When I think back on our trip to Morocco, I don’t think one place or experience will define it. We did some incredible things and saw places I’d never seen before, but what made this trip different was why we were there.

We went to visit my sister, who lives in Casablanca. My brother and seven-year-old niece came up from Senegal to join us, and my wife, son, and I traveled there together. For ten days, we were in the same place at the same time. Ten days sounds like a lot until you’re there. It was long enough to settle in a little, but nowhere near enough time to see everything. Looking back, though, seeing everything wasn’t really the point.

One of my favorite parts of the trip was seeing my sister in her element. Usually, when we’re together in Senegal, surrounded by cousins, aunts, uncles, and the rest of our extended family. This time, we were visiting her.

Casablanca is the home she has made for herself. She has her own routines, her own people, and her favorite places. You could tell how proud she was of her adopted home and how excited she was to share it with us. If we had given her another month, she probably would have found another month’s worth of places to show us.

Experiencing Morocco through her eyes was different from arriving as tourists and trying to figure everything out ourselves. We visited places she loves and met people who have become important to her. She wasn’t simply showing us Morocco. She was showing us another part of her life.

Morocco also wasn’t quite what I had pictured. We all carry mental images of places we’ve never visited, only to arrive and realize how incomplete those pictures were. Morocco is an African country, but culturally and visually, it felt very different from the parts of Africa I had experienced before. Arab, French, Spanish, Amazigh, and African influences overlap there, alongside modern cities that may challenge whatever ideas you had before arriving.

Even within Morocco, every city felt different. Casablanca didn’t feel like Tangier, Tangier didn’t feel like Chefchaouen, and Marrakesh was its own thing entirely. That’s one of the things I love about traveling. The more of the world you see, the harder it becomes to fit entire countries, cultures, and regions into neat little boxes.

The moments I remember most fondly happened between our planned activities. I remember watching my niece and my son spend time together despite the ten-year age difference between them. They figured out how to play together and simply enjoyed being around each other. I remember all of us eating together, driving from city to city, laughing about whatever had happened that day, and having that much uninterrupted time together.

Those aren’t necessarily the moments you think about while planning a trip. You think about where you’ll stay, what you’ll see, where you’ll eat, and how much you can fit into the time you have. Then you come home and realize that some of your clearest memories weren’t on the itinerary at all.

One of those memories is meeting Mr. Mohamed, a driver my sister uses when she travels around Morocco. He took us everywhere, but it quickly became obvious that calling him her “driver” didn’t capture their relationship. He looks out for her, and if she needs something or has a problem, she knows she can turn to him. The care between them goes far beyond someone simply doing a job.

One day, we went to his home for an incredible lunch his wife prepared. As soon as my sister walked through the door and greeted his wife, daughter, and granddaughter, you could see what their relationship really was. She wasn’t a client coming over for lunch. She was part of their family.

It was beautiful to watch. My sister had moved to another country and created a life for herself. Along the way, she found people who had essentially adopted her into their family. You could feel the love between all of them.

I’ve thought about that a lot since the trip. Family is bigger than the people we’re related to by blood. There is the family we’re born into, and there is the family we build throughout our lives. Technically, I have a sister-in-law and a brother-in-law, but I don’t think of them that way. I have an older sister and a slightly younger brother. That’s what they are to me.

Some people remain outsiders to their spouse’s family even after decades of marriage. That has never been my experience. My wife’s family is my family, and being together in Morocco made me appreciate that even more.

My brother and niece traveled from Senegal, and we traveled across the world to meet them. My sister opened the life she had built in Casablanca and tried to show us as much of Morocco as she could. Then we met Mr. Mohamed and his family and saw that the same thing had happened for her there. She had built another family around herself.

Maybe that’s what happens to family as we get older. It begins with the people we’re born with, but the circle grows. People enter our lives through marriage, friendship, work, community, or circumstance. Eventually, some of them stop feeling like people we met along the way and simply become family.

I’ll write about the photography side of Morocco another time because that experience deserves its own story. I took plenty of photographs, and the trip made me think about photography, travel, and even how much gear I really need. But when I think about Morocco now, the photographs aren’t the first thing that comes to mind. The people are.

This trip felt like one of those lightning-in-a-bottle moments when the right people happened to be in the right place at the right time. You can plan the flights and the places you’ll visit, but you can’t plan how it will feel when everyone is finally together.

Maybe that’s part of why I’ve become so interested in preserving the moments in our lives. Photographing what happened isn’t enough. I also want to remember the context around those photographs: who was there, what we were laughing about, how it felt to sit around the table together, what my son and niece were doing while the adults talked, and what it was like to watch my sister proudly share the life she had created for herself.

Those details become easier to lose with time. A photograph might remind me where we were, but it won’t always tell me what was happening outside the frame or why that moment mattered.

Ten years from now, I don’t just want to remember that we went to Morocco. I want to remember this version of Morocco: my sister showing us around her city, my son and niece spending time together, driving across the country with Mr. Mohamed, and sitting in his home eating the meal his wife made for us. Most of all, I want to remember how it felt to have everyone together in one place at this particular moment in our lives.

I hope my son and niece remember some of it too. Maybe twenty years from now, they’ll see a photograph from Morocco and remember what it was like to be there together, ten years apart and at completely different stages of their lives. That’s what I want to preserve.

Later ✌🏾,

Kwame

I recently finished reading The Inner Game of Tennis. Overall, I thought it was an okay book. It’s probably not one I’d recommend unless you’re really into tennis, but there was one chapter that completely caught me off guard. In Chapter 8, the author talks about why we start hobbies in the first place. Whether it’s tennis, running, photography, or anything else we enjoy, most of us start because it’s something new, something enjoyable, and something that simply makes life a little more fun. Running might start because we want to get healthier or lose some weight. Photography might start because we want to capture the people and places around us. The reasons are usually simple, but over time they become much more complicated.

The problem isn’t having goals. I think goals are healthy. The problem is becoming attached to those goals to the point where they define whether we’ve succeeded or failed. If we don’t hit a certain pace, reach a certain distance, make a certain photograph, or improve as quickly as we’d hoped, we start feeling like we’ve somehow fallen short. Before long we’re comparing ourselves to everyone else online, to our friends, or even to a previous version of ourselves. That chapter hit me hard because I realized I’ve been doing exactly that with both running and photography.

Lately I’ve become obsessed with tracking my running. I wear an Apple Watch, a heart rate monitor, and I recently bought a dedicated running watch. I’m constantly looking at pace, heart rate zones, recovery scores, and every other metric the watch can give me. The data itself isn’t bad, but I found myself asking, “What’s the point?” Somewhere along the way I forgot why I started running in the first place. Running was never supposed to become another spreadsheet. For me, it’s always been a form of moving meditation. It’s how I clear my mind, explore places I haven’t been before, and spend time outside without feeling like I need to be productive.

That’s one of the reasons I want to start carrying my Ricoh GR IIIx on more of my runs. I love the idea of stopping whenever I notice something interesting, taking a picture, and continuing on without worrying that I ruined my pace or interrupted the workout. If stopping for thirty seconds means I come home with a photograph I’ll appreciate years from now, that’s probably a much better trade than shaving a few seconds off a training run.

Photography has been following a similar pattern for me. I haven’t been taking as many pictures lately, and at first I thought it was because I wasn’t feeling inspired. The more I thought about it, though, I realized it wasn’t that I was comparing myself to other photographers. I was comparing myself to my former self. I’d look at photographs I made a year or two ago and think that I used to have a better eye or that I was somehow more creative back then. The reality is much simpler than that. I haven’t been carrying my camera as often, so naturally I’m making fewer photographs. Creativity isn’t something that disappears overnight. Like any skill, it fades when we stop practicing it.

The truth is I never picked up a camera because I wanted to become an award-winning photographer. I picked it up because it helped me notice the world. Even on days when I don’t take a single picture, I find myself paying more attention when I have a camera with me. I notice the way light falls across a building, the expressions on people’s faces, or small moments that I probably would have walked right past otherwise. Carrying a camera changes the way I experience the world, and that’s something I’d almost forgotten.

