Words from the Window Seat

I spend a lot of time on planes. With the finicky wifi and depending on the amount of time in the air, there is usually little room for getting actual work done. So I find myself cleaning out my camera roll (there’s no way I need all 45,000 photos?), reading, or writing down ideas I hope to pursue later.

One of those ideas — posting on Substack.

I do my best to start every day with writing three morning pages in my journal. I’m not always consistent, but I try. Writing has been such a transformative ritual for me, so eventually I gravitated toward a platform that put personal writing at the forefront.

Substack has been a recent addition to my scrolling habits. It feels like a more creative and exciting Reddit, but not quite as fiery and funny as Twitter once was, and since I follow other photographers, it has a beautiful visual element without the overload of ads, engagements, and general nonsense of Instagram.

As someone who works in social media, I do have to stay on the apps. I need to know the top performing post types and trends on Instagram, and I have to be the first to catch a Tiktok rant going viral about one of my clients. So for me, rather than take a blessed break from the internet, I try to set limits on how much endless scroll content I consume, and add in some slower-paced content.

This is one reason I read so much — a physical book in my hand can consume me for hours without the eventual side effect of feeling guilty and self conscious about spending hours online.

But Substack has been a welcome in-between. I’ve stumbled across essays and authors I never would have heard of without this app, and I love subscribing to my friends’ publications (A Novel Idea being one) and getting periodic glimpses of their life in my inbox.

Lately I’ve been feeling a little lost about where I want my photography to go. What do I actually enjoy taking photos of? What inspires me and helps me find a flow state? I know I love traveling, but when I finally take a trip of my own accord, I find myself leaving the camera behind, or stressing over which one to bring and ultimately thinking too much about it.

Photography doesn’t feel natural right now, and that’s okay. I can still do what I need to do for work, but I want to find the spark I used to have for capturing the moments of my own life.

So I’m starting to cull through my archive. I’m hoping to share little postcards from my photography journey over the years and reflect on photoshoots and moments I loved, and hopefully find some inspiration along the way.

Starting here, with my first trip to London and Paris as a senior in high school. The photos are not groundbreaking by any means, but it was my first real attempt to capture my experience in a new place. (Not to mention, one I had obsessed over since the moment I discovered One Direction on Twitter in 2011.)

It’s funny to look at these now, knowing how much I’ve travelled back to these places and taken far more exciting images. I can almost feel my own energy through these. Always looking up, seeing architecture far older than the concept of my own country. Experiencing the London Underground, the Eiffel Tower, Hyde Park, and Parliament for the first time— places that only existed in movies and TV for me until then.

It’s also interesting that so many of the photos are horizontal. I had an iPhone back then, but these were all taken on a Canon DSLR that I borrowed from my mom. Instagram existed, but still in squares with heavy filters and white bars on the sides. It hadn’t yet evolved to influence the way we took photos.

Now my instinct is to capture vertical images that will eventually be cropped to 4:5 or 9:16 for sharing on social. Which certainly comes in handy for my job, but I wonder about all the moments I’ve missed in day-to-day life that I would have noticed before I tailored and trained my eye to see things through the lens of top-performing content.