Welcome back! It's great to have you here for another edition of Notes On Seeing.

The Main Frame:

Photography is meant to be simple.

Not easy. Simple.

There's a difference, and it matters. Because somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up the idea that getting better meant adding more. More technique. More rules. More equipment. More post-processing steps. More things to remember before we press the shutter.

And the weight of all that "more" is quietly crushing the thing that drew us to photography in the first place.

I know this because I lived it. I spent years layering complexity onto my own process — stacking technique on top of technique until the act of making a photograph felt more like an exam than an act of seeing. I had the knowledge. I had the gear. But my photographs were overthought and lifeless.

The thing that cracked it open for me was, of all things, a toy camera.

A Holga. If you haven't come across one, it's about as basic as a camera gets. Plastic lens. No real exposure control to speak of. Light leaks. Vignetting. Everything that a "serious" photographer is supposed to avoid.

And it completely changed how I thought about photography.

Because when you strip away lens choice, when you strip away aperture priority and exposure compensation and all the micro-decisions we agonise over, something remarkable happens. You're left with just the act of seeing. Just: what's in front of me, and do I feel something about it?

That's it. That's the whole process.

I'm not saying we should all shoot on toy cameras forever. But there was something in that experience — the forced simplicity of it — that showed me how much of my creative energy had been leaking into technical decisions that weren't actually serving the photograph. I was spending so much time worrying about how to capture the thing that I'd stopped noticing the thing itself.

The photographers who were making the most compelling work weren't the ones with the longest checklist. They were the ones who'd distilled everything down to a few core instincts and trusted them.

That's what the language of photography really is. Not an ever-expanding manual. A small, learnable vocabulary — expression, light, intrigue — and once we start seeing through that lens, the camera becomes a tool again instead of an obstacle.

So here's the question worth sitting with: where in your own photography do you feel that overwhelm? Where could you take a step back and pare things down? Not abandon what you know — but stop letting it crowd out the reason you picked up a camera in the first place?
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Loving Light

Let's talk about light for a moment, because this is where simplicity and depth meet — and where a lot of us tie ourselves in knots.

A lot of us were taught to think of light as a problem to solve. Harsh midday sun? Avoid it. Flat overcast sky? Wait for golden hour. Dappled shade? Nightmare. We built a whole anxiety system around something that should be one of the most joyful parts of photography.

And I get it. There's a whole world of technical knowledge about light — colour temperature, Kelvin values, inverse square law, the quality and direction and hardness and softness of it. You can study it for years and still feel like you're only scratching the surface. It's genuinely fascinating stuff.

But here's what I've noticed: the photographers who have the deepest relationship with light aren't usually the ones who can recite the most theory. They're the ones who are sympathetic to it.

What I mean by that is something closer to feeling than knowledge. It's the difference between understanding that side-light creates texture and actually standing in a room at four in the afternoon, watching the way the light rakes across a wall, and feeling something shift inside you. It's the difference between knowing that golden hour produces warm tones and being genuinely moved by what happens to a familiar street when the sun drops low.

That response — that shift — is what the best photographers are working from. Not a set of rules. A relationship.

So rather than asking "what kind of light is this and how do I handle it," what happens if we start with a simpler question: how does this light make me feel?

Not what is it doing technically. How does it make me feel?

Because when we approach light with that kind of openness — when we stop trying to categorise it and start letting ourselves be affected by it — something changes in the work. The photographs stop looking like competent exercises in lighting theory and start feeling like they were made by someone who was actually present. Someone who noticed.

We don't need to master light. We need to be in conversation with it.

The Curator's Gallery:

If you want to see what simplicity looks like in the hands of a master, look at Ernst Haas.
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Haas was one of the pioneers of colour photography at a time when the art world didn't take colour seriously. But what makes his work extraordinary isn't just that he shot in colour early — it's how he saw.

Take a look at these photographs. Motion blur. Reflections. Abstracted colour. Soft focus. By the standards of conventional photography, half of this work is full of "mistakes." The gondolier is blurred. The pool photograph is more about the distortion in the water than the room itself. The car bonnet has become a canvas of warped reflections rather than a sharp, faithful record of a vehicle.

And that's precisely the point.

Haas wasn't fighting against these so-called imperfections. He was embracing them. He understood that blur could convey movement more honestly than sharpness. That a reflection could reveal something truer about a place than a straight-on document of it. That colour, freed from the obligation to be "accurate," could become its own subject.

What Haas was doing — and what makes him such an important photographer to study — is stripping away the rules about what a photograph is "supposed" to look like and instead following what the light and the moment were actually offering him. He was making his photography simple. Not by avoiding complexity, but by refusing to let technical convention override what his eye was telling him.

Most of us have been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that these things are errors to be corrected. Haas treated them as the photograph.

If you want to go deeper into his work and approach, I recently released a video on the channel that explores exactly this. It's worth your time.

The Weekly Observation:

This week, try two things.

First, leave the house with your camera and one rule: follow the question "what's that thing over there?" every time something catches your eye. Don't evaluate it. Don't run through a mental checklist. Walk toward whatever pulled your attention and make the photograph.
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Second, take a leaf from Ernst Haas. Find one scene, and instead of trying to get a "correct" photograph of it, lean into whatever the light and the moment give you. If there's blur, let there be blur. If there's a reflection that distorts the scene, photograph the distortion. If the colour is doing something unexpected, follow it.
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At the end of the week, compare these photographs with your more considered, deliberate shots. I think you'll find something interesting about which ones feel more alive.

Inside the Tribe:

This idea — that simplicity is the destination, not the starting point — runs through almost every conversation inside the Tribe. It's one thing to read about stripping away complexity. It's another to practise it week after week alongside other photographers who are wrestling with exactly the same instinct to overcomplicate.

What I consistently see happening in the Tribe is the moment someone stops trying to prove their technique and starts trusting their eye. The work changes. And the conversations change with it — they stop being about settings and start being about what drew us to that particular moment, that particular light, that particular gesture. That's where the real growth lives. Not in adding more knowledge, but in finding the courage to use less.
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I'll see you out there with your camera. If you want to share what you find and get my eyes on your work, come join us in the Tribe.
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Alex