I have been circling a new phone for a few weeks, and I caught myself doing the thing. The thing where you assemble a justification you already know is decorative - in this case that the always-with-me snapshot camera might be the actual reason to buy it. So I went looking for permission on the internet, and the internet was delighted to provide: this phone now genuinely takes photos as good as a mirrorless camera.

Then I fell over a video making the identical claim about the Pixel 3, seven years ago.

It was not true then and it is not true now. I still have RAW files from a Canon 20D that hold up perfectly well next to what my current cameras produce, and I can see hard quality differences between those cameras and the snapshots from a reasonably recent Pixel without squinting. Both of those things at once. The sensor in your pocket got extraordinary and it did not close the gap, and the industry has been announcing that it closed the gap on a roughly annual cycle for a decade.

Which is the shape almost every gear story comes in, once you start noticing.

I said at the start of all this that photography keeps being sold to us as something done for an audience, a platform, or a purchase. The first two I have already had my say about. This is the third one.

Vinyl crackle

My favourite specimen is one I own and love. Fuji's film simulations are marvellous, I use them constantly, and the claim that they simulate film is marketing nonsense of a high order.

Put a bit of noise and the occasional pop underneath a digitally produced track and you have not simulated a vinyl record. You have added a reference to one. The grain slider in Lightroom has the same relationship to actual film grain: it gestures at a physical process it does not reproduce and was never going to. It is the same move as the 50mm myth I went after the other day, a decision handed to us as a fact, except that here somebody is holding an invoice. What Fuji has built is a set of very good, very characterful colour renderings with evocative names, and if they had called them that, nobody would have loved them less.

The Leica Look lives in the same drawer for me, along with 3D pop and micro-contrast and whatever the current word is. I am not saying the images do not have a character. I am saying that the character is a lens design and a colour profile and, most of all, the person who chose to buy that camera and therefore shoots a certain way - and that "look" is doing the work of hiding all three behind something that sounds like physics.

None of this stops me enjoying any of it. The gap I care about is between the marketing story and what is true, not between good gear and bad.

Three kinds of Leica commentator

Which brings me to the place where the stories get loudest.

There are three kinds of Leica commentator. One, people with photographic or technical reasons for liking them. Two, people who like them for emotional reasons. Three, people who do not own a Leica, would never buy one, and are extremely keen to tell everybody else how they ought to think about Leica.

Full disclosure so you can weight everything below accordingly: I like Leica, and I put myself in category one. I shoot an M10-D, which needs a word of explanation if you have never handled one.

The M is Leica's rangefinder line, unchanged in concept since the 1950s. You focus it by hand, by lining up a second faint image inside a small bright patch in the viewfinder until the two coincide. There is no autofocus. You are looking through a window at the actual world with a frame drawn on it, rather than at a small screen relaying what the sensor currently sees. The D in mine goes a step further: no screen on the back either, so there is no way to look at a photograph until it is off the camera. That combination exists nowhere else.

Then Leica announced the M EV1, an M with the rangefinder taken out and an electronic viewfinder put in - a tiny screen, in other words, showing you the sensor's view, the way essentially every modern camera does.

The forums were a perfect demonstration of all three categories at once, and honestly quite entertaining. Category one asking why this costs more than a Sony while doing less than Leica's own SL with an M-adapter on the front. Category two answering with Look, Design, Prestige, Legacy. Category three explaining that Leica is a Rolex for dentists with more money than ability. Nobody talking to anybody.

My own reaction was that I did not understand it, and it took me a while to work out why. Every so often the community starts hoping aloud that Leica will build exactly this, and the wish always sounded to me a bit like the sports car community hoping Ferrari will finally offer soft suspension and a cruise setting for the engine management. The constraint is the product. Take the rangefinder out and you have removed the reason the thing exists, and what remains is an expensive camera that does less than cheaper ones.

What the camera does to you

And that is the part the marketing never sells, because it cannot be photographed for a product page.

Shooting fully mechanically does something to you. Not to the files - to you. No screen means you cannot check the shot you just took, which means the walk never stops, which means the next frame comes out of what you were still looking at instead of out of the last one. The rangefinder puts a bright frame in the world rather than a preview of a picture, so you are looking at a scene with an intention laid over it and not at a small television showing you what you already have. I cannot demonstrate any of this in an image. It changed how I shoot anyway.