Running feels much the same. I’m never going to be a professional runner, and that’s perfectly fine. I’m only in my second year of what I hope becomes a hobby that lasts the next thirty years. When I line up for a race, I’m not really competing against other runners. Most of the time I’m competing against the course, against my own mind that wants to quit halfway through, and against that little inner critic that always tells me I could stop early. The boring training runs, the easy miles, and the quiet mornings are where most of that battle happens. They’re less about getting faster and more about building discipline while giving myself time to think.

One idea that’s stayed with me recently came from something I heard someone say about photography. They said that whenever you’re with a friend, you should take a picture together because you never know when it might be the last one. At first that sounded a little dramatic, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized how true it is. Life changes. People move away. Families grow older. We assume there will always be another dinner, another road trip, another afternoon together, but none of us really knows that.

That’s another reason I want to carry my camera more often. Not just to photograph landscapes or interesting streets, but to photograph the people I care about. My wife, my kid, my dog, my friends, and my family. Even if it’s just with my phone, I want to make a habit of preserving those ordinary moments because one day they won’t feel ordinary anymore.

That one chapter reminded me of something I think I’d slowly forgotten. Running isn’t really about pace. Photography isn’t really about making the perfect image. They’re about slowing down, paying attention, spending time in community, staying healthy, and experiencing life a little more fully. Somewhere along the way I let the metrics and expectations become more important than the hobbies themselves. It’s time to reverse that. My goal now is simple: carry the camera, go for the run, enjoy the process, and remember why I started in the first place.

I’m curious if you’ve ever experienced something similar. Have you found yourself turning a hobby into something that felt more like work? If so, what helped you reconnect with the reason you started?

Later ✌🏾,

Kwame

In my latest video, I take Pixel for a walk with one simple challenge: photograph a single block. No destination, no pressure—just slowing down, paying attention, and seeing what unfolds. If you've been waiting for the perfect opportunity to pick up your camera, maybe it's closer than you think. Watch the video and, the next time you're out for a walk, see what you can discover just around the corner.

More than a year ago, I made a decision that has quietly changed my relationship with photography. At the time, I called it my “10-Year Gear Project.” The idea was simple: build a camera kit that meets my needs and then stop worrying about upgrades. No chasing the latest camera body, no obsessing over lens announcements, and no wondering whether my photography would improve if I just bought one more piece of equipment.

What I expected was to save money. What I didn’t expect was how much mental space it would free up.

The other day, I was scrolling through YouTube and noticed something interesting. There wasn’t a single camera review in my feed. No rumors about upcoming releases. No “What’s in My Camera Bag?” videos. No endless debates about one camera being better than another. Instead, I found myself watching photographers talk about the places they had visited, the projects they were working on, and the stories behind the photographs they had made.

That made me realize that it’s not just that I haven’t bought any new gear. I’ve stopped paying attention to gear altogether.

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For years, even during periods when I wasn’t actively buying anything, I was still consuming content about equipment. I was reading reviews, comparing specifications, keeping up with industry news, and wondering whether a different camera or lens might help me create better work. Looking back, I don’t think I realized how much attention that process required. Even when I wasn’t spending money, I was spending mental energy.

Today, what interests me about photography is completely different. I’m drawn to the photographer who spent a week exploring a small town and documenting its character. I’m interested in the person who returns to the same trail every morning to see how the light changes throughout the seasons. I want to know what someone experienced, what they noticed, and what they learned along the way. The camera is still part of the story, but it is no longer the most interesting part.

As I’ve gotten deeper into running and cycling, I’ve noticed the same pattern emerging. If I wanted to, I could spend hours researching bike pedals, cycling computers, running shoes, hydration systems, running vests, and all the other gear connected to those hobbies. The internet makes it remarkably easy to convince ourselves that the next purchase will somehow move us closer to our goals.

Sometimes, better equipment does make a difference. I’m not arguing otherwise. The right tool can absolutely make an activity more enjoyable or more efficient. What I’ve noticed, though, is that the people I find most interesting rarely spend much time talking about gear. They’re talking about experiences. They’re sharing lessons they’ve learned through practice. They’re documenting the process of becoming better at something.

When it comes to running, I’m far more interested in the story of someone balancing marathon training with a full-time job and family responsibilities than I am in a review of the latest running watch. The common thread is that these people are focused on doing the thing rather than optimizing the thing.

Ironically, stepping away from gear obsession has made me appreciate my gear more. Today, every camera I own serves a purpose. My Ricoh GR IIIx is the camera that goes everywhere with me. My Sony A7CR can be a compact walk-around camera when paired with a small lens, while my Sony a6700 and telephoto lens are perfect for wandering through the woods looking for wildlife or more isolated scenes. The cameras themselves haven’t changed, but my relationship with them has.

Instead of wondering what I’m missing, I focus on what I can create with what I already have. I’ve also realized that my equipment can adapt as my interests and needs change. If I ever truly need something I don’t own, I can rent it. So far, I haven’t encountered a situation where my gear has prevented me from making the photographs I wanted to make.

This summer, I’m preparing for a big trip. Years ago, I probably would have spent weeks researching gear before leaving. I would have compared options, watched reviews, and convinced myself that I needed one more camera or one more lens to make the most of the experience. Instead, I’ll likely bring one bigger camera, one lens, my Ricoh, and an action camera for video. That’s more than enough for what I want to do.

What I’ve come to realize is that most hobbies have their own version of a gear trap. Photography has cameras and lenses. Running has shoes and watches. Cycling has bikes and components. Productivity has apps and software. Whatever the hobby happens to be, there is always another upgrade waiting just around the corner and another reason to believe that the next purchase might be the thing that finally moves us forward.

The challenge is that consuming content about a hobby can start to feel like participating in the hobby itself. Watching photography videos feels connected to photography. Reading about running feels connected to running. Researching bikes feels connected to cycling. In small doses, there’s nothing wrong with any of those things. The problem is that they can quietly replace the thing we actually wanted to do in the first place.

For me, escaping the gear trap has been less about saving money and more about reclaiming attention. By stepping away from the constant cycle of upgrades, reviews, comparisons, and rumors, I’ve created more room for curiosity, creativity, and experience. And I’ve become more interested in the people who are doing the work than the tools they’re using to do it.

The older I get, the more I’m convinced that attention is one of our most valuable resources. Every hour spent thinking about what I might buy is an hour I’m not spending creating, exploring, learning, or experiencing. The gear hasn’t disappeared from my life, but it has returned to its proper place. It’s a tool that supports the experience, not the experience itself.

Later ✌🏾,

Kwame

As photographers, especially those of us who aren’t trying to build a brand, chase likes, or turn this into a career, it’s easy to forget how much of our photography is influenced by that inner voice constantly evaluating what we’re doing. Most of us are just trying to get better at our craft. We’re trying to make photographs that feel meaningful to us. Yet somewhere along the way, many of us develop this habit of treating every frame as evidence of whether we’re progressing or falling behind.

I know I do.

I’ll look at a photograph and immediately start grading it. The composition could be stronger. The focus isn’t quite right. The light wasn’t as interesting as I thought it was when I pressed the shutter. Sometimes the judgment happens so quickly that I barely notice it. The experience of making the photograph is over, and now I’m evaluating the result as if I’m reviewing someone else’s work.

What’s interesting is that the judge never seems satisfied. If the photograph is good, it asks why I can’t do that more often. If it’s bad, it asks why I’m still making those mistakes. If I get the lens I wanted, it starts wondering about the next lens. If I improve one skill, it immediately points to another weakness. The finish line keeps moving.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much energy can be spent trying to become a “better photographer” instead of actually enjoying photography.

That doesn’t mean improvement isn’t important. Learning is part of the fun. Developing our eye, understanding light, refining composition, and becoming more intentional with our cameras are all worthwhile pursuits. But I think there’s a difference between learning and judging. Learning comes from curiosity. Judgment comes from constantly measuring ourselves against some imagined standard that we’re never quite able to reach.

