Journal
A note from my ongoing reflections on photography, place, and the moments that reveal themselves slowly.
Marie and I visited Brunswick Heads in northern New South Wales in 2021, not long after the long stretch of COVID lockdowns had eased. It was a place we already knew and liked — a small coastal town with a relaxed pace that makes it easy to slow down.
At least, that is usually how it feels.
On that trip, however, I realised later that I wasn’t really slowing down at all. After months of restrictions, I felt an urge to make up for lost time. Everywhere we went I was pressing the shutter — photographing almost anything that caught my attention.
Looking back now, I suspect I was trying to record the experience rather than truly absorb it.
By the time we returned home, I had taken nearly four thousand photographs in the space of a week. Faced with that volume of images, the editing process became overwhelming. Many of the photographs received only the quickest review, and quite a few quietly disappeared into the archive on my hard drive.
This image was one of them.
A couple of years later I was searching through my files for a photograph that might suit the theme of reflections. I came across this image and made a quick attempt at editing it, but the result didn’t feel right. The edit seemed to make the photograph worse rather than better, so once again it was set aside.
It wasn’t until early last year, while revisiting some older images that I had previously edited poorly, that I opened the file again.
This time I approached it differently.
With a little more patience — and perhaps a little more experience — the photograph began to reveal itself. What caught my attention was the way the reflections behaved across the surface of the water. In some areas they were almost perfectly still, while in others the movement of the water transformed them into something close to abstraction.
The ripples seemed to travel through the reflection itself, subtly bending and stretching the shapes of the bridge and the rower as they moved across the surface.
Looking at the image now, I notice details I barely registered when I first took it — the small droplets falling from the paddle, the near-perfect reflection of the rower, and the moment where the structure of the bridge meets the water and then continues again as reflection.
It is a quiet photograph, but it contains far more than I initially saw.
Revisiting the image has reminded me of something I occasionally forget while photographing. I don’t need to record everything I encounter. When I allow myself the time to truly see what is in front of me, the photographs that matter often reveal themselves much sooner.
Sometimes the photograph is already there.
It simply takes a little patience to recognise it.
Read More Stories Like This:
- Why We Stop Seeing the Photographs We Once Loved
- Why the Best Photographs Don’t Try to Impress You
- Why the Art on Our Walls Often Fails to Bring a Room to Life