The same thing runs in the other direction and is easier to miss. I bought an OM-3 a while back and get spoken to about it constantly, everywhere, by strangers. Stealthy street photography this is not. That is not a flaw in the camera, it is a property of carrying it, and it changes what kind of work is available to me on any given afternoon as surely as a focal length does.

Or take the constraint I imposed on myself for a while, shooting out of camera and skipping the edit. I still do not know whether that was a self-inflicted handicap or a development step. My results only ever pleased me moderately and I wanted to fiddle with every single one - which could mean the discipline was wrong for me, or could mean I have years of conditioning to shed and that the itch to fiddle is the conditioning talking. That question is worth more to me than any comparison of JPEG engines, and it is a question about me.

So I will keep wearing it out

A dealer told me recently that my Q2 is worth almost nothing on the used market. Not because anything is broken - because it has marks on it. Apparently Leica buyers, unlike buyers of every other brand, expect a used camera to have been kept in cotton wool and taken out only in good weather, and the moment there is any evidence of a life the price falls through the floor.

Sit with that for a second, because it is the whole argument standing in the open. The resale market is offering me money to treat my camera as an object to be protected rather than a tool to be used. That is a piece of gear reaching all the way into how I behave, and in exactly the wrong direction. Everything else in this post is a story someone told about a picture. This one is a story about my hands.

I was only curious anyway. I will carry on wrecking it.

There is more where this came from. The whole series collects under Photo Thoughts.

My phone has been set to greyscale for months now. It started as self-defense - the standard advice about making the slot machine in your pocket less rewarding - and I expected to last about a week. Instead I turn colour back on maybe once a fortnight, for a map or a photo I actually need to judge, and every single time I flinch. The thing is candy-bright. Loud in a way I had completely stopped registering. Then I switch it back off and the room gets quiet again.

The mental hygiene worked. What I did not expect was the second effect, which turned out to be the more interesting one, and which is really what this whole post is about: it changed what I could see.

Scroll a feed in greyscale and most of the images collapse. Not some of them - most. It becomes very obvious very fast how many photos you encounter in an ordinary day are running purely on signal colour: a saturated orange, a branded blue, a sunset cranked until it hums. Take the colour away and there is nothing underneath. No composition worth the name, no contrast doing any work, no reason for the eye to stop anywhere in particular. We have collectively agreed to use colour as an attention mechanism rather than a compositional one, and the result is a diet of pure sugar with no finesse in it anywhere.

And then every so often something does stop you, and it stops you harder than it ever did in colour, because now you are seeing structure instead of being flagged down. Those images are worth studying, because whatever is holding them up is doing so without the loudest tool in the box. Greyscale turns out to be a decent instrument for sharpening your own eye, which is not what I installed it for.

Try it for two weeks. Worst case you learn which pictures in your own archive were only ever carried by a colour.

Half-truths we repeat until they sound like physics

The greyscale thing is one small correction to a much larger problem, which is how much of what we believe about photography arrived without ever being examined. Somebody says it on YouTube, it gets repeated, and after a while it stops sounding like an opinion and starts sounding like a property of the world.

My favourite specimen, because it is the most confidently wrong: 50mm is the focal length that matches human vision.

I would love for some photography student somewhere to write a proper paper on how this claim managed to convince so many people, because as far as I can tell it is repeated far more often than it is examined. And the giveaway is that everybody agrees on the conclusion while nobody agrees on the reason. Ask five people why it is true and you get four different mechanisms, each of which falls apart when you poke it.

The most literal version goes via the focal length itself, which is easy to check and immediately wrong. The eye's physical focal length is somewhere around 17mm, and it is not even fixed - the lens in your head changes shape when you focus on something close. Whatever else 50 is, it is not that number.

So people move to field of view, which sounds much more promising. A 50mm lens on full frame covers roughly 40 degrees horizontally and about 27 vertically. Human vision runs to something like 135 degrees. That is not a near miss, that is a different order of thing. And this is where the comparison stops being merely inaccurate and starts being category confusion, because our eyes do not work like lenses at all. Only a tiny patch of the retina resolves sharply. If we assessed our vision the way we assess a lens, on the basis of what is actually sharp on the sensor, we would be walking around with a two degree field of view. We do not notice this because our eyes are in constant motion and the brain assembles the result into a stable picture that never existed on the retina in one piece. Which is a further reason the comparison fails: there is no exposure. You are not looking at a frame, you are looking at a composite being continuously rebuilt.

