an action. You are witnessing a life, however briefly. You begin to carry that life with you.

That is what I mean by empathy. Not emotion, necessarily. Not performance. Just the slow, quiet recognition that someone else’s experience matters. And the photograph becomes a record of that recognition.

This is what I have learned, over time. Photography, at its most honest, is not about freezing time. It is about releasing yourself into it. It is not about control. It is about attention. To make a good image, you have to let go of the desire to extract something. You have to dwell in the space long enough that the story begins to rise on its own.

Sometimes it is the way a hand holds weight.
Sometimes it is a single expression in a crowded room.
Sometimes it is the dust in the air or the way the light cuts across the floor.
The story might not be obvious to anyone else, but it reveals itself to you because you were there, because you stayed, because you watched without rushing.

We talk a lot about storytelling in photography, but we rarely discuss the kind of attention a story requires. Not just curiosity, but care. The story of a place, a person, a moment, these are not things we can capture by force. They have to be received. And to receive something, you have to slow down.

The knife sharpener knows this. He does not rush through the task. He does not talk while he works. He listens. To the metal. To the wheel. To the silence between.

Photography is the same. The longer you do it, the more you realize it is not about what you are trying to say. It is about what you are willing to hear.

What makes photography different from other ways of telling stories is that it happens in time, not outside of it. You are there, present in the same light as the person in front of you. You are affected by the same temperature. You are both inside the same moment. Photographing someone, then, becomes a kind of shared experience. A collaboration, whether spoken or silent.

And that is why photography, done well, cultivates empathy. Not just for your subject, but for the context in which they live. Their body, their work, their waiting. Their fatigue. Their pride. Their hands. Their past. Their possible future. A good photograph cannot tell you everything, but it can point to the presence of all that complexity.

I go back to the knife sharpener because it reminds me that the real work is never about perfection. It is about readiness. About listening closely enough to know when something is finished. Not flawless, but true. You feel it in your hands. You hear it in the change in tone. You know when the moment has fully presented itself.

That is when you make the photo.

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I kept the fate of this photo a secret for so long that I forgot about it. It was one of 70 photos featured in the “Accidental History” exhibit at the Westerville History Museum, located in the library, several years ago.

During the exhibit, the mother and her three children unexpectedly saw themselves on the gallery wall, unaware they had been chosen from approximately 14,000 photos I had provided to the museum.

The mother wrote her contact information on a small piece of paper and left it with one of the museum’s researchers, asking to be contacted if the photo ever became available for purchase. The note was slipped into a file and, like Indiana Jones’ ark, forgotten.

When the exhibit ended, the photos were given to the Friends of the Library to sell in the library bookstore as a fundraiser. Every time I walked by, I saw the photo hanging just inside the bookstore doorway. Before that, it had hung on the wall of Museum Manager Jackie Barton’s office.

One day, there was a blank space on the wall where the photo had hung. The bookstore said it had been sold to a grandmother who had visited with her three grandchildren and wandered into the bookstore. One of the children tugged at her sleeve, saying they were the ones in the photo.

She bought it, telling the shopkeeper it would be a Christmas present for their mother if the kids could keep quiet long enough. And, if the photographer who made the photo didn’t write about it in his newsletter.

I was sworn to secrecy, unable to tell the story of how the photo ultimately reached the people who would appreciate it most.

Now you know my secret.

The collection of photos from “Accidental History” is now on sale at the Ohio Art Market in Uptown Westerville. There isn’t enough room to display all 70 on the walls at once, and I’m not sure of which photo will be displayed and when, so check often to see if your favorite is there.

Technical details:

Shot this on my iPhone as I was returning to my car after a trunk or treat at Westerville Community United Church of Christ.

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I admire how optimistic arborists are. I recently asked one how he felt about planting trees along a new road, knowing he might never see them fully grown. It seemed like a fair question. His answer caught me off guard. He replied right away, sounding cheerful, not wistful. He spoke about the joy of planting, doing the job well, and trusting time to do its work. The idea that someone else might enjoy the shade of those trees in the future seemed to energize him instead of making him feel left out.