I’ve started noticing that some of my favorite photography experiences have very little to do with the photographs themselves. They’re the mornings spent wandering with a camera before everyone else is awake. They’re the moments when the light suddenly changes and catches my attention. They’re the quiet satisfaction of noticing something ordinary that I would have walked right past if I hadn’t been carrying a camera.

Those experiences have value regardless of what ends up on the memory card.

In a strange way, I think that’s what the inner judge makes us forget. Photography isn’t only about producing photographs. It’s also about seeing. It’s about paying attention. It’s about engaging with the world a little more deeply than we otherwise might.

When we become overly focused on outcomes, we can miss the experience that made us pick up a camera in the first place.

One thing I’ve been experimenting with is letting go of the expectation that every time I pick up a camera, I need to come home with some “bangers”. I think a lot of us quietly carry that expectation around. We head out hoping for a keeper, hoping we’ll find an interesting subject, hoping we’ll make something that justifies bringing the camera along in the first place.

The problem is that expectation can turn photography into a search for results rather than an experience. Some of my most enjoyable days with a camera have produced photographs that I rarely look at again. But I remember the walk. I remember the light. I remember noticing things I would have otherwise walked right past.

Those experiences weren’t valuable because of what ended up on the memory card. They were valuable because they got me out into the world, paying attention.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if that’s what the inner judge makes us forget. Photography isn’t only about producing photographs. It’s also about seeing. It’s about slowing down enough to notice what’s already there. The photographs matter, of course, but they’re not the entire experience.

Maybe that’s the practical application of retiring the inner judge. Not eliminating it entirely—that probably isn’t possible—but recognizing when it’s taking over the conversation. Recognizing when we’ve shifted from experiencing photography to evaluating ourselves through photography.

Because at the end of the day, we’re people carrying around little boxes filled with glass and electronics, capturing light that exists for a fraction of a second. There’s something wonderfully playful about that. The moment we stop treating it like a test and start treating it as an exploration, photography feels much more like what drew us to it in the first place.

I’m curious if you’ve experienced this too. Do you ever catch yourself judging your photography more than enjoying it?

Later ✌🏾,

Kwame

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In this week’s audio note, I explore the idea that photography isn’t always about taking pictures. Sometimes it’s noticing the light coming through a window, carrying a camera while walking the dog, looking through a photo book, or simply paying closer attention to the world around us. Maybe a “Zero Day Off” isn’t about creating every day—it’s about staying connected to curiosity and the practice of seeing.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. What does a Zero Day Off look like in your photography life? Leave a comment below, and if you’d like to follow along with future audio notes, essays, and reflections, be sure to subscribe.

Later ✌🏾,

Kwame

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the fact that I don’t really have a long-term photography project. Not in any formal sense anyway.

I still carry a camera almost everywhere I go — walks with Pixel, family trips, baseball games, quiet mornings. Photography has become part of how I move through life. Over time, most of us end up building these huge collections of images almost accidentally. Pictures of our families, changing seasons, pets, strange light coming through the kitchen window. The archive slowly grows without us thinking much about it.

There’s something beautiful about that. But I’ve also noticed there’s a difference between consistently taking pictures and feeling deeply connected to something photographically. That’s probably the best way I can describe where I’m at right now. Not burned out, not frustrated — just slightly untethered creatively.

Some of my regular walks have started feeling more familiar than curious. I know where the eagles usually are along the lake. I know the spots where I tend to stop. I still love having those places in my life, but I can feel when familiarity starts becoming autopilot. The photographs are still there. The sense of discovery isn’t always there with them.

That’s what started making me think about long-term projects again — though even calling them “projects” feels too formal for what I mean. I’m not talking about disappearing into the wilderness for six months or creating some grand artistic statement. Most of us have lives that don’t allow for that. We have work, families, responsibilities, dogs that need walks. Photography has to fit somewhere inside all of that.

For me, the projects that make the most sense are the ones already sitting quietly inside my routines.

During the pandemic, I started going to the same wildlife refuge in Colorado almost every Sunday. At the time, I never considered it a photography project. If anything, it was an excuse to get out of the house after being stuck inside all week. But over time, the refuge stopped feeling like just a place to take pictures and started feeling familiar in a much deeper way.

I learned which trails were more likely to have coyotes or foxes. I knew where the burrowing owls lived and roughly what time they’d emerge. I started noticing how the bison behaved differently depending on the season. There was one deer that had twins, and every time I saw them I’d stop for a while just to watch them move through the grass together.

I had lived near that refuge for years before the pandemic. I had visited it many times. But I had never really known it until I started returning consistently.

That’s what repetition can do when curiosity stays attached to it. The longer we return to something, the more layers it begins revealing. Small details stack on top of each other until eventually we stop simply photographing a place and start building a relationship with it.

Maybe that’s part of what feels missing for me lately. Not better gear. Not technical growth. Just a deeper relationship with something photographically.

Oddly enough, I started thinking about all of this while spending time in our small garden. This is the first year I’ve been somewhat serious about it — watering plants every morning, pruning, checking the soil, pulling slugs off lettuce, watching tiny changes happen day by day. Some of the plants already look completely different than they did just a couple weeks ago.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, it hit me that maybe this is the kind of thing long-term projects are actually made from. I’m already out here every morning. I’m already watching this thing change. There’s a beginning, growth, maintenance, harvest, decline, and eventually dormancy. At some point the plants will stop producing. The garden will go quiet for the season. If I brought the camera with me consistently, the project would essentially build itself around something I’m already doing.

I haven’t decided anything yet. But for the first time in a while, something feels like it might be worth staying close to.

Which got me thinking about how many projects like that are already quietly happening in the background of our lives. The longest photography project of my life has probably been photographing my son growing up. Years of baseball games, vacations, ordinary afternoons, birthdays — an entire human life unfolding slowly in front of the camera. I never called it a project. But what else would you call it?

I wonder how many of us have something like that sitting in our archives without realizing it.

I think we overcomplicate the idea of photography projects, especially as hobbyists. We assume they need to be ambitious or artistically significant in order to count. But some of the most meaningful ones are already happening — already connected to the rhythms we’re naturally returning to. We just haven’t named them.

I still don’t fully know what this current season of photography looks like for me. Maybe the garden becomes something. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe another project finds me the way the wildlife refuge did.

But I do know there’s a difference between occasionally noticing beautiful moments and building an ongoing relationship with what we photograph. And I think that relationship is what keeps curiosity alive over the long haul.

Maybe that’s all a long-term project really is.

Later ✌🏾,

Kwame

In this conversation, I want to challenge that.

I’m speaking as someone who owns and uses both full frame and APS-C cameras regularly. I’ve shot with the Sony A7CR and been blown away by the detail it produces. At the same time, I’ve used cameras like the Sony A6700 and Fujifilm X-T5 and come away with images that feel just as meaningful, just as strong—sometimes indistinguishable unless I check the EXIF data.

That’s really the heart of this: the gap between these systems isn’t what it used to be. And yet, the narrative hasn’t fully caught up.

This isn’t about saying gear doesn’t matter at all. It does. But it matters in terms of how it fits your life, your style, and the way you actually shoot—not just sensor size on a spec sheet.

This is especially for us hobbyist photographers. The ones who take this craft seriously, but aren’t doing it for clients or paychecks. We’re documenting our lives, our families, our walks, our travels. We care deeply about the images we make—but we also have to live with the gear we carry.

And I think there’s something validating in recognizing that you don’t need to chase a bigger sensor to be a “real” photographer.

We already are one.

In this conversation, I walk through my own experience using different systems, how I think about sensor size today, and why I believe most modern cameras—regardless of format—are more than capable of producing incredible work. The question isn’t whether your camera is enough. It’s whether you’re letting it be.

