This topic is especially timely as we approach the holiday season and these opportunities become more abundant. It feels a shame to let another season pass without an earnest effort to capture some of the magic. Whether it's your kiddos experiencing unrestrained joy, reuniting with rarely-seen relatives, or simply documenting friends in their element, taking candid pictures is a meaningful way to capture memories, tell stories, and spread some love.

For a bit of context, I have historically been a disappointing photographer. It’s only recently that I’ve overcome this deficit and have “unlocked” my ability to embrace the art. For this reason I felt compelled to share a few insights with the intention being to perhaps help you capture more of these golden moments yourself. What follows below should set you on the right path. Making you dangerous enough with a camera to have fun and get started on a path toward meaningful progression.

Principles for Better Candid Photos

In my journey to improve, I discovered Greg Williams' course, Candid Photography Skills and out of all the content I’ve consumed on the subject I think his principle-based tutorials have had the greatest impact on improving my photos.

Let me share what I've learned from Greg’s approach, starting with the fundamentals.

Working with Subjects

There are two primary approaches to candid photography: being a participant or an observer. Greg seems to primarily work as a participant - he moves with his subjects, dances when they dance, runs when they run. He engages in conversation, makes funny faces, and uses his personality to capture authentic reactions. This approach was completely foreign to me, I never even considered how my behavior was reflected back at my subject. I will note that this approach is definitely more advanced and requires a level of fluency with your camera and technical settings, as you'll need to make fine adjustments while staying engaged with your subjects.

As a relative beginner, I've found it more comfortable to start as an observer. This means finding a quiet corner or staircase during gatherings and discretely capturing moments as they unfold. It's less demanding technically and allows you to focus on composition and timing while you build confidence with your equipment.

Understanding Light

Light is often the limiting factor for low skill photographers, but Greg's perspective was totally liberating: He’s fond of saying “there's no such thing as bad light”, “there is a good photo in every lighting situation”, “Make people look good in ugly light”. This mindset shift viewing lighting as a fun challenge or puzzle to be solved as opposed to good light vs. bad light has been a massive, albeit potentially obvious creative unlock.

The fundamentals of light I keep in the back of my mind while shooting are as follows:

• Size (like the sun versus a lamp)

• Source (natural or artificial)

• Diffusion (clouds, screens, or other materials that scatter light)

• Distance from the subject

The key light - or dominant light source, plays a crucial role in composition. Outdoors, it's typically the sun; indoors, it might be a window or main room light. Understanding where this light comes from helps you position yourself and your subjects for the best odds of capturing magic.

Backlighting - Greg's favorite technique involves backlighting (the opposite of what I assumed made for a great snap), not directly behind the subject, but capturing some light source in the frame. This approach can smooth imperfections and create flattering portraits. I have found this rather difficult to achieve in practice but is definitely worth the failed attempts when you nail it.

Technical Elements

Exposure is fundamentally about controlling light through your lens. The key is to notice how your subject's brightness compares to their background.

Two things to keep in mind when adjusting your exposure:

• When shooting against a dark background, lower your exposure;

• When shooting against a lighter background, raise it.

On smartphones, you can adjust this by tapping and dragging your finger up or down on the screen; on cameras there's typically a dedicated dial.

Composition and Environment - Greg emphasizes that great pictures can be found anywhere - it's about your perspective and creativity. He recommends giving yourself three minutes to find the perfect shot - long enough to explore angles but short enough to maintain energy and spontaneity. Especially useful to keep in mind when shooting toddlers.

Look for "frames within frames"2 - doorways, car windows, picture frames, or natural elements that draw the eye into the image. These create depth and interest while leading viewers to your subject. Roads, paths, and architectural elements can create vanishing points that add visual energy to your compositions.

Rule of thirds - important to understand, but don't be afraid to break it. Sometimes, the most compelling images come from deliberately breaking traditional composition rules. The key is understanding the rule well enough to know when breaking them will enhance, rather than detract from what you are trying to convey. I don’t currently break it that often and even keep the guides on my camera display.

Focus and Editing - Sharp focus on your subject is crucial, but don't feel confined to conventional wisdom like always focusing on the eyes. Sometimes focusing on a different feature - a cheek, nose, or mouth - can create more interesting or intimate portraits.