That conversation stays with me as our community discusses a school income tax levy. Opponents are concerned about the short-term effects, which makes sense. Supporters remind me of the arborist. They realize that no data or experience can promise a certain result. Still, they choose to act, believing that what we do now will matter in the long run. The decision is really about taking care of the future, not about being sure of the outcome.

This way of thinking has shaped my life, especially through photography. For twenty-one years, I have taken a photo every day. What started as a discipline turned into a way to notice the world. The goal isn’t to create something amazing each day. It’s about seeing that every day brings something worth noticing. Like a Stoic practice, anything can be valuable if it teaches you something. Failure, repetition, and ordinary moments aren’t distractions—they are part of the process.

Over time, I realized that not knowing the outcome isn’t a weakness. It’s an opportunity. When you let go of expecting a certain result, you start to notice more. You see what’s really there, not just what you hoped to find. Expectations still have a place, but they act more like questions than guarantees. They challenge your patience, show where your focus drifts, and reveal if you can stay present even when nothing seems important.

Photography brings many quiet joys. One of them is seeing things come together over time. A single photo might seem plain or unfinished, but as the days pass, patterns and themes start to emerge. What once felt random becomes a record of what you noticed. This sense of order isn’t planned. It comes from sticking with the practice and letting the days connect.

Another joy is being present. Taking a photo every day requires a special kind of focus that can’t be hurried. It means being in the moment, noticing light, movement, and mood without trying to change them. Presence isn’t a perfect state—it’s just being available. You show up ready to see what the day brings, even if it’s not much.

There’s also the story that slowly appears. No single photo tells it, and that’s not the point. The story comes together later, shaped by repeating and returning, not by planning. It’s told in a roundabout way, through habits, what’s left out, and the occasional clear moment. In this way, the photos show life as it really happened, one ordinary day after another.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about Aristotle’s idea of eudaimonia. People often call it happiness, but that doesn’t quite fit. Aristotle wasn’t talking about a feeling. He meant a way of living that helps someone grow and thrive over time, shaped by good habits, character, and staying involved with the world.

This idea matches my daily goal of adding to my collection of experiences. I don’t mean chasing new things just for fun or distraction, but seeking out experiences that teach me something. Sometimes it’s something new or different, sometimes better, and sometimes uncomfortable. The real value is in what these experiences ask of you: attention, openness, and a willingness to change.

Photography fits well with this idea of flourishing. Taking a photo every day isn’t about seeking pleasure or avoiding hard things. It’s about staying involved. The camera gives you a reason to look more closely and avoid jumping to conclusions. Over time, this kind of engagement broadens your view. When you face experience honestly, it makes you less sure of your own assumptions.

As you become less certain, empathy grows. Seeing other lives, places, and moments makes you realize your own view isn’t the whole story. Watching and noticing every day teaches you to see context and details. It gets harder to ignore things you don’t understand right away. Over time, these repeated experiences quietly shape who you are.

In this light, taking a photo every day is like planting something. Each picture is small and unfinished on its own, but together they make sense when you look back. Like planting trees or making choices for a community, the value isn’t in knowing the result ahead of time, but in showing up and doing the work. Flourishing isn’t a place you reach. It’s something you practice by paying attention, caring, and being willing to keep adding to your experience of life.

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I made this photograph by approaching the scene as a challenge of timing, position, and restraint within real limits. With each pass of the combine, the field shrank, and opportunities dwindled. There was no luxury of prolonged observation. Each cut removed another chance. I watched just enough to grasp the machine's rhythm, then took action. I waited for the combine to move in this direction because it placed the operators in the cab clearly in view and directed the light correctly. The opposite direction would have hidden them. Once those elements lined up, there was no reason to wait any longer.

This photograph exists because the field itself is changing. This was the first harvest on this land since the adjacent 88 acres were sold to the city for business development. What had been open farmland is now being converted into shovel-ready sites for offices, roads, and parking lots.

The soil here is Wisconsinan glacial soil, land that supported generations of farming. That history is ending. The acreage being harvested is the last family-owned parcel within the city limits that is still actively farmed. Even that use has narrowed.

Where this land once produced fruits and vegetables for a local farmers’ market, it now grows soybeans and corn, crops chosen for efficiency rather than community need. Part of that efficiency is agricultural taxation. Row crops allow the land to remain classified as farmland, preserving a lower tax rate even as development encroaches.

