Behind the lens

I've always found it strange that photographs get shown without any of the context that made them possible.

The conditions, the planning, the three failed attempts before the one that worked — none of that is visible in the final image. Which is fine, mostly. A photograph should stand on its own. But there's a version of the story that gets lost when you strip all of that away, and I've started to think it's worth telling.

So this is where I do that. Each post here is the story behind a specific image or shoot — where I was, what I was trying to get, what went wrong, and occasionally what went right in a way I didn't expect. I'll mention gear when it's genuinely relevant and skip it when it isn't. These aren't tutorials, and they're not gear reviews. They're just the honest account of how the pictures actually got made.

Some of them took one attempt. Most of them took a lot more than that.