When it comes to editing, it's more about selecting images for their information density rather than technical perfection. Look for photos that tell a story or capture authentic reactions. Greg's editing process is surprisingly simple:

• Start with cropping - cropping is by far my favorite editing technique. I find it can transform a very mid picture into something extraordinary simply by tightening up the frame.

• Adjust exposure - this is better to do while shooting, but slight adjustments can be made in post.

• Fine-tune brilliance, highlights, and shadows - I personally don’t mess with this too much on the back end, but prefer to use the Ricoh recipes to set these ahead of time.

Black and white photos - ensure you have at least one pure white and one pure black element in the frame - don't rely solely on mid tones.

For those wanting to dive deeper into technical elements, the next progression, and where I’m currently spending the majority of my time, would be to explore and understand how exposure value, metering, f-stop, ISO, and shutter speed settings effect a photo and which situations certain combinations of these settings work well in.

The Social Angle

Everyone appreciates a thoughtful and flattering photo of themselves, so being capable of capturing candid moments makes you an indispensable addition to any gathering. While taking on the role of photographer can mean missing out on being in photos yourself, it's a noble and worthy sacrifice that allows you to give others the gift of preserved memories. It's particularly valuable to promote and scale this skill to as many members of your social and familial circles as possible - ensuring everyone gets to be in photos rather than one person always being behind the camera. Teaching is also one of the best ways to learn and solidify your knowledge.

Who I’m studying

Henri Cartier-Bresson - The father of modern photojournalism and master of the "decisive moment," the man that started the candid movement.

"To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It's a way of life."

I think if you’re a photographer, to only cultivate your talent with photography is pretty dull. You have to read, you have to look at sculpture and paintings. That’s how you build this talent.

Vivian Maier - A former nanny whose candid photography was discovered posthumously. A true master. Every photo is stunning.

Gary Winogrand - Known for his fast-paced street scenes. He has an eye for candid oddities. Easter eggs abound.

Bruce Gilden - Known for his close-up, flash-heavy street portraits. Gangster.

Greg Williams - Love the Greetings series. A bit unfair because photographs the most beautiful and expressive people on the planet, but still worthy of appreciation.

Dewey Nicks - cool guy taking cool photos.

Saul Leiter - captures the quiet beauty of city life in subtle and abstract ways. Another master. His color and composition are so so good. Unreal.

Mark Cohen - capturing the essence of decades as if stumbling on private moments.

Scott Schuman - The Sartorialist, street fashion OG. Sadly, it seems his original blog is no longer in existence.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, the goal is to capture images that tell stories in a single frame - photos dense with information that reveal something new each time you fix your gaze on them. These are the images you'll want to display, share, and revisit over the years. They become touchstones for memories and connections, making photography not just a technical skill but rather a social one. Strengthening relations and preserving those golden moments.

My simple recommendation is to start by photographing what matters most to you - your daily life, your loved ones, your personal world. The most meaningful photos will always be those that express something unique from your personal perspective.

Walls, metaphorical and physical, have been on my mind lately. (Above) and below are some beautiful walls, Justin Murphy’s note titled Walls as a Service1, a few brief thoughts on benevolent walls and an original poem. Ponder at your leisure.

Walls as a Service

On Benevolent Walls

Walls shape and protect who we are.

Walls re-direct.

Walls defuse the primal instinct to take the easy road by creating strategic friction.

Walls constructed of our own volition are the ultimate lever for shaping behavior.

Walls, ancient and old, remain because they have served us well. Examine them.

Walls create a break in the action, a respite for recuperation and contemplation.

Walls make long roads viable.

Walls should be scaled, tunneled through, run around, and smashed down by the vigors of youth.

Walls should be carefully constructed and reconstructed during middle age.

Walls should be a fortress of peace, safety, and solitude in old age.

A non-exhaustive list of benevolent walls

1. Religion

2. Marriage

3. Kids

4. Friendship

5. Dogs

6. Homeownership

7. Jobs

8. Rituals

9. Hobbies

10. Reading

11. Writing

12. Running

13. Lifting Weights

14. Eating whole foods

15. Eating seasonally

By engaging in any of the above, you’ve effectively walled off an infinite number of decisions, distractions, and temptations.

A Poem

If this list appeals to your nature, you are in the right place.