If this hit home for you, let me know. Are you shooting APS-C, full frame, micro four thirds—and does it even matter to you anymore?

I’m always curious how other hobbyist photographers are thinking about this.

Later ✌🏾,

Kwame

There have been seasons in my life when I felt myself drifting away from photography, and it never happened in some dramatic way. I didn’t make a big decision to stop. I didn’t pack up my cameras and declare that chapter over. It was quieter than that. I just started reaching for the camera less. Walks became walks without pictures. Days passed where I noticed things — long shadows across a wet street, the particular orange that lives at the edge of a winter afternoon — but didn’t feel the urge to capture them. The light was still there. It still registered. It just didn’t pull me anywhere. Then enough time went by that I had to admit something felt different.

For me, it started with Instagram.

In the beginning it was good — I was seeing what other people noticed, developing my own sense of what I was after. But eventually I felt the platform working on me. A photo I genuinely loved got ignored. A safer one got traction. I started making that calculation before I even raised the camera. The question stopped being what do I want to photograph and became what will this look like to someone scrolling past it. Once that shift happened, something drained out of the work. I was still making images, but for a different reason, and I could feel the difference every time I went out.

Around that same period, I started hearing that passion should become income — that if you love something enough, you owe it to yourself to build something around it. I wrote about this more last week, about what it actually means to do this for the love of it, so if you missed it, it’s worth going back to. But the short version is that I wasn’t burnt out on photography. I was burnt out on performing it. When money entered before I’d figured out what the work was actually for, it hollowed things out faster than I expected.

The gear spiral happened too. It offered something that felt like progress — you can compare lenses, read reviews, feel like you’re moving forward. There’s a whole community built around that, and it feels like engagement. But knowing more about cameras is not the same as seeing better, and the time I spent researching was time I wasn’t out making things.

What quietly undid me more than any of that was comparison. The feed is full of Patagonia and golden hour and dramatic portraits made in places that require long flights. It adds up to an argument nobody is making out loud: that meaningful photography happens somewhere else, to people with a better eye, in conditions that aren’t your actual Tuesday afternoon. I started looking at my own life — the neighborhood I’d walked a hundred times, the dog in the same yard, the ordinary light of an ordinary day — and deciding it didn’t quite qualify. I was waiting for better material that was never going to come, because there is no better material. There’s just what’s around you and whether you’re paying attention to it.

That wasn’t a habit that changed — it was a belief. The algorithms and the monetization pressure and the gear debates are conditions you can step back from. But believing that your life is too ordinary to be worth photographing sits inside you quietly, and it’s harder to argue with. Once I started believing it, I stopped carrying the camera.

What I’ve learned from going through all of this — more than once — is that falling out of love with photography isn’t a failure. It’s usually the practice telling you that something got misaligned, that you drifted from the original reason you picked up a camera without quite noticing. The question worth sitting with isn’t how do I get motivated again — it’s what was I doing it for before things got complicated?

For me, what helped most was stepping back from social media, letting go of the algorithm, and changing the way I thought about gear. We’re in a moment where even budget cameras are genuinely capable tools that can last years, and the gap between entry-level and high-end has never mattered less for the kind of photography most of us actually want to make. Once I stopped measuring what I had against what someone else was shooting with, gear became something I picked up and used, not something I thought about. And once I stopped posting for an audience, I noticed I was carrying my camera almost everywhere — not out of discipline or any creative strategy, just because I wanted to. Because I was enjoying it again.

I won’t pretend it’s perfect now. There are still days, occasionally a couple of weeks, where the camera stays home. But those stretches are shorter and further apart, and when they happen they don’t carry the same weight. They’re just a quiet spell, not a sign that something is broken. The difference between then and now isn’t that I’ve solved anything. It’s that I remembered what I was doing it for, and I kept coming back to that instead of chasing everything around it.

Later ✌🏾,

Kwame

I’m not thinking of this as a podcast, at least not right now. It’s more of an experiment — a companion to the Monday newsletter, a place to sit with the same idea a little longer and talk through some of the thoughts that didn’t fully make it into the written piece.

The newsletter is usually where I try to shape the idea. These audio notes are looser. More conversational. Less polished. A little more like thinking out loud after the essay is already written.

This week’s note goes deeper into the word “amateur,” and why I think it deserves more respect than it usually gets. I talk about photography as a hobby, the pressure to turn everything into a side hustle, the burnout that can come from performing for likes, and why making pictures for ourselves still matters.

For now, I’m going to keep treating these audio notes as a small experiment and see how they feel — for me, and for anyone who decides to listen.

Later ✌🏾,

Kwame

Somewhere along the way, amateur became an insult. A way of saying: not quite there yet. Not serious enough. Still learning.

But the word comes from the Latin amare — to love. An amateur is someone who does something for the love of it. That’s the whole definition. And when I think about it, that is exactly what I am, an amateur in the truest sense.

I didn’t always feel that way. For a long time I carried the word like a disclaimer — something to explain around whenever photography came up. “I’m a photographer, but not professionally.” That qualifier existed because I’d absorbed the same hierarchy most of us absorb without ever deciding to: professional means serious, amateur means something less. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to untangle that.

What changed it wasn’t a single moment. It was more like an accumulation — figuring out, over time, about why I actually pick up a camera. It’s not for income. It’s not for an audience. Ninety percent of my photos will never be seen by anyone but me. They live in Lightroom, organized by date, and that’s where they stay. For a while, I felt some vague, low-grade guilt about that, like a photo only fully existed once someone else confirmed it did. Like the work needed a witness to count. What I’ve come to understand is that the folders are not a failure to share. They’re just the archive of a practice. The record of what caught my attention at the time.

The love that brings us to photography is not one general thing, and I think we do ourselves a disservice when we treat it like it is. My love is specific. It’s the love of noticing — of moving through a day with a little more attention than I would otherwise. The camera is a vehicle for that, not the destination. I carry it the way some people carry a journal, not because something extraordinary might happen, but because the habit of looking changes how ordinary days feel. The streets I walk with Pixel. The same trails I’ve been down dozens of times. The light at a particular hour on a road I drive every day. None of that is dramatic. All of it matters to me.

But someone else’s love looks completely different, and that’s the part the word “amateur” is actually big enough to hold. The love of capturing family — the unrepeatable texture of a particular season of your kids’ lives. The way your parents looked that afternoon, the ordinary Tuesday that turned out to matter years laters. The love of wandering somewhere unfamiliar with a camera and no agenda. The love of remembering — of holding onto places and moments that would otherwise just dissolve quietly into the past. These are not lesser versions of some more serious photographic pursuit. They are the pursuit.

My own relationship with all of this has been an ebb and flow. Right now it leans toward family and the familiar — walks with Pixel at the dog park, my kid at a baseball game, the close and the everyday that I’d miss entirely if I weren’t paying attention. Earlier in my practice, it looked different, and I expect it will again. More travel at some point. More unfamiliar places. New seasons of life bring different ways of seeing. That’s not inconsistency. When the love shifts, you follow it, and the work changes accordingly.

I know what it feels like to shoot toward something empty. There was a period where I was making pictures for other people — for the response, for some idea of what a photographer was supposed to produce — and it hollowed the whole thing out fast. I wasn’t burnt out on photography. I was burnt out on performing it. The camera hadn’t changed. The problem was that I’d quietly stopped doing it for myself. I think that’s probably a more common experience than most of us admit out loud, because it requires acknowledging that we got pulled in a direction we didn’t actually choose.

Maybe that’s the real work of it—reclaiming the word amateur for ourselves. A reminder that photography does not have to become a business, a brand, or a performance to be valid. It can simply be a way of paying attention. A way of remembering. A way of staying close to our own lives. To be an amateur, in the truest sense, is not to be less serious. It is to be rooted in love first. And I think, for a lot of us, keeping that in mind that might be the most honest kind of photography there is.

Later ✌🏾,

Kwame

I’m trying something a little different today. I didn’t feel like getting in front of a camera for a YouTube video, but I had some thoughts about my recent time in Costa Rica that I wanted to share in a more personal way. You’ll find an audio recording at the top of this post where I dig into a specific encounter I had with another photographer.

