On Losing the Thread and Finding It Again
There’s a pattern I’ve started to notice in myself: I get eight episodes into something, and then I lose interest. Not because the thing stops mattering, but because somewhere in that stretch, I forget why I started.
Loosing the threat
Photography does this to me too. This past stretch, I stopped capturing my daily records – a ritual of going out and photographing whatever I noticed – and instead found myself researching orthochromatic film. Reading about Ilford’s Ortho 80 Plus stock, learning the history of a “legacy concept” film. I told myself this was still part of the mindful photography practice. But of course it wasn’t: It was preparation dressed up as practice. I was circling the thing instead of doing it.
I think this is worth naming honestly, because most writing about mindfulness and creativity likes to skip this part. It wants to go straight from “I lost my way” to “and then I found stillness.” But that’s not how it happened for me, and I doubt it’s how it happens for most people. What actually happened is smaller and less dramatic: I didn’t have a breakdown or a breakthrough. I just kept mistaking research for experience, until one day I picked up the camera and went for a walk anyway.
What brought me back
What changed wasn’t discipline. It was excitement — the plain, uncomplicated kind you feel when you’re trying something new just because it’s new. And underneath the excitement was something more important: a playful mindset. I wasn’t shooting for anyone. What I made that day wasn’t intended for an audience. It was just me, having fun with a camera and a roll of film, on a walk with no destination other than see what’s here.
Three pictures came out of that walk, and I want to tell you about them, because they’re the clearest evidence I have that this playfulness actually works.
The three pictures
The first is a kind of self-portrait, though you’d barely know it. I laid down in the grass and put the camera down with me, so I’m just a blurred figure in the background, half-swallowed by flowers in the foreground. There’s something mystic about it — not because I planned that, but because I wasn’t trying to be seen clearly. I was just there, low to the ground, letting the grass take up more space in the frame than I did.
The second is a bike ramp near where I used to live as a student, with strange pillar lights that look, if you squint, like figures in kimono. I’ve photographed this same spot again and again over the years, always drawn back to it, never quite finished with it. This time there was lens flare — technically a mistake in black-and-white film, where it doesn’t behave the way you’d expect from color. But the mistake gave the image an extra feeling, something soft and diffuse. It reminded me of Rinko Kawauchi’s work — that quality of ordinary light doing something quietly extraordinary.
The third is the other self-portrait: a large tree next to a small garden plot, and me standing beside it in a white sweater — just a white dot in the frame, barely a presence at all. Not hiding, exactly. Just not insisting on being the subject.
What they have in common
Looking at the three together, what strikes me is that in all of them, I disappear a little. I’m in the frame but not commanding it. And I think that’s exactly what I’d lost during the research spiral and, before that, during my daily-carry-camera phase — that phase had started to feel mechanical, like checking something off a list, like I’d quietly become a content creator without meaning to. The pictures stopped being about presence and started being about output.
The practice of picking it back up again
This is the part I most want to say plainly: mindfulness in photography isn’t a state you arrive at and keep. It’s not a setting you switch on. It’s a thread you drop constantly — into research, into habit, into performance, into the need to make something for someone — and then, if you’re lucky, you notice you’ve dropped it, and you pick it back up. Not through willpower. Usually through something as small as curiosity, or play, or the decision to go for a walk with no plan for what the pictures are for.
Where this leaves me
I still don’t know exactly what comes next. Maybe I’ll keep shooting film for a while. Maybe I won’t. I’m wary of depending on new shiny things — a special grain, a special look — to manufacture presence for me, the same way I’m wary of turning stillness into another kind of content strategy. What I want instead is to keep finding my way back to what felt alive in those three pictures: the grass, the flare, the white sweater under the tree. Not a technique. A way of being there.
If you’re in your own version of this — lost in research, or habit, or the pressure to produce — I don’t think the answer is to try harder to be mindful. I think it’s smaller than that. Go for a walk. Bring nothing to prove. See what’s alive. You’ll lose the thread again eventually. That’s not failure. That’s just the shape of the practice.
