I did not study photography. I just spent years washing up at a window that faces east.

If you stand in the same place at the same time every day, you start to notice things that no book ever explained to me. The light in February is thin and blue. In May it arrives early and stays cheerful. By September it goes long and yellow and makes even the dish rack look significant.

Three things I noticed

  1. Soft light is mostly a window with cloud in front of it. You do not need equipment. You need a grey day.
  2. The good hour is shorter than you think. Twenty minutes, sometimes less. Stop and look when it arrives.
  3. Shadows do most of the work. A plain cup on a plain table becomes a picture the moment the light comes from the side.
A shadow of a vase with flowers on a wall
Nothing here was arranged. It was simply a good day for that wall.

A small exercise

Pick one thing in your house that stays put. Take a picture of it every day for a week, at the same hour, with your phone. It does not matter what it is. By day seven you will be looking at the light and not the object, and that is all there is to it.

Most of photography is standing still and paying attention. The camera is only there to prove you did.

I still wash up by hand, for what it’s worth. The dishwasher would save me fifteen minutes a day, and I would not know what month it was.

Sample content for The Pixel, a fictional personal blog.