Too Many Open Tabs

I spent most of the past year chipping away at photos from one trip. Japan 2025 kept sitting there in the background. Not in a dramatic way. Just always there. A folder of edits, memories, half-formed lessons, and little creative threads I had not quite closed yet. I rolled bits of it out slowly. Instagram posts. Blog posts. Lessons learned from walking around with a camera. Small pieces of a much bigger thing. At the time, I do not think the bigger thing was fully formed. I knew there was something in it, but I could not see the final shape yet.

It felt a bit like being handed a LEGO set without the instructions. You can tell there is probably a big set in the box. You can see the colours, the weird specific pieces, the parts that clearly belong to something. But you do not know what you are building yet. So you start with what you can see. A section here. A little wall there. Something that looks like it might connect later.

That was the Japan project for me. A photo set became a post. A memory became a paragraph. A small frustration became a lesson. A lesson became something I could share. Slowly, the thing started to look less like a pile of loose pieces and more like a project.

The hard part was that life did not stop feeding me new pieces while I was still sorting the old ones. I went on other trips. I made new photos. I had new ideas. I wanted to follow them, because that is the whole point of being creative. You notice something, you get excited, and you want to chase it.

But the Japan backlog was still there. Monster is probably a bit dramatic, but it did start to feel like one. Not because I hated the work. I loved a lot of it. That was part of the problem. It mattered enough that I didn’t want to rush it. But because I didn’t want to rush it, it kept staying open.

There is only so much creative RAM in my head. New trips, new photos, new ideas, they all kept arriving. But Japan was still running in the background, chewing up space. Every time I tried to pick up something new, part of my brain was still holding onto the old project. That is where creative work gets sticky.

Input is easy to romanticise. Go somewhere new. Shoot something new. Buy the book. Watch the video. Save the idea. Open another tab. Output is where the loop closes. Not because posting something magically finishes it forever. It does not. Sometimes sharing a piece just helps you understand what that piece was. But it gets it out of your head.

That was the thing I kept learning with this project. If I waited for the whole Japan trip to make perfect sense before sharing any of it, I would probably still be sitting on most of it. The slow roll was not a compromise. It was the only way through it.

Each small release closed a little loop. One photo set. One post. One memory. One lesson. Not the whole thing, just enough of the thing to make it lighter. And once it was lighter, I had room again. Room for new photos. Room for new trips. Room for newer ideas to come in without feeling like they were competing with the unfinished work behind them.

The funny part is that those new ideas did not always pull me away from the long project. Sometimes they looped back and helped me understand it better. A newer trip would make me realise why something from Japan worked. A different camera choice would make the old kit decisions clearer. A fresh edit would explain an instinct I had months earlier but could not name at the time.

That is why I do not think of sharing as the end of the process anymore. It is part of the process. Not the performance side. Not the metrics side. I mean the actual creative process. The part where the work stops being this private, unresolved thing taking up space in your head and becomes something outside of you. Something you can look at properly. Something other people can take from, ignore, connect with, or misunderstand. Fair enough. It is out there now. That matters.

Because if everything stays open, nothing really moves. The grand project never gets finished. The new ideas never get space. The whole thing just gets heavier. So I am trying to get better at letting the work leave my head in pieces. Not perfectly. Not all at once. Just steadily enough that the project keeps moving and my brain has room to notice the next thing. Turns out that is the slow roll. And for this one, the lego set was built, and those mental browser tabs got closed making room for something new.

The free Visual Diary Collection is my attempt at bottling the feeling of the places I shoot. Have a wander if that's your thing [Link to free →]