“The credit belongs to the man or woman in the arena who actually strives” a butchered, cropped Teddy Roosevelt quote, lifted because it snaps my attention where it ought to be: to the person making, failing, trying. A reminder to self — make more than you consume. Write more than you read. Practice more than you plan.
Life conspires. Tonight it was a drive home, the sun low and the river Trent breathing fog from an old, polluted memory of Trentham Hall — an Orson Welles frame come to life, a scene that felt cinematic by accident. On the river, the three essential photographic ingredients presented themselves like a ready plated meal: light, timing and composition.
Camera at home, car full of people. In another life I’d have pulled over, left everyone to their evenings and chased the light. But this life had a list: cook, care, ferry kids, be present. Our dog became my accomplice — a small, energetic alibi for an evening walk with the camera. Practice, if you can steal it, pickpocketed from time, is still practice.
Spot the Alibi
Notes from the field:
- The Fuji X-E5 is brilliant — essential, immediate. It carries the spirit of my first real camera, the Olympus 35 RC, only this time without the wait for the film to develop.
- Files are heavy and detailed — a full-res JPG lifting 25 kgs/mbs. It feels like a gift to have options yet simultaneously a storage liability.
- Cropping, surgical - like a kick from Bruce Lee, economical and decisive. You can rescue a rushed moment, pull meaning from haste. My inner Sam Abell protests, but sometimes the crop is stewardship, not sin.
- Film-like - Fuji’s recipes do a lot of the work here. Once their quality is reduced further, push contrast, and an image grits up into something that feels like a winter wander with Ilford HP5
A little humility: I shot 23 frames. Back in film days that would have been a 24 — a Yorkshireman’s conservatism perhaps — no accidental double exposure. Of those 23, one or two will sit in my mind like companions. The others survive only with a Bruce Lee crop kick.
Don’t think pros crop? Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Man Jumping Over the Puddle has a backstory: decisive moment, yes, lucky shot through a fence hole, perhaps, but the negative shows the frame was trimmed. The great shots are built from work, practice, luck and a thousand small choices: lead the eye, balance the layers, compose and let in the light.
My result? Two that won’t embarrass, a pile of failures that teach. The math of making: practice + failure + repetition.
Chop wood, carry water.