While we were both looking at the same bird with similar gear, our results were different. It wasn’t because I’m some “pro” or “master”—it was simply because I’ve been putting in the miles back home.

The “In-Between” Miles As many of you know, I’m deep in training for the Indy Mini half-marathon right now. There’s a direct parallel here: you don’t show up to the starting line and expect to run 13.1 miles if you haven’t been running with no fanfare.

Photography is exactly the same.

If the only time the camera comes out is on vacation, there is going to be a natural tension and frustration when the gear doesn’t feel like an extension of your hand. In the audio above, I talk about:

• Moving your feet: Why I got into a half-squat for a Kingfisher while others stayed standing.

• Technical muscle memory: How back-button focusing—something I practiced while walking Pixel—became second nature when a hummingbird finally landed.

• The Daily Reps: Why the “boring” shots at my kid’s baseball games or the grocery store are actually the most important shots I take.

I’m not trying to say I’ve figured it all out—I’m a hobbyist just like you, practicing this craft because I love it. But I’ve found that the more I carry my camera during the “boring” errands or the daily walks here in Washington, the more at home I feel with it when I’m finally standing somewhere spectacular.

It’s about making the camera a part of our daily life so that the gear eventually disappears and we can just be present in the moment.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments: What does your “everyday practice” look like? Do you find it easy to stay sharp when you aren’t on a big trip, or do you struggle to find the motivation to shoot the “ordinary” stuff at home?

Give the audio a listen and let me know what you think of this format!

Later ✌🏾,

Kwame

David duChemin wrote about a shift he made on his last trip to Kenya — arriving not just looking for subjects, but looking for ideas. Specific compositional challenges he wanted to work through: scale, motion, high-key images. It’s a good piece, and I’ve been thinking about it in the context of Costa Rica, because my experience pointed somewhere different. I wasn’t hunting for ideas. I was just trying to stay open — no list, no target species, nothing I needed to walk away with.

On one of the days, my wife and I did a bird-watching tour at Curi-Cancha Wildlife Refuge. The guide went through our group that morning asking each person what they wanted to see. When he got to me I said I was open to seeing whatever was available. He said he’d never heard that before, but he liked it. I wasn’t trying to be poetic. I just didn’t have anything specific in mind, and I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

At one point the guide pointed out a kingfisher sitting on a branch nearby. I didn’t even know Costa Rica had kingfishers. I’d done a little research before the trip, but not much — I like being surprised by a new place. I’ve never seen a kingfisher in the wild because I don’t live where they typically are, and it’s one of my favorite birds. Seeing one, getting low enough to shoot it at eye level, and coming away with a portrait I’m genuinely happy with — that happened because I wasn’t walking past things in search of something else. I was just there.

The hummingbird garden worked the same way. My first instinct was to track the birds, chase the movement, follow whatever was happening. I tried that for a few minutes and gave it up. I picked a cluster of blooms, set my focus, and waited. When a bird came into that zone I fired, and moved on when it left. Most of those frames are useless, but a few have light and motion in them that I couldn’t have gotten by chasing. I stopped trying to control where the birds went and let them show me.

The gear section of all this matters, but probably not in the way people expect. I’ve had this lens, Sony 70-350mm, for four years and the body, Sony A6700, for over a year and a half. When things got difficult in the field — autofocus grabbing branches instead of feathers, light dropping in the jungle — my hands knew what to do. That kind of familiarity doesn’t come from trips. It comes from everything in between. The walks around the neighborhood with Pixel, the ordinary afternoons with nothing worth shooting, all the boring pictures I’ve written about before. I watched people on multiple excursions struggle with the gap between what they saw and what their cameras showed. These are people who love photography — that much was clear. But the camera only comes out on vacation, and that’s where the disconnect shows up. It’s not a gear problem. The cameras were fine. It’s a repetition problem, and the only way through it is the work that nobody else sees.

I came home with around 1,700 frames. I’m down to about 300 in my first pass. When I pull out just the photography — not the family pictures, just the personal ones — I’m looking at some of the best images I’ve made. Not the greatest pictures I’ve ever taken in the history of my photography, but they’re up there, and I know I’m still getting better. The best part about going in with no agenda is being genuinely surprised by what I came back with. All those miles with Pixel, all those walks with a camera when nothing was happening — that’s what made this possible.

Later ✌🏾,

Kwame

This trip to Costa Rica is for my son’s spring break. That sounds simple enough, but there’s a weight underneath it that I’ve been carrying quietly since we landed. He’s getting older, and the older he gets, the more his time starts to belong to his own life — his own schedule, his own plans, his own direction. These trips, the ones where we’re all together with nowhere else to be, are starting to feel less like a given and more like something to hold onto.

So we’re here, and we’re moving faster than usual. Costa Rica has been a series of places — hanging bridges, an active volcano, a waterfall — each one worth its own day, compressed into a few hours. It’s not the slow, stay-in-one-place kind of travel I prefer, but even inside the pace, there are moments worth stopping for.

On the first full day, I forgot my telephoto lens. We walked through the jungle and spotted howler monkeys and spider monkeys moving through the canopy above us. They were too far for the 17-50, even pushing the A7CR into crop mode, and I knew as I was looking up at them that I wasn’t going to get the shot I wanted. A few years ago that would have followed me for the rest of the day. I would have replayed it on the walk back, on the drive to the next stop, probably all the way home. This time, I watched them move through the trees, pulled out my Samsung, got something passable, and moved on. Not perfect, not print-worthy, but I got something and then I let it go.

I’ve been thinking about Jay Maisel lately — a photographer I’ve never met but whose videos I’ve watched more times than I can count. One of the things he talks about is going out empty. No agenda, no predetermined shot list, no fixed idea of what the day should produce. You just show up and receive what’s there. It sounds simple, and maybe even a little passive, but it’s actually one of the harder practices to build because it runs against everything the photography internet tells you to do. Plan your shots. Chase the light. Know what you’re looking for before you leave the house. Maisel’s answer to all of that is essentially: go out empty and trust what comes.

I think that’s what’s been happening on this trip, even without me naming it that way. Back at the hotel — an indoor-outdoor space where birds drift in and out of the shade — I’ve been shooting casually, nothing with any real intention behind it. More like warming up my eyes before a bird photography tour later in the week. And I’ve been okay with that. There’s something useful in just making pictures without pressure, letting the rust work itself off without forcing anything.

What keeps pulling me back, though, is something simpler than technique. I have to actively remind myself to photograph my family while we’re here. Not because they’re not on my mind, but because it’s easy to get absorbed in new scenery, in the pull of something visually interesting, and let the people you came with drift to the edge of the frame. The quiet moments between the activities, when nothing scheduled is happening and the actual trip is.

That’s the thing I want to hold onto from this one. These trips aren’t photography trips. Photography is just what I do, the way some people journal or sketch — it’s the practice I bring along with me wherever I go. But the trip itself is about being somewhere new with people I love, doing things we’d never have the chance to do otherwise. The camera is welcome, but it’s not the reason we’re here. Going out empty means something a little different when your family is standing next to you. It means being present with them first, and letting the pictures find their way in around the edges.

Later ✌🏾,

Kwame

A few months ago I wrote about why our photography deserves a home — a website, a place that belongs to us outside the noise of social media. I meant every word of it. I also said I was going to update my own. I haven’t, not really. Life got in the way, the way life does, but that’s only part of it. The harder truth is that I sat down more than once to update the site and walked away without uploading a single image. Not because I didn’t have pictures. Because I couldn’t figure out which ones represented where I actually am right now. Every time I tried to answer that question I ended up somewhere else entirely, thinking about something bigger than a website.

I’m still going to do it. But I’ve started thinking about it differently — less like a project to finish and more like something to tend over time. A portfolio, like a garden, is never really done. It changes as we change. I have more to say about that, but that’s a different day.