That context shaped how I approached the photograph. I was not documenting a routine harvest. I was recording a transition. The machines in the background are not incidental. They signal what is coming next. The combine in the foreground is doing its job, perhaps for one of the last times in this place.

From a technical standpoint, I needed settings that would hold detail in a fast-moving, dusty scene. I shot at f2.8 to keep light intake high while maintaining subject clarity. The shutter speed was set to 1/8000 to freeze the machine and airborne debris while still allowing the dust to retain texture. ISO 250 kept noise down while giving me flexibility in bright daylight.

I used a 180mm focal length to compress the scene and bring distant elements forward without stepping into the field. That compression helped layer the image so the harvest and the development read together rather than as separate events.

Avoid standing too close, but be deliberate about why you are creating distance. In an earlier post titled “Reading a Constrained Scene. A lesson from a street-adjacent setup,” I wrote about using position and focal length to eliminate a distracting car from the background. In that situation, the goal was reduction. Here, the goal was inclusion. I wanted the background interference, because it is not interference at all. It represents what this land is becoming.

I positioned myself on higher ground near the farmhouse so I could see across the field and pull the combine and the construction equipment into the same frame. That vantage point allowed the land to read as one continuous space, from harvest to development. I chose a lens that could take in all of the objects without forcing any single element to dominate.

That elevated position also placed the combine’s hopper and unloading auger directly on the horizon. This alignment matters. The horizon becomes a dividing line between land uses. Below it is the active field, still producing a crop. At it, the machinery intersects with the sky and the distant construction, marking the point where farming gives way to development. When you can align working elements with the horizon like this, it creates a quiet visual cue that reinforces the story without explanation.

Distance compresses the scene and helps organize complexity. The construction equipment becomes context rather than clutter because it is placed intentionally and given visual weight. This serves as a counterpoint to the earlier lesson. Sometimes you use focal length and position to remove distractions. Other times, you use them to make sure nothing important is left out.

Pay attention to light, even when it seems ordinary. Side light reveals texture in the dust, the field, and the metal surfaces. Flat light would have reduced this to a record image instead of a photograph with intent.

Frame with intention and leave space for the subject to move. I allowed room in front of the combine so it feels like it has somewhere to go. Cropping too tight on working machinery removes scale and shortens the story.

When you photograph land like this, look past the immediate action. Ask what the place has been and what it is becoming. Use your framing to include those answers. This is how a photograph moves beyond showing a harvest and begins to document a quiet change, where the crop is no longer food but development waiting in the distance.

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At first, the scene didn’t look promising. It was squeezed between parked cars on a busy street. Rather than look for a better spot, I decided to work with what I had and solve problems as they came up. The steps below show how I turned a cramped, awkward space into a usable frame. This is about making choices, not following strict rules.

Look at the location carefully before you start shooting. Notice what shapes the space. In this case, parked cars made it hard to move and set the frame’s boundaries. The main thing was to figure out what I could change and what I had to accept.

Change only what you need to. I moved a chair on the sidewalk to clear the foreground and stepped back a bit to open up the frame. These small tweaks eliminated distractions that would have drawn attention away from the subjects. Checking the frame edges early helped avoid issues later.

Next, I had to choose a focal length. Using the long end of a 24–70mm f/2.8 lens produced a shallow depth of field, helping separate the subjects. This worked for focus, but not for composition. The narrow view made the car in the background compete with the people in the foreground.

Instead of insisting on a shallow depth of field, I changed my priorities. Using a slightly shorter focal length made the background car less distracting, even though it meant more of the scene was in focus. The main lesson: in constrained scenes, prioritizing a clean, simple background is often more important than achieving shallow depth of field. Good separation comes from where you place things and how much they stand out, not just from blur.

Throughout this process, another concern ran quietly alongside the technical decisions: keeping the couple comfortable. To do this, I maintained an ongoing conversation, explained what I was doing, and made sure they never felt rushed or stared at. Much of the work happened without the camera at my eye. While continuing to talk with them, I was evaluating framing, timing, light, background movement, and subject placement. Time was spent standing, shifting position, choosing the strongest vantage point, and removing clutter. Once the scene was simplified and the variables were under control, the actual shooting was brief. Twenty-two frames were made in nineteen seconds. The eighteenth frame became the final image.

