Making Sense of Chaos

When we take photos and throw them online, it could be for anything, just a hobby, a showcase for potential clients, or maybe for reasons we don’t fully understand ourselves. Whatever it is, there’s got to be a why behind it.

Some days I can’t hear mine. My head’s cluttered, ideas, half-formed plans, everything pulling in different directions. Photography cuts through that.

In photography, you’ve got this fixed box to work with, fill the frame, as they say. That’s why longer focal lengths can be such a weapon for cutting through the mess. I like longer fixed primes. They force you to commit. To pick something and lock in. Everything from 75mm to my favourite 135mm (full-frame equivalent) feels like magic to me. They strip a scene down to its bare elements, isolating exactly what I want. But even if you’re used to shooting wider… say the 24mm field of view on your phone, you can clean up your framing just by stepping into 35mm territory, or even better, 50mm. The tighter you go, the less the chaos can creep in.

One morning in Hoi An, Vietnam, I was walking around the markets. Locals spilling from all directions, bikes roaring past, people yelling and bargaining with shop vendors, pure chaos! I had my 135mm on. Scanning the crowd, looking for something clean to cut through the chaos. Then I saw a shopkeeper sitting still in the middle of it all. One frame. The rest didn’t matter.

That’s what photography does, it’s the reverse of most art forms. Painters, sculptors, designers, they start with nothing and add until they have something. We start with everything. The mess, the distractions and strip it back until all that’s left is the thing we choose to put into the frame.

The world’s chaos. You don’t fix it. You just decide what to keep.

Why are we here? Who put us here? What happens when we’re gone? We won’t get answers to the big questions. Not here. Not now. So what do you do with the time you’ve got?

We make things. We leave some kind of mark. We tell our story, and maybe a few others along the way.

For me, there’s nothing better than lying in bed at the end of the day and thinking: Hell yeah. I made something today. A small piece of me in the world, maybe inspiring someone I’ll never meet. Or better yet, because I just really love a shot.

That’s enough. Order pulled from chaos.