There’s a particular kind of patience that only a camera teaches you. Not the patience of waiting, but the patience of noticing — the difference between looking and actually seeing.
Street photography forced me to stop optimising for efficiency. A walk that used to take 15 minutes now takes two hours. I find I don’t mind.
The Frame as Constraint
The viewfinder is a useful tyranny. It removes the option to look everywhere at once. You choose one rectangle, and within it, you wait for the world to arrange itself into something worth keeping.
This is, I think, a useful practice for anyone whose work is mostly digital and formless.