Blog

A friend of mine is a serious photographer. Or was. He invested heavily over the years, good cameras, multiple lenses, equipment that most hobbyists would envy. It is all stored away safely now. He regrets not pursuing the hobby more actively. The technology moved on, he tells me. Mirrorless cameras replaced DSLRs. Metal lenses arrived. What he has feels dated. And so the cameras sit.

I understood that feeling more than I admitted.

A couple of years ago I went out shooting with a group of bird photographers. Bird photography is a different discipline. It requires telephoto zoom lenses, the kind that let you observe a bird at a distance and fill the frame with it at full length. These photographers had serious equipment. Long, heavy lenses that meant business.

My lenses had zoom capability. Just not like anything they were carrying.
I got intimidated. Not by the photographers themselves. They were generous and welcoming. But by the gap between what they had and what I had. I started worrying that I would eventually feel compelled to spend money I did not want to spend just to keep up. So I quietly stopped going out with them.

That was the wrong decision. But it took me a while to see it.

A few weeks ago I picked up the camera again and made a deliberate choice. I had been carrying three lenses every time I went out. The constant switching between them was a distraction, always wondering if I had the right one on, always second guessing. So I decided to carry just one.

A prime lens. 85mm.

A prime lens does not zoom. If you want to get closer to your subject, you move your feet. That is the only option. It sounds like a limitation and it is. But limitations have a way of focusing the mind.

In downtown Phoenix, shooting with just the 85mm, I got some shots wrong. Angles I misjudged. Distances I miscalculated. But I was thinking differently, about composition, about where I was standing, about how I was relating to the subject rather than just adjusting a lens to compensate.

When I messaged my friend about it, he was happy. Happy that I was picking up the camera again. Happy that I was writing again too. His cameras are still stored away. But something in the conversation felt like a small door opening.

You do not need the perfect equipment to pursue what you love. You need the one lens you already have and the willingness to move your feet.

Constraints do not limit you. They teach you.

In Paris, I picked up a camera. The city made it easy. There were groups, there were streets made for wandering, there were a hundred reasons to point a lens at something beautiful or strange. After Paris, life got in the way. The UK came and went. The camera stayed but the outings did not.

I have become more reserved over the years. Not just with people. With cameras too. Street photography is an intimate act. You are capturing someone’s life without asking. The privacy of strangers weighs on me in a way it did not when I was younger and less aware of such things.

In Phoenix there is a group that does this. The timings never work for me. So one evening I decided to go alone. Just me and the camera in downtown Phoenix during golden hour.

The first few minutes were uncomfortable. That particular apprehension of standing on a street with a camera, wondering if you have any right to be there. And then I started shooting. And I forgot everything else.

Two things happened that I did not expect.

The first was a man pulling a collapsible wagon across the road. I spotted him from a distance and waited, the way street photographers do, for him to enter the frame just right. I looked through the viewfinder. Nothing. I looked up. He was walking directly towards me.

“What did you shoot?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was planning to take your picture but you walked towards me.”

He laughed. We both did.

The second was during golden hour. A person walking into the light, the kind of silhouette that makes you hold your breath. I was about to press the shutter when someone appeared at my elbow and showed me his phone screen. He had taken the same shot. We stood there comparing what we each saw in the same light. Smiles. A brief conversation. Two strangers on a street with cameras and nothing else in common.

The passersby smiled too. Encouraging, unhurried smiles.

I went out worried about intruding on people’s lives. I came back having connected with them instead.

I should not have stopped doing street photography.

In January 2009, I wrote my first post on Nona’s Pensieve. I called it “Booting up.” It felt like a big deal then, finding the time and the courage to write.

A lot has happened since.

I wrote through 2009, through the years that followed, through different cities and different versions of myself. Somewhere along the way I tried to monetize it. I watched the views. When the money did not come and the views did not grow, I got worried. Then distracted. Then I stopped.

That is the truth.

Life felt different without writing. I did not expect that.

So here I am. Booting up again. Same name, new home. No monetization. No obsessing over views. Just writing on my own space, at my own pace, about whatever catches my attention.

It would be nice if you read it. It would be lovely if you commented. But that is not why I am here.

I am here because I missed this.