If you followed me through my home, you’d see my daughters’ modelling clay creations and stacks of my sons’ stick-figure comics.
But you wouldn’t see signs that I’m a photographer.
A camera lying around, yes.
But printed pictures or collections?
No.
This bothers me.
I’ve been doing this for 15 years, for other families and for mine, and there are four prints on our wall.
Four.
And they took ten years to get there.
A couple of years ago, we took a road trip in a minivan through the Southwest USA, up the Pacific Northwest, and back across Canada.
I came home with an overwhelming number of photos.
Then I spun my wheels for two years, envisioning a wall in our bedroom as a gallery of photos, but unable to decide which pictures I’d print.
I pulled together the photos I liked most, dropped them into Lightroom, and it was chaos.
No cohesion. No direction. Just 14k images fighting each other.
So I gave up on trying to capture the entire trip and chose Saguaro National Park as a starting point because Naomi loves the place so much.
Even when I narrowed the photos down to a few absolute favourites, they didn’t seem to look good next to each other.
That’s when it clicked: Whether it’s an entire trip or a side adventure, I needed a better way to bring photos together.
You need something that unifies the images across a body of work.
Most of us start with our favourites. That’s where it breaks. Because you can gather your favourite photos, and they still won’t work together.
Pretty pictures? Sure.
But nothing that holds them together.
A location narrows the scope, but it isn’t unity. It’s just a setting.
These photos were going to hang in our bedroom.
Instead of asking which ones I liked most, I asked a different question:
What do we want to see when we wake up?
What do we want to see before we go to sleep?
I had photos I loved: cars on desert roads, highways stretching into the distance, hikers on trails.
But they carried something with them:
Movement
Travel
Adventure
And that wasn’t the feeling I wanted in that space.
I wanted something still. At rest. Quiet.
That decision changed everything.
Once the anchor was clear, the rest followed.
First: select for unity.
Then: refine for variety.
Not endless variety, just enough.
Different light.
Different tones.
Wide scenes and small details.
Moments where the landscape leads.
Moments where the cacti take over.
Unity without repetition. Variety without chaos.
That’s what made the collection work.
This is the part I missed for years: The project defines the rules.
Nine photos that my wife and I wake up to every morning.
This asks for a certain kind of unity. And once that’s clear, the work gets easier. Because now you’re not choosing from everything.
You’re filtering.
I filter out the photos I don’t want in the gallery, then I’m looking at three things:
What’s happening inside each photo?
What elements are at work?
What happens when the images sit side by side?
Do they hold? Sometimes they don’t. And that means leaving out photos I love. That’s part of it.
Sometimes the contrast is between subject matter in general, the landscape vs cacti. But among the collection, you’ll see contrasts in elements such as line, shape, colour, and texture.
My daughters make something, and it exists. As they shape it, it becomes real. There’s no gap.
The act of making, for a photographer, is long.
Seeing.
Clicking.
Importing.
Sorting.
Thousands of images.
We can make for years, and never bring the work into existence. Click, transfer, disappear.
My daughters don’t have this problem with clay pots. You see it as she makes it.
As photographers, our work takes longer.
See. Click. Gap. Make.
That gap is everything.
Photography is the full arc:
Experiencing.
Seeing.
Capturing.
Processing.
And finishing.
The print.
The collection.
The thing you can actually live with.
It’s part of the craft.
And if we don’t do that part, we leave our work unfinished.
Mat writes from Canada as a lifelong student and lover of family and photography.
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