Timing mattered. I watched for red lights to catch moments when the background cleared. On the street, the best frame only lasted a few seconds. Waiting for these gaps was more important than changing camera settings.

Taking test shots helped clarify choices. Zooming changed the background and revealed how elements overlapped. I picked what gave the best balance between interaction and clutter.

After making these choices, I could stop worrying about technique. With the setup ready, I could focus on people’s gestures and timing. That’s the main point: sort out the technical details early so you’re ready when the right moment happens.

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The day started with heavy clouds and little open sky, so there was no clear light. As the afternoon went on, the clouds began to thin out. I noticed a narrow beam of light enter the winery and land on a couple sitting with their backs against the red brick wall. The contrast between the soft indoor light and that focused beam immediately caught my attention.

Since I had photographed here before, I knew how the light moved through the space. This helped me spot the brief moment of light worth capturing. When you’re familiar with a place, small changes become more noticeable.

Sometimes I know the people I photograph, but other times I don’t and need to earn their trust. This time, I knew the winery’s owner, which helped. I spoke to her first, and she welcomed me in. That invitation was important because it gave me a clear reason to be there and allowed me to explain why I had come.

Once inside, I was able to be clear about my purpose. I told them the light had caught my eye and that I wanted to photograph the interaction at the table. Being straightforward and calm usually works better than giving long explanations. People respond well to quiet confidence that does not feel pushy.

There were three people at the table, but the couple shared the strongest connection. I chose not to include the third person, focusing instead on the couple. When I photograph groups, I prefer to keep the story clear rather than try to be fair to everyone. The story determines what goes in the frame.

I included the third person’s hands holding a wine glass in the lower left corner of the frame. These hands anchor the edge of the photo and add a foreground layer for depth. Including just part of someone shows they are there without drawing too much attention.

I took the photo with a Nikon Z50 II and a 12–28mm lens. I spot-focused and metered on the man, then underexposed by half a stop to prevent bright highlights from blowing out. When the light is strong and directional, protecting highlights is more important than brightening shadows. Shadows can help set the mood as long as the highlights are preserved.

The brick wall behind them absorbed extra light and kept the focus on their faces, hands, and gestures. It added texture without being distracting. When I see dramatic lighting, I look for backgrounds that help control it.

After I figured out access, composition, and exposure, I was able to concentrate on observing. I watched how the couple leaned in and how their conversation developed. The light didn’t last long, so I worked deliberately without rushing. When you make technical choices early, taking the photo becomes about paying attention rather than interrupting the moment.

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The Five Exposure Roll of Film does not mean that every photographer must shoot five pictures, in order, on every assignment. Great photographers don’t work that way. They understand the structure so completely that they don’t need to move through it step by step. The insurance photo still exists, but it may be one of the first four frames rather than the first one made. Clarity and accuracy are assumed. They may arrive immediately at the fifth exposure because that level of thinking is what is expected of them.

The Five Exposure Roll of Film is not a checklist and it is not about coverage. It is a way of describing how a photographer’s thinking changes while working an assignment. It traces the shift from compliance to meaning, from answering the question that was asked to solving the problem that actually exists. At its core, it is about staying present, responding to what unfolds, and accepting responsibility for telling the story well.

Every assignment still begins with obligation. There is always an insurance photo. It reflects the assignment exactly as written. It establishes trust. It proves the photographer understands the brief and can deliver clarity under pressure. Without it, nothing else matters. For many photographers, this work requires conscious attention. For others, it happens almost automatically. In both cases, it exists because it must.

From there, the process begins to diverge, not in quality, but in focus.

Emerging photographers tend to deliberate in their exposures. They secure the assignment first, then respond to what they are seeing. Each exposure teaches them something about timing, framing, and judgment. The process is visible because it is formative. They are learning how to recognize when the assignment has been answered and when it can be pushed further without losing its footing.

As engagement deepens, the subject ceases to stand alone. The photographer begins to see the situation. Context enters the frame. Environment, background, and peripheral details begin to take on meaning. The photograph no longer tries to explain the story, but it reveals that the story is more complex than the assignment suggested. Observation replaces execution as the dominant skill.

