Aimless, restless, searching for something to hold my attention, I find myself circling back to an old flame—photography. In my youth, it was joy unfiltered, pure and consuming. Now, as thirty draws near, the itch for creation stirs again. Yet I feel it pulling against a world where algorithms dictate what I see, what I feel, what I think I desire.
Art has always been my rebellion against that machine. My release. But even in photography, I once hid behind the “spray and pray” method—snapping endlessly, hoping that something would land. In the end, I wasn’t sure if it was talent or just luck.
So I’ve set myself a new challenge: twenty photographs a day. No more. A ceiling, not a floor. A rule that forces me to slow down, to look harder, to truly choose. If the image is to matter, it must be deliberate.
Armed with my Sony A7-RII, I stepped into the local park under the noon sun. My wife shot her camera beside me, but I carried only a single mission: to see. To frame. To press the shutter with intent. To prove to myself that the passion hasn’t died—that I can still create without pandering, without hashtags, without feeding the endless monolith of modern media. Simply create.
This work belongs only to me. No algorithm will shape it; no invisible hand will guide it. The photographs will answer to no one but my own eye.
These are the photographs I returned with. I didn’t end up with twenty keepers—some were overexposed, some out of focus, others simply fell flat. But perhaps that was the point. Perfection wasn’t the goal. What I found instead was the quiet discipline of slowing down, choosing with care, and seeing with intent rather than impulse.
Each frame became less about the outcome and more about the act itself—the pause, the consideration, the vision taking shape before the shutter fell. And in that practice, I discovered a piece of what I had been chasing all along. 📸
