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A man on the beach yesterday, watching me pin wet paper to a board in the wind, came over and asked if I could "fix the exposure" on a photo he'd taken of his wife. He had his phone out, already scrolling for it. I said this is not that kind of photography. He looked at the blue print, then at his screen, then back, and said oh, so it's like a filter. I didn't correct him. I just held the paper down and let the sun do its work while he walked off. But I've been turning it over all evening. Everything I do is slow and uncertain and half out of my control, and people keep wanting it to be a shortcut to something else. Nobody asks a painter if they can just crop it. Maybe it's my fault for working in public. The sea makes people think everything is easy.

my brother was not good at photography. like, genuinely bad. half the frames are his thumb. the other half are blurry pictures of things he was excited about, usually food or our cousin's dog. but I found the box of negatives last week, tucked behind some tax paperwork in a closet I'd been avoiding. spent the whole weekend making contact sheets in the darkroom at the community center, just to see what was on them. there's this one where he's trying to photograph the ocean and instead got like, a wall of beige blur. and I can't stop looking at it. it's so incompetent. it's so him. I've been staring at it like it's the most profound thing I've ever seen. I'm going to try to work with these somehow. torn paper collages from the contact sheets maybe, or cyanotypes of his worst frames. not sure yet. but I've been sitting with the fact that he put all this energy into documenting his life and most of it is just... bad. and that's the whole point somehow. anyway. if anyone has experience working with found negatives that are mostly garbage, I'd love to hear how you approached it without making it sentimental garbage yourself.

I've been tracking the analytics for a client's Instagram account, and we've seen a peculiar drop in engagement over the past quarter. Likes and comments are down about 15%, and reach has plateaued despite consistent posting. The content itself hasn't changed drastically – still high-quality photography and relevant captions. My suspicion is that the algorithm is simply prioritizing different types of content now, perhaps Reels or Stories, and our static posts are being de-prioritized. It's frustrating when established tactics start to falter without a clear reason. Has anyone else observed a similar shift recently?

Did a portrait for a friend's parents' anniversary. They're lovely people, I've known them since I was a kid, so I said 300 zloty and waved off the rest. It took me eleven sittings' worth of work across two weeks and I kept redoing the mother's eyes until I got them right. The friend was happy, the parents were happy, nobody complained once. And I still spent the whole time feeling like I owed them an apology for taking their money at all. 300 zloty for that much work is brutal if you do the arithmetic, which I did, standing in my kitchen at midnight like an idiot. The weird part is my friend's husband actually does photography and charges proper money for it. Nobody thinks twice about his rates. But I hand someone a portrait I sweated over and I want to refund them for being inconvenienced.

It was at my brother-in-law's place in the 6th. Some woman I'd never met, nice enough, works in tech. We're talking about what I do, she gets excited, says oh you should try Midjourney for your portraits, you can generate the composition and then just paint over it, it saves so much time. I said that's not really how I work. She said no but it's the same thing in the end, the image is what matters. I wanted to ask her if she'd say the same thing to a chef about a microwave meal. But I said something about observation and she changed the subject and I could feel her thinking I was being difficult. The thing is, I spent four years learning to see. Not to copy photographs. To see the actual fall of light across a real face in a real room. The temperature of the shadow under a jaw, the blue that lives in white linen at dusk. If I let a machine decide my compositions, what exactly did I learn? I know we all use reference. I know photography changed painting forever. I'm not a purist. But there's a difference between a tool and a replacement for the whole act of looking. Maybe I'm just old. Maybe in ten years every painter works this way and nobody cares. But I care. I like the slowness. I like being wrong for two hours and then something clicks.