One thing I noticed while sitting with all of this was that the photographs I’ve made while traveling and those I’ve made close to home don’t feel like they came from the same photographer. Not in quality. In connection. In how deep they go.

When I travel with a camera something shifts almost immediately. I step off the plane, or out of the car, and suddenly I’m paying attention in a way I haven’t been in months. Everything is worth looking at. The street signs, the light on the buildings, the way people move through a market, the color of a door I’d walk past without a second thought at home. I’m wide open, taking everything in because none of it is familiar and I don’t want to miss a frame of it.

Part of that is newness. When we haven’t seen something before our brains pay attention differently. We can’t rely on what we already know, so we actually have to look. But something else is happening too. When we travel the mental noise of ordinary life goes quiet. The to-do list, the emails, the low hum of everything we’re supposed to be doing — all of it recedes. Travel frees up a part of the brain that daily life keeps fully occupied. And into that quiet, we start to see.

The pictures I make in that state are real and alive. But they are almost by definition surface pictures. Not because I’m not trying, but because I’m a visitor. I’m working fast because I know the clock is running. There’s a race-against-time quality to travel photography that produces a particular kind of image — vivid, immediate, wide open. But a first impression, always.

At home I have the opposite conditions and the opposite problem. All the time in the world and none of the alertness. I drive the same streets, walk the same trails, move through the same spaces day after day until they become invisible to me. The brain stops processing what it thinks it already knows. Familiarity doesn’t just breed contempt. It breeds a kind of blindness.

And layered on top of that is all the mental noise that travel temporarily lifts. At home the to-do list is always running. I go for a walk and I’m already somewhere else in my head, thinking about what’s next, what I forgot, what needs to get done. We move through our own neighborhoods on autopilot, eyes open but not really looking. I don’t think I’m alone in that.

I’ve been sitting with a question I don’t fully have an answer to. The wonder we feel in new places — is it the place, or is it us? Newness gets us there faster, no question. A place we’ve never been demands our attention in a way a familiar street doesn’t. But what if we tried to bring that same quality of presence somewhere ordinary? The trails we walk. The neighborhood we’ve lived in for years. The grocery store we visit every week, without really looking at it. I’m not sure we can manufacture the feeling exactly. But I think the attempt changes something.

I’ve been training for a half-marathon, running the same trail several times a week with Pixel. Somewhere along the way it stopped being a route and became a place I actually know. There’s a magnolia tree that’s days away from losing its petals. A tree where two eagles like to sit. Spots where puddles form after rain. Neighbors turning over their flower beds for spring. None of this was visible to me at first. Repetition revealed it. I didn’t go looking — I just kept showing up, and eventually the place started showing me things.

That’s what belonging to a place can give us that visiting never can. Time. The chance to return. To watch something change slowly, to see a season move through a single tree, to notice what’s different today from what it was last week. Travel photography will always have its own energy and I’m not trading it for anything. But the pictures we make at home have access to a kind of depth that a first impression never will.

I’m still figuring out how to close the gap between the two — how to move through my own days with a little more of that traveler’s attention. Some days it works. Some days, I get to the end of a run and realize I barely looked up.

A quick note before I go — today is the last day to join the early reader group for The Unseen: A Guide to Photographing Your Everyday. I'm looking for a small group of people willing to read it and share their honest thoughts before it goes out into the world. If that sounds like something you'd want to be part of, the link is below.

Join the story

I carry a camera with me every day. Not because it’s a fashion piece or a content strategy. I just love taking pictures. It’s how I move through the world. It’s how I pay attention.

But most of what’s out there about photography isn’t really for people like us. It’s about going pro. Building a following. Which lens to buy next. There’s a whole industry built around the idea that we’re one upgrade away from being better photographers. One preset pack. One course. One new camera body.

And then there’s social media, doing its thing — showing us the best of everyone else’s lives and making our own feel a little less interesting by comparison. Like our morning coffee or our dog on the couch or the shoes by the front door aren’t worth the frame.

We know that’s not true. But it’s hard not to feel it sometimes.

That’s why I wrote The Unseen: A Guide to Photographing Your Everyday.

It’s a book about learning to see what’s already in front of us. Not in the “open your eyes and point your camera” sense, but in the deeper sense — paying attention to the light that moves across the kitchen table every morning, the way the neighborhood looks after rain, the quiet beauty of a room when no one else is awake. It’s about shifting from “what should I photograph?” to “how can I photograph this?” — and discovering that when we make that shift, the world stops feeling like it’s run out of things to show us. My goal is that by the time you finish this, you won’t just have read a book — you’ll be looking at your own home and neighborhood with brand-new eyes.

Be part of the process

The book is close to done, and before it goes out into the world, I want to put it in the hands of the people it was written for.

I’m looking for 10 people to read an early copy and help shape the final version. Not as a favor to me — as part of the process. This is a book by a hobbyist photographer for hobbyist photographers, and it matters to me that it resonates with this community.

Here’s how it works: sign up below, and if you’re one of the first 10, I’ll send you a Dropbox link with the book as a PDF and an EPUB — read it however works best. Sign-up will be open for one week. After it closes, I’ll send everyone the link and instructions together. From there, you’ll have two weeks to read the book and share your honest feedback through a short Google Form. What worked, what didn’t, what you felt.

First come, first served. Some of your feedback may end up as a testimonial on the book’s website.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know what Life in Focus is about. This book goes deeper. And I want it to be right.

Help me bring this to life

The Longer story of why I wrote this

I didn’t start this because I had some big vision for a book. I kept noticing a gap.

There’s so much content about photography, and almost none of it speaks to hobbyists. Everything points toward monetizing, growing an audience, turning it into something. And for those of us who aren’t interested in any of that — who just want to take pictures because picking up a camera makes us see our lives differently — there’s not a lot out there.

That quiet gap is where this book came from.

The other piece is what social media does to how we see our own lives. We scroll through highlight reels — the best of everyone’s travel, their golden hour everything — and without meaning to, we start measuring. Our backyard doesn’t look like their backyard. Our Tuesday doesn’t look like their weekend.

But if we’re on a walk and we see a leaf fall from a tree and no one else is around, we just witnessed something that will never happen again. That exact moment, that exact light, gone. If we photographed it, we held onto something that would have disappeared.

That’s not small. We just treat it like it is.

I think about my kid’s toys. I used to photograph his favorites — a duck, a stuffed animal, a fire truck. They were just toys. Now those pictures come up and we both stop. “Oh yeah, I remember that.” The thing itself is long gone, but the picture kept it.

I think about our two dogs who died within six months of each other. We have hundreds of pictures of them, and the ones that mean the most aren’t from hikes or trips. It’s our Beagle finding the sunniest spot in the house. Our Lab standing behind me in the kitchen every single time I cooked. Now Pixel follows me everywhere — upstairs, downstairs, always right there. I photograph that too, because I’ve learned what those pictures become.

The book is about all of this. Not the big vacations. Not the once-in-a-lifetime trips. The mornings. The walks. The coffee. The shoes by the door. The things that make up an actual life.

Writing it has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’m a visual person, and getting what’s in my head onto a page was a real struggle. It took about a year, and I went slow on purpose. No shortcuts. I wanted it to be honest.

I’m not a professional photographer. I’m not a professional writer. I’m a mid-40s guy who’s been carrying a camera for over 20 years and has finally been doing it long enough to notice some things worth sharing. I don’t think I could have written this earlier in my life. It took years of learning to slow down — to stop trying to capture everything and start noticing what actually matters.

There’s a voice that says, “Who cares?” I’m not famous. This isn’t flashy. It’s a guy talking about photographing the everyday and being present in the mundane.

But I think a lot of us are out here. Quiet. Unseen. Doing the thing we love because we love it.

If that’s you, this book was written with you in mind. And I’m glad you’re here.