Established photographers work from the same structure, but their attention is placed elsewhere. Years of repetition have absorbed the earlier exposures into instinct. Clarity, accuracy, and coverage are assumed. What remains is the responsibility of resolution. For them, the work often begins at Exposure Five. That level of resolution is not an aspiration. It is the expectation.

Confidence changes everything. When the photographer knows the assignment has already been fulfilled, safety gives way to judgment. The photograph still respects the facts, but it no longer resembles the editor’s original mental picture. Experience, restraint, and intention shape the frame. This is often the moment when an editor recognizes that the photographer is not just completing assignments, but carrying stories.

The fifth exposure pushes beyond surface description without abandoning the assignment’s purpose. The subject may recede, appear indirectly, or be implied rather than shown. Metaphor, absence, or abstraction may replace explanation. This photograph cannot be planned. It only emerges after sustained attention and honest engagement. When it appears, it feels inevitable. It resolves the story in a way nothing else can.

This difference is not hierarchy. It is efficiency of attention. Both emerging and established photographers are doing the same work. One is still learning how the structure operates. The other has internalized it so completely that it disappears.

Editors sense this immediately. It shows up in how quickly a photographer understands what the story is really about, how little excess there is in the work, and how reliably the final image resolves the assignment without explanation. Trust grows not from boldness, but from consistency.

This is why editors return to the same photographers again and again. Not because they deliver more images, but because they deliver better solutions. They do not simply show what happened. They translate what it means.

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My wife sang in the funeral choir at our church, where she would learn about other people’s lives, their families, and the influences they had on others, too late to enjoy them while they're still living.

Eulogies are always gracious, with friends and family speaking about the transitional moments in relationships, how their lives were changed by the relationship, and how sorrow becomes the catalyst that brings them all together to remember another’s life.

That was the situation several years ago when my mother-in-law’s family gathered in the crisp cold of a North Dakota winter.

Family had gathered to celebrate the gentleness of a woman whose tumultuous life never betrayed her love for her children. We stood together, in tears, not afraid to speak of the good things, the moments of congratulations and celebration bequeathed to her children. A gift to pass along to the following generations without condition or regret.

Winter’s first snow changed the landscape ever so briefly, reminding me of that moment, when brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews gathered to celebrate a life. We were in that moment of cold between death and resurrection when only memories brighten the day, and tears wash away the sadness. It’s a shame it sometimes takes the bitterness of death for us to celebrate the good in people’s lives.

Several weeks ago, one of her daughters wrote on Facebook that it was the anniversary of her death and how much she was missed. Minutes late, I’d uploaded a photo of the family gathered at the church after her funeral. Everyone stood close together, joined in grief and joy.

Several years ago, the New York Times wrote about the elevation of obituary writers to lofty news writing icons. The task once detailed to the lowest of copywriters is now a much sought-after job where style is measured beyond the ability to lace a linear timeline into a cohesive description of life passed.

My mother never trusted obituary writers, even the ones who wrote the succinct one-column catalogs published only in the local paper, accompanied by a photo from an undetermined date to best illustrate the best day of their life.

She didn’t want her life’s catalog to omit anyone, any critical event, or any family connection, no matter the status. To make sure, she wrote her own obituary.

It’s difficult to say, but she was fortunate to know death was near. She had survived an earlier fight against cancer but understood her second battle, worsened by a heart problem, was one she wouldn’t win. She wasn’t eager to die but believed she would soon be with my dad, and that was all that mattered in the end.

Her obituary was perfect, completing a life of honor and dedication to family and friends.

During a conversation with my wife about obituaries, she asked if I would write my own, like my mother did, to ensure it was accurate and included everything important to me.

“My photography is my obituary,” was my answer.

The collection of 1/125th-of-a-second frames, including all the spot news, sports, features, portraits, landscapes, and snapshots, would speak for me at my death. I have no idea how many photographs I’ve taken, watching as the screen goes dark, and returns to brightness, revealing the moment after the photo I didn’t see.

I’ll never know how many people have seen my photographs. After more than 40 years of shooting for newspapers and The AP, followed by more than 20 years of photos in Westerville, there’s no way to know.

