photography should happen without notifications
no, we shouldn't have one device for everything
There was a time when I used to think that the only camera I would ever need was the one in my pocket. And while I love that smartphones have made the craft of photography wildly more accessible, there is a cavernous gulf between what a phone and a physical camera can do. I was in a soup of delusion, genuinely believing that there was no way that the inconvenience and learning curve of physical cameras were necessary anymore. Pffft! I was so wrong!
My attitude quickly changed when I quit my job as a creativity teacher in tech to start doing this work: writing here, making adventure art, producing short films and video essays, teaching accessible art classes, and walking deep in the woods to find myself again. Shaking off the corporate cultishness, I started to get curious about having single-track devices. Creative tools that do one thing.
That was how things were at the birth of smartphones in 2007, the concept of analog bags makes me giggle the tiniest bit as it reminds me of being a teenager with a big, heavy totebag. Back then I was lugging around a 3 megapixel digital camera, a journal, a Nokia phone with t9 texting, my iPod, a planner, and countless other things that new phones were promising to replace.
But through replacement, there has been a loss we must acknowledge. Every single time I pickup my phone, regardless of what I wanted to do, distractions, notifications, and old habits of checking the same 3-4 apps as a nervous habit to self soothe, make it feel impossible to actually do the thing I picked it up for. Good ideas are ephemeral and if they are forgotten while you accidentally open up that app again1, you’ve paid a high price on your creative intuition.
Having a singular focus for a tool is essential in this era of mass distraction.
A sketchbook is a tool like this, as is a synthesizer ,or a guitar, but forcing myself to use a physical camera felt like a hassle. Yet when I shot with my phone, most of the photos I took were forgettable. I almost never went through them in an honest and intentional way. They were uploaded to the cloud to not be considered again… until I ran out of cloud storage and had to either fork over the upgrade fee or undergo the painful drudgery of actually organizing my digital files.
While many of my paintings in 2023 were inspired by smartphone photos, the results of real cameras made me increasingly curious. There was something distinctively different: the soft focus, the real not-computationally-created bokeh, the granular control of light. I wanted to paint from these images instead, as there seemed to be a clear distinction from the hyper sharp-HDR effects of smartphone cameras.
Then, a hand-me-down Sony digital camera from 2014 was gifted to me by a family member who heard I was trying my hand at making YouTube videos, and thought I could get more use out of it than them. Excellent. At first, I made loads of mistakes — terrible white balance choices2, weird kit lenses that distorted my face3, relying on “auto” settings that wrecked my intent — but after a few years, I no longer leave the house without my camera in my bag, as it’s an essential tool for my artistic life.
Sure, my bag is heavier again. So what? A camera without notifications, and with physical buttons has become an embodied practice for me. That is crucial in these times. Taking pictures is like a dance. I don’t need to second guess or tap a screen anymore, simple physical dials on the camera and lens, alongside my body positioning, guide me in crafting my references. I love taking photos now as a craft, and, it is no longer as a feature that inspires me to upgrade my phone every few years. Digital cameras work for decades, have removable batteries, take SD card storage, and they are often, but not always, repairable.
I think that subscription fatigue4, the enshittification of technology — through both physical devices and platforms alike — have caused this year’s sudden surge in everyone suddenly going analog and while people are mad at yet another consumerist trend, I think they are onto something.
The things we use for our creativity need to stop distracting us — Pulling us down rabbit holes of notifications, stats tracking, news updates, and shit we did not intend to look at.
The more hobbies and creative practices in our life that we divorce from screens and corporate control, the better. The more often we can do something without being pulled down a portal of distraction, forgetting how or why we are doing the thing, brings us back into empowerment of our creative selves, our intuitions, and our lives.
If you’re really into this idea, hop over to my Live Classes waitlist page and sign up to take a photography class with me later this year. There’s also a whole host of other class offerings there for you to vote on with waitlist signups.
I’m trying to run my business democratically this year, which means the next class I’ll be teaching is focused on drawings and sketchbooks because that’s what people voted for! More info on that to come next month.
This week, I went through and put together a “Best of 2025” album of references for my patrons here, and in the process I noticed something big looking back. Adaptation to my injured spine led to a completely new way of looking and shooting photos. I couldn’t walk more than 200 feet without a lot of pain, but getting out and just looking in one place was both essential to my wellbeing and transformative. What I saw in that stillness opened up an entirely new way of moving with my camera through the world.
It gave me permission to move slow. In our culture that feels forbidden in a way that was in opposition to stats and algorithms, but in noticing and appreciating the beauty around me slowly, photography fundamentally changed for me to solidify as an essential creative and wellness practice.
Below the jump, I share the albums with my patrons for my Best Photos of 2025. I encourage all of those folks to use them to inspire drawings, paintings, songs, and poems but, to never use them with generative ai tools. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, I’d love to have you join us. Folks have been sharing their drawings and paintings with me over in Discord and it is the coolest thing ever to have a community working from this collection together.
I am also planning to test the idea of a monthly compassionate critique club with these folks! So if you’d like to join in on that to give and receive feedback in a kind and compassionate space, I’d love to have you. It will be everything that critique room in art school should have been, and I can’t wait to help people improve their work as a group.
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