Thanks for reading ✌🏾,

Kwame

Join the story

The last few weeks, I haven’t picked up a dedicated camera much. It’s not that anything is wrong — it just hasn’t been calling me the way it normally does. The phone has been handling things. Pixel on a walk, something in the yard, whatever catches my eye on any given day. I’ve always believed phone photography is real photography because the decisions are the same and the eye is the same, but there’s a different kind of intention that comes with reaching for a dedicated tool. A shift in how you show up to the moment. I haven’t been in that mode lately, and honestly I’ve been fine with it.

A few years ago that kind of stretch would have nagged at me, but now it mostly doesn’t. I think a lot of us were taught early that rest has to be justified — that slowing down is only okay if you can point to whatever wore you out first. If you can’t, if you’re just not reaching for the thing you normally reach for and there’s no clean reason why, you start looking for the problem. Auditing yourself. I’ve gotten a lot better at not doing that. Sometimes you’re just in a quieter season and that’s really all there is to it.

Instead of picking up the camera, I’ve been spending time with a little Android handheld, running through old Mario levels. There’s something genuinely restful about a game with rules that don’t change and stakes that don’t exist. You run right, you collect coins, nobody asks you to optimize anything. My wife thinks it’s hilarious, and she’s not wrong.

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What I’ve noticed though is that the eye doesn’t really stop even when everything else slows down. We had our first snow of the season recently and Pixel was out front just being a dog in it — running around, doing her thing. I grabbed the phone and got some pictures and video, and it wasn’t until after that I thought about how much better one of my cameras would have handled that light and that kind of movement. The phone did fine, but I felt the gap.

Later that same day a tree came down in the yard and nearly hit the house, and I went out with the phone and documented it without a second thought. Didn’t even occur to me to reach for anything else — the phone was the right tool for that moment and that was that. Same day, same phone, and two completely different feelings about it.

That’s what I keep coming back to during quieter stretches. You’re still in it. Still noticing things, still making small instinctive decisions about what’s worth recording and how. The practice doesn’t go anywhere just because you’re not being deliberate about it — it just runs quieter for a while until something pulls it back up.

For me that’s usually spring. Winter around here isn’t my favorite time to shoot — the light is flat, the days are short, and it just doesn’t move me the way other seasons do. So if this is the time of year when I slow down, play video games, and let the cameras sit on the shelf, that’s fine. Spring will come and I’ll want to be outside with something in my hand again. I’ve already been thinking about spending more time with the macro lens — small subjects, close attention, the kind of shooting that feels like a reset. That feels right for where I am right now.

What I know at this point in my life and in this practice is that I don’t feel the pressure to constantly be creating or constantly be sharpening my eye the way I once did. Creativity needs room to breathe. It needs seasons where you’re not producing anything, not pushing anything forward, not trying to grow. I used to fight that feeling. Now I’m learning to just lean into it, enjoy the quieter pace for what it is, and trust that I’ll come back out of it when the time is right. And I always do.

Later ✌🏾,

Kwame

P.S. I've been working on a project in the background for a long time now — something that's been a bit of a bucket list goal for me. I'm finally ready to share it with you all. Keep an eye on your inbox tomorrow morning; I'm going to need a little bit of help from a few of you to get it across the finish line.

This past week held two small celebrations in the same breath — my birthday, and the two-year anniversary of the day Pixel came home with us. We didn’t do anything elaborate. Some good food, a few photos, and time together as a family. Just one of those simple afternoons where nobody is trying to get anywhere and the day unfolds at its own pace.

But something I’ve been noticing lately kept floating around in the back of my mind during that time.

I have a hobby that I genuinely enjoy, and sometimes I feel a little guilty about it.

That might sound strange, but the feeling has been there more often lately. Photography has become a big part of my life, but not in a professional way. I’m not trying to sell prints. I’m not building a photography business. I’m not chasing clients or turning it into a side hustle. For me, it’s simply something I enjoy doing. It’s a way to slow down and pay attention to what’s happening around me.

And yet, there’s this quiet cultural expectation that if you’re good at something, you should probably be doing more with it. You should monetize it. You should build something from it. You should figure out how to turn it into income.

I’ve heard that idea enough times that it occasionally sneaks into my own thinking. I’ll catch myself wondering if I’m somehow wasting an opportunity by keeping photography as a hobby instead of trying to turn it into something bigger.

But every time I follow that idea through, it never really feels right.

Recently, I intentionally put my camera away for about a week. I wanted to reset a little and see what it felt like not to carry it everywhere. What I noticed pretty quickly was that the camera wasn’t the point. Moments kept showing up where I instinctively wanted to photograph something. The way the light came through the window. Pixel doing something goofy.

That’s when it clicked for me that photography isn’t really about the camera anymore. It’s just part of how I move through the world now. It helps me notice things that would otherwise pass by.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized the real tension wasn’t about photography at all.

It was about whether adults are allowed to simply enjoy things.

Somewhere along the way it feels like we absorbed this idea that hobbies are only acceptable if they eventually lead somewhere. If you’re going to spend time on something, it should probably become a business, a side hustle, or at least something productive. Fun, by itself, can start to feel like it needs justification.

But when I look at the photographs I’ve taken over the years, the ones that matter most to me have nothing to do with productivity. They’re pictures from walks with the dog, afternoons with my family, baseball games, road trips, and random days that didn’t feel important at the time.

Photography helps me hold onto those moments.

Not because they’re remarkable, but because they’re mine.

And the truth is, I don’t want that practice to become something else. I don’t want to measure it by income, clients, or whether it’s “going somewhere.” I already have parts of my life that operate that way.

What photography gives me is something different. It gives me a reason to pay attention to the life that’s already happening.

When I look back at my life years from now, I doubt the things I’ll care about most will be how efficiently I used my time or how many opportunities I turned into money. I suspect the memories that will matter are the quieter ones: the walks, the birthdays, the dog sleeping nearby, and the ordinary days that slowly became meaningful over time.

Photography is just one way I’ve found to notice those things while they’re still here.

Peace ✌🏾,

Kwame

I’ve been training for another half-marathon, and it’s made something very clear to me: running long miles and taking “boring” pictures work the same way. On race day, those 13.1 miles are electric. Thousands of people line the streets. Strangers cheer. There’s music, energy, and that rush you feel crossing the finish line. It feels like everything you’ve done has been building toward that moment. But that moment only exists because of hundreds of quiet miles before it. Three to five miles every other day. Ten miles on cold, silent Saturday mornings. No crowds. No applause. No one is handing you water. Just you, putting in unremarkable work, over and over again. Photography follows the same pattern. The images people notice, the projects that feel meaningful, the moments that stand out—they’re built on countless ordinary frames that nobody ever sees.

We all have our race days. The big trip. The national park we’ve been dreaming about. The coast at golden hour. Those are the moments we get excited for, the ones we plan around, the ones that produce the images we actually want to share. But for every one of those moments, there are hundreds — maybe thousands — of quiet, ordinary outings that no one will ever know about. A walk through the neighborhood with the dog. Fifteen minutes at a local park photographing ducks that couldn’t care less that you’re there. An evening in the backyard when the light is decent but not special and you’re just working through settings because you want your hands to know what to do before your brain has to think about it.

I’ve been calling these the boring pictures. Not because the act of making them is boring — it’s usually not — but because the results almost never go anywhere. They sit in Lightroom untouched. Maybe I flag one or two. The rest I’ll never open again. It used to feel like wasted time, like I should have something to show for every outing. But I’ve started to see it differently.

The boring pictures are where the actual learning happens. When I go out to the pond near our house and practice tracking birds in flight, I’m not trying to make a portfolio image. I’m trying to build a reflex. I’m learning how a duck moves before it lifts off the water. I’m figuring out where my focus settings need to be when the light drops and the background gets busy. I’m making mistakes in a place where the stakes are zero so that when the stakes are higher — when I’m standing somewhere I may never visit again — my hands already know what to do.

Musicians understand this. They practice scales for years. Dancers do barre work every single day. Writers fill journals with sentences no one will ever read. But in photography, we don’t really have language for practice. We just call it all “shooting,” which makes it sound like every time we pick up a camera we should be producing something worth sharing. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a Tuesday afternoon walk.