I do know about the lady behind my wife at the grocery store in Ft Lauderdale who talked with another customer about my photos in the previous day’s newspaper.

I do remember the father who greeted me with his phone, showing off the photos I’d taken of his son and saying he would never delete them.

I followed a woman to her car so she could show me the photo of her granddaughter that I had made, which was now attached to her dashboard with tape.

There are more stories than I can ever remember of people telling me about a photo I shot of them or a photo they saw published that affected them.

I got that response from mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, police officers and firefighters, a president, several governors and many politicians, kids, criminals, and death row inmates.

The common thread for all of them was my photography. It spoke to them and was now registered in their memory. At the lower corner was the credit line “Photo by Gary Gardiner.”

One of the plans for my funeral is to continue My Final Photo until the cold earth is lowered over the casket.

I’ve arranged with friends to set up a camera in my casket as if I’d just pulled it from my eye so they can see my final pose. As each passes the casket, the camera will shoot a frame and deliver it to the My Final Photo website. My obituary, at least the photo version, will continue after my traditional obituary is printed in the local paper.

Every day, as I prepare to create another photo for the My Final Photo project, I want to ensure that if it truly is my last photo, it is memorable. That it tells a story and is evocative. That it adds to the story of my life in a way others might be interested in vying to be the writer and photo editor for the New York Times, who will tell my story.

My son-in-law says my tombstone should read:

Here Lies Gary Gardiner – Photographer
“Pretend I’m Not Here”

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Leaving the Assignment Without Abandoning the Narrative

By the time the fifth exposure becomes possible, the assignment has been completed in every practical way. It has been answered directly, expanded thoughtfully, observed honestly, and shaped with clear intent. Nothing remains to be proven. That is exactly what makes this final step both dangerous and necessary.

Exposure Five is where the photographer pushes past the assignment’s limits without losing its essence.

This isn’t rebellion. It’s release.

The photographer no longer works to meet expectations, even heightened ones. The approach shifts into a different tone, where the assignment is no longer just a set of instructions but a starting point. The subject remains visible, but it is no longer the focal point. Meaning takes precedence.

This moment in photography has parallels throughout creative history. When Jackson Pollock abandoned the brush and placed the canvas on the floor, he wasn't rejecting painting; he was engaging with it more honestly than he could within its current rules. When Pablo Picasso absorbed and then surpassed the early innovations of Henri Matisse, it wasn't simply about competing for novelty. It was a dialogue about what seeing can become. When Andy Warhol painted soup cans, the result looked radically different from Pollock’s chaos, yet it stemmed from the same process: attention pushed beyond convention until form caught up with thought.

Exposure Five is part of that lineage. Not in style, but in structure.

This photograph does not aim to improve the assignment. It seeks to answer it in a way that couldn’t have been planned. The photographer doesn’t arrive at this shot with a concept. Instead, the concept comes from spending time with the subject, from layers of attention built over the first four exposures. What emerges isn’t cleverness; it’s inevitability.

This is why Exposure Five cannot be the first. It can't even be the fourth. It requires the foundation of compliance, variation, observation, and intention. Only then does the photographer earn the right to let go.

In this final exposure, the usual methods for creating expressive, communicative photographs may be set aside. The photographer might rely on abstraction, metaphor, absence, or inversion. The subject could appear indirectly, partially, or symbolically. The image may seem quieter or more confrontational than anything that came before. What matters is that it addresses the assignment’s deepest purpose, not just its surface details.

This is often the photograph that surprises everyone, including the photographer.

The assigning editor may not have imagined it. The photographer certainly did not plan it. Yet when it appears, it feels unmistakably right. It carries the kind of clarity that does not explain itself. Editors recognize it not because it follows rules, but because it solves the story in a way nothing else could.

Exposure Five is where photography shifts from simply depicting to translating meaning. The photographer no longer just shows what the subject looks like or what the scene feels like, but instead reveals what it signifies.

This is the space where experience, empathy, skill, and risk come together. It is not guaranteed. It cannot be forced. Sometimes it never shows up. But when it does, it justifies the whole process.

This is the photograph that exceeds expectations without dismissing them. The one that fulfills the assignment by redefining what an answer can be.

And if the opening paragraph was the first exposure, this is the sentence the reader remembers long after the story ends.

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