Point this out and the argument usually retreats to perspective. Never mind the angle, the claim goes, it is about how lines and depth relationships look - a 50mm rendering of a street matches how the street feels to stand in. Except the eye projects onto a curved surface and a lens projects onto a flat one. There is no focal length that makes a flat projection behave like a spherical one; the geometry simply does not have that solution. You can pick a focal length whose distortions bother you least, and that is a real thing worth choosing, but it is a preference about failure modes rather than a match. And whatever "how the street feels to stand in" means, a good part of it is coming from having two eyes about six centimetres apart, which no single lens has ever done anything about.

The last version is the only one with something in it, and it quietly gives the game away. A 50mm image can look right - but only if you also fix how far away the viewer is standing. Move a print closer to your face or further from it and you have changed the angle of your overall shot, which is roughly what zooming does. So the claim holds only if we all agree to look at pictures from the same distance, which we very obviously do not, since the same photograph now gets viewed on a phone at arm's length, on a laptop, and occasionally on a wall.

Notice also that the arguments pull in opposite directions. Match the total field of view and you end up somewhere around an ultra-wide. Match the small cone you are actually attending to at any given instant and you end up in short telephoto territory, 85mm or beyond. Match the projection geometry and there is no answer at all. Nothing here arrives at 50 unless you already knew that 50 was the answer you were looking for.

What is really going on has nothing to do with eyes. The diagonal of a 35mm frame is about 43mm, and a lens roughly matching the diagonal of its format was, in Barnack's day, the cheapest thing to build fast and well corrected. 50 was close enough, so 50 got made, in enormous numbers, for decades, and came bundled with every camera anybody bought. Two or three generations of photographers learned to see through it before they ever chose anything. The "normal" lens is normal because of manufacturing economics and the shape of a rectangle somebody standardised a hundred years ago.

Once you have caught one of these you start finding the rest, and they all have the same shape - a decision presented as a fact:

The good light is golden hour and blue hour. Grey skies are boring. A photograph has to be sharp and full of detail. A photograph comes in a certain format.

Take the sharpness one, since it cost me the longest to shake. Sharpness is the easiest quality to measure and therefore the one the industry has agreed to sell us, review by review, MTF chart by MTF chart. The longer I photograph, the less often I care. My favourite frame from last winter is a low-angle shot of a pair of black ice skates with pink laces cutting across the ice, and essentially nothing in it is sharp. The blur is the subject. Freeze that moment properly and you have a picture of some skates.

The frame is a decision, not a default

Which brings me to the last one on that list, and the one I have thought about most.

Image formats are a convention. Not a law, not a technical constraint, and not even a very old convention. There was a time when oval and round images were about as ordinary as rectangular ones - look at what people hung on walls before industrial production got involved. The rectangle won because it is what rolls off machines efficiently, what fits a film gate, what cuts from a sheet without waste. Then it won so thoroughly that everything else began to feel wrong.

I have been playing with a circular fisheye lately, a lens that produces a genuinely round image with black around it, and the most interesting part has been watching my own reaction. Round pictures feel wrong to me. Not bad. Wrong, the way a misspelled word is wrong. I look at a round photograph of the Toronto skyline in magenta and green, sun flaring off a tower, the whole thing curled into something like a crystal ball, and part of my brain is still filing a complaint about the shape. There is no reason for that beyond a lifetime of rectangles. The complaint is information about me, not about the picture.

So here is what I actually think, and it is the closest thing I have to a rule. A mature photographer chooses the format from what they are trying to say, not from where the sensor collects the most data.

That turns a default into a set of questions worth asking every time. Do you want to confirm what the viewer expects, or surprise them? Where should the eye enter, and where should it be unable to leave? Are you after symmetry or motion? Do you follow the standard - landscapes horizontal, portraits vertical - because the subject wants it, or because that is what everyone does? A square imposes a calm that a 3:2 cannot, simply by refusing to favour any direction. A very long horizontal makes the eye travel and turns viewing into something closer to reading. Extreme formats are wonderful for exactly this reason: they make the viewer feel the shape before they have identified anything inside it.

None of that is available while the frame is still a setting you never touched.

Minor White has a line that I keep coming back to, and it is one of my favourite photography quotes: "Don't show me what it is, show me what else it is!" I do not manage it often. But the times it works are the times I decided something on purpose - the colour, the light, the shape - instead of accepting what the camera and the internet handed me.