I think about the people I’ve seen on vacation with a camera they clearly haven’t used in months. The flash is popped up in the middle of the day. The dial is on auto. And I’m not judging them — I’ve been that person. But I know what’s going to happen when they get home and look at those files. The images aren’t going to feel like the trip did. And the gap between what they experienced and what the camera captured is going to be frustrating, maybe enough to make them think the camera is the problem. But it’s not the camera. It’s the missing miles.

What I’m still learning is that the boring pictures aren’t just building technical skill. They’re building something harder to name. When I walk the same trail with Pixel for the hundredth time and bring the camera anyway, I’m not just practicing exposure or composition. I’m practicing the act of paying attention when nothing is asking for my attention. I’m learning what I notice when there’s no spectacle to point the lens at. And sometimes, buried in those unremarkable outings, I start to see patterns in what I’m drawn to that I never would have recognized if I only picked up the camera for the big moments.

The boring pictures don’t need to be shared. They don’t need to be curated or posted or even kept. They just need to be made. They’re the quiet, invisible foundation underneath every image we’re proud of — the hundreds of miles that make the 13.1 possible. Nobody is going to cheer for us while we’re making them, and that’s fine. That was never the point.

The point is that we keep showing up. Same trail, same light, same ordinary afternoon. Camera in hand, not because something extraordinary might happen, but because this is what the practice looks like when no one is watching.

Later,

Kwame ✌🏾

There’s a paved trail I walk a lot in the winter. It’s practical. When it rains, my shoes don’t get muddy and Pixel’s paws stay relatively clean. There’s a lake along the path, a house with a dock, birds that tend to perch in the same general areas, and a few fishing piers where people stand and cast their lines. I’ve photographed all of it before. I know where I usually stop. I know the compositions that have worked in the past. Without even thinking about it, I can slip into making the same picture over and over again. The place hasn’t changed, but my seeing can become automatic.

At some point, I started noticing the way light filters through the trees and spills across the pathway. I began going out right after it rains, when puddles form and the ground turns into a mirror. I found myself slowing down for small details I would have walked past before, like a blackberry vine hanging in front of a wall. In the summer it’s full and heavy, blackberries dangling from it. In the winter, stripped down, it looks almost like a gnarled finger reaching out into the cold air. None of that required a plane ticket. It required looking again.

I remember taking my sister-in-law down that same trail when she was visiting. For her, it was completely new. She was amazed to see people swimming in the lake in the middle of winter. I’d seen it before. I barely registered it anymore. Watching her react reminded me how much I had normalized. Sometimes it takes someone else’s fresh eyes to show us what we’ve stopped seeing.

That moment stuck with me. And since then, I’ve noticed I can recreate that feeling of newness without actually going anywhere. If I walk the trail in the opposite direction, everything shifts. The light hits differently. The lake appears at a new angle. Even turning around mid-walk can change the entire experience. It’s the same path, but it doesn’t feel the same.

Or I’ll drive to a different part of the city, visit a neighborhood I don’t normally spend time in, grab coffee somewhere new, and just wander a bit. That small sense of not knowing what’s around the corner — it’s the same feeling I get driving through Dakar. It isn’t about distance. It’s about stepping into the unknown, even in small ways.

The longer we stay somewhere, the more it starts to feel ordinary. I think that’s just human nature. Even if you live somewhere beautiful, over time it becomes the background of your life. The place itself hasn’t lost its beauty. Our attention has simply softened. Photography helps me interrupt that. It asks me to slow down, to look at what I think I already know, to notice how light changes after rain, or how a vine transforms with the seasons. It reminds me to turn around sometimes and see what’s behind me.

Most of us won’t be boarding planes every month in search of the next great image. We’ll be living our lives in familiar neighborhoods, walking familiar trails, passing the same houses and storefronts. But if we’re paying attention, those places don’t have to feel small. You might not find anything spectacular on a given day. But that subtle shift, that small sense of wonder returning — most days, that’s more than enough.

Later,

Kwame ✌🏾

Photography isn’t just about snapping pictures or collecting moments. At its core, it’s about how we express ourselves. It’s about how we interpret the world, how we notice small details, how we respond emotionally to what’s in front of us, and how we translate all of that into something visual. Every photograph we make carries a piece of our perspective, whether we intend it to or not. What we choose to frame, what we choose to leave out, where we stand, when we press the shutter, and when we decide not to—all of those choices reflect who we are and where we are in our creative lives.

I was reminded of that on my recent trip to Senegal. Before I went, I had a clear picture in my mind of the kinds of photographs I wanted to make. I imagined myself walking through Dakar, creating layered street photographs full of movement, color, and everyday life. I pictured images that felt immersive and intimate, the kind that make you feel like you’re standing right there in the middle of the scene. In my head, I already knew what my “best” photos from the trip were going to look like.

What actually happened was different.

While I did come home with photographs I’m grateful for, many of them didn’t match the vision I had carried with me. Instead of feeling deeply embedded in the environment, I often felt as if I were observing from the outside. Instead of anticipating moments, I was reacting to them. Instead of returning to the same places again and again, learning their rhythms, I was constantly moving, constantly adjusting, constantly starting over. I was working within the limits of being a visitor, and those limits quietly shaped the kind of pictures I was able to make.

At first, I saw that gap as a disappointment. It felt like I had fallen short of my own expectations. It felt like there was a version of the trip, and a version of myself as a photographer, that I hadn’t quite reached. But as I’ve spent more time sitting with those images and reflecting on the experience, I’ve started to see it differently. What I brought back from Senegal wasn’t a failure to execute a plan. It was an honest record of where I am in my creative journey right now.

It reminded me that photography is never neutral. We don’t simply document what’s in front of us. We interpret it through our experience, our comfort level, our patience, our familiarity with a place, and our willingness to slow down and observe. In Senegal, I didn’t have the deep familiarity that allows you to anticipate moments instead of chase them. I didn’t know which streets would come alive at certain hours or which corners were worth returning to over and over. I hadn’t earned that level of intimacy with the environment, and my photographs reflected that.

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Back home in Seattle, I rarely think about those things consciously. I know where to walk. I know when the light works. I know where interesting interactions tend to happen. I know when it’s worth waiting and when it’s time to move on. That kind of knowledge doesn’t come from talent or gear. It comes from time, repetition, and presence. It comes from showing up in the same places long enough for them to start revealing themselves to you.

That contrast helped me understand something important about creativity. We often think growth comes from learning new techniques or chasing a certain style, but more often it comes from learning how to pay attention to where we actually are. The photographs I made in Senegal showed me my current relationship to unfamiliar places. They were showing me my comfort level, my habits, and my limitations. Instead of fighting that, I’ve started to see it as valuable information.

Creativity isn’t about forcing ourselves into an image of who we think we should be as artists. It’s about listening to what our work is telling us and responding with patience. It’s about asking why certain images resonate with us, what kind of presence they require, and what kind of life supports that kind of seeing. Those questions matter far more than any technical setting ever will.

There is a strong temptation, especially when we travel, to chase images that look impressive at a glance. We want the postcard. We want the highlight reel. We want photographs that signal that we were somewhere special. But images that last, both for us and for others, usually come from care and attention. They come from someone noticing something small, ordinary, and meaningful and deciding that it deserves to be seen.

Photography isn’t a destination that you arrive at one day and suddenly feel finished. It’s a process. A long, ongoing process of learning how to see more clearly, how to be more patient, how to be more present, and how to trust your instincts. No one ever truly masters it. We just keep moving forward, one experience at a time, one photograph at a time, going a little further along the path.

My time in Senegal didn’t show me what I lack. It showed me where I am, and that turned out to be exactly where I’m supposed to be right now. Still learning. Still growing. Still curious. Still willing to show up and make imperfect pictures in the service of something meaningful.

Later ✌🏾,

Kwame