The Technical Decisions I Make Today That Took Me 20 Years to Understand
These have nothing to do with settings, and everything to do with seeing.
For a long time, I believed that improving as a photographer meant learning more.
More techniques.
More tools.
More ways to fix things.
I chased precision, sharpness, control. I learned how to expose correctly in difficult light, how to recover shadows, how to squeeze detail out of almost anything. All useful skills. None of them transformative.
What actually changed my photography happened much later, and much more quietly.
I didn’t become better by adding complexity.
I became better by reducing choices.
Over time, technique stopped being something I applied to a scene, and became something I used to exclude scenes.
To walk away.
To wait.
To commit before lifting the camera.
Most conversations about technique focus on what happens after the camera is in your hands:
exposure, focus, sharpness, timing.
In reality, the most decisive technical work happens before the camera is raised.
It happens when you recognise that the light is interesting but the structure is weak.
When you already know which focal length will work, and which ones won’t.
When you accept that part of the frame must fall into darkness, because clarity demands sacrifice.
These decisions don’t feel technical when you make them.
They feel intuitive.
But intuition is just a technique that has been internalised over time.
Early in my career, I tried to solve everything inside the frame.
Now, I solve most things by deciding whether a frame deserves to exist at all.
That shift changed my hit rate more than any camera upgrade ever did.
What follows are the technical decisions I make today almost without thinking, decisions that took me years of mistakes, excess, and overworking to understand.
They have nothing to do with settings, and everything to do with judgement.
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