There is more where this came from. The whole series collects under Photo Thoughts.

Then other people started posting fotogedanken of their own, which made me very happy. The tag has turned into something better than a personal notebook - follow it and you get a steady stream of photographers thinking out loud about the medium instead of about gear, which is rarer than it should be.

Reading a year of my own back in one sitting, the same argument keeps surfacing in different disguises: photography is a practice you do for yourself, in a world that keeps insisting it is for an audience, a platform, or a purchase. Everything below is a variation on that one idea. Each section also has a longer post behind it that I will get to over the coming weeks - this one is the distillation.

The part that isn't pressing the button

Start with something I keep coming back to. Photography is the only art form where the act itself can theoretically be over in a millisecond. A painter is inside the making for hours. A musician is inside it for the length of the piece, at minimum. We can walk around for an entire afternoon and the work, the actual exposure, lasts a five hundredth of a second. Everything else - the walking, the waiting, the noticing, the editing, the sequencing, the moment where you hand the thing to somebody - sits around the act rather than being it. That is exactly why thinking about the medium is worth the time. The interesting part is almost entirely the part that is not pressing the button.

It also means photography reaches a lot further than making pictures with a camera. My son's girlfriend gave me a notebook for Christmas, a Nuuna made from recycled jeans, and it feels wonderful. It also needed work before it could compete with my current favourite, a Dingbats. I transplanted a ribbon marker out of another notebook, glued in three pen loops, built a paper pocket into the back cover. Now I only need the patience to fill the book I am currently writing in before I am allowed to start the new one. I count that as one of my fotogedanken, because people who are into photography tend to be the same people who notice the fine grain of things, who have a soft spot for analog objects even when they shoot digital and publish online, and for whom the way there is usually the point.

Amateurish is a compliment

Somewhere in the first year of putting frames around my images, someone whose work I openly admired told me they looked amateurish and gimmicky. Gimmicky is a matter of taste, fine. Amateurish I will happily take as a compliment, because it says I am doing this primarily out of affection for the medium rather than to satisfy a convention. We live in a world of photographic oversaturation. The only person who has to be happy with the result is you. If that means a frame, a filter, a round image, a deliberately blown-out sky, then you have already won.

A swipe crowd is not an audience

"Instagram is the best way to find an audience for my photography." I hear it constantly and I have doubts. I have never once watched somebody be long and thoughtful on social media. Be honest with yourself - how often does it really happen? And by long I do not mean three seconds instead of half a second. What we are dealing with is a swipe-like-swipe-swipe-like crowd, and whatever that is, it is not an audience. Not the same species of thing.

The marketers make this very legible. Every online presence I have ever run - the blog, the podcasts, the photography, back when I was still feeding a five-figure follower count on Twitter - has eventually attracted someone who wanted me to start selling my audience. Photography seems especially prone to it. The wish for an audience seems to lead directly to the error of treating monetization as the same thing as success. Requests came in via Pixelfed the other week. Nobody has yet offered to monetize my Bookwyrm profile, which is a shame. I guess I keep reading purely for fun then.

Twenty copies, given away in person

The counterweight is not to give up on being seen. It is to put the work somewhere that assumes a viewer with a spare five minutes. Erik's photo zine is the model I keep pointing at, because it stands in a long tradition of people thinking critically about photography as a form of communication and handing those thoughts to others for discussion. That practice has become rare. Most photography publishing today is either a lightly disguised invitation to buy gear or a how-to, and both of those are fine, and neither of them is a conversation.

There is a rule hiding in that which I only formulated recently, and it is uncomfortable enough that I want it in writing: if you put no effort into publishing your images, you do not get to be surprised when the audience puts no effort into thinking about what they saw. Layout is respect. A sequence is an argument. Handing somebody twenty printed pages is a different request than dropping a JPEG into a feed, and people answer the request you actually made.

So my photos exist almost exclusively in print, in a zine or a book, and even then only if you really want one. Twenty copies, maximum print run, given away in person. This year I want to go a step further and make them by hand. I genuinely do not know yet whether that is a good idea, because I love holding printed photographs about as much as I hate wrestling with modern printing technology. But I want unusual paper, and unusual paper means doing it myself.

There is more where this came from. The whole series collects under Photo Thoughts.