Welcome to The Mettleist.

Mens sana in corpore sano1

|Met·tle|n. Substance or quality of temperament; spirit, esp. as regards honor, courage, fortitude, ardor, etc.; disposition; — usually in a good sense. A certain critical hour which shall…try what mettle his heart is made of. South. Gentlemen of brave mettle. Shak. The winged courser, like a generous horse, Shows most true mettle when you check his course. Pope. To put on one’s mettle, to cause or incite one to use one’s best efforts.2

1. We are strivers - we pursue the good life with urgency and vigor.

2. We strive to be a physical force - health and fitness is the soil from which ambition springs. Through regular physical exertion and mindful diet, vitality increases.

3. We strive to be an intellectual force - as much about virtue, honesty, intuition, integrity, and bravery as it is about IQ. Through good intellectual habits, intelligence expands.

4. We believe in being useful -

   “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.”

   ― Robert A. Heinlein

5. We believe in the power of responsibility - we take our responsibilities seriously but never ourselves. Responsibility is always a privilege.

6. We believe in a job well done - we care deeply about our endeavors, big and small. Our work funds our ambition. It does not define us.

7. We believe in the long game - the most powerful force that we can harness is dogged, incremental, constant progress over a long time frame.

8. We believe in cultivating taste - we are tuned in to what moves us. Details matter.

9. We believe in thoughtful dress and grooming - we don’t tolerate slouches.

10. We believe in manners and decorum - Whilst knowing how and when to tastefully break them.

11. We believe in good posture and a friendly disposition - chest out, chin up. Mood is a choice.

12. We believe in the art of conversation - we abhor bores

13. We believe curiosity is a virtue - odd and broad consumption facilitates far transfer and novel insight.

14. We appreciate a sharp sense of humor - friendly banter is highly encouraged. Be capable of dishing it out and taking it in stride.

15. We are champions of self-expression - we root for one another in public and thoughtfully critique in private.

16. We believe in picking up the tab - and tipping generously.

We are The Mettleist - spirited and resilient.

I continued to mull this quote over in my mind:

“Turning something from an idea

into a reality

can make it seem smaller.

It changes from unearthly to earthly.

The imagination has no limits.

The physical world does.

The work exists in both.”

- Rick Rubin

And it wasn’t until I reviewed my podcast notes from the John Mayer - Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin that I made a connection.

Mayer discusses his digital whiteboard method:

I use this digital whiteboard I swear by … I’ve sold a lot of people on the whiteboard idea now. It seems silly at first but you get to see it right up there.

I had one of those holy shit moments when I realized what John Mayer was describing with his whiteboarding was precisely what I was describing as missing from my creative process. The immediacy with which we can transfer ideas from our heads to reality is paramount. Now, I’ve known this intuitively, which is why I’ve always carried a notebook, digital or physical, around with me since I could write. The missing component, however, has been a system to work through these ideas after the initial spark.

As Mayer puts it:

Just get a circuit going. Get the light bulb to light up because all the wiring is there.

I have a proverbial garage full of precious hand-blown glass light bulbs with the potential to light up, but I’ve never bothered to spend the time to see if all the required wiring was there to make any of them glow. I was suffering from the same paralysis a hoarder does when confronted with cleaning out their garage.

Mayer goes on to say that once you have a spark :

You don’t leave the room. You put sweatpants on. You’re in a hoodie. You’re not going out tonight. Your friends are going out and you’re not. Why? Because the biggest thing is about to happen to you. All these songs that I play on stage now represent a night. I went, “Shut it down. We got work to do”. It’s my favorite and least favorite. It’s just wonderful torture you know you’re in for.

As much as I LOVE this sentiment, yours truly works a demanding day job, has twin 18-month-olds, a wife, and a very needy dog, so I needed to reimagine this approach to fit my requirements. Here’s how I approached creating my own inspired-by method.

I distilled my writer’s block into three main issues:

1. The need or ability to make incremental progress on multiple ideas.

2. When inspiration strikes, the ability to capture the seed of that idea and create a physical relic.

3. The physical relic represents the start of something requiring a “hoodie on” moment. For me, “hoodie on” moments will likely last 20-45 minutes, with an occasional late night where I can make incremental progress over weeks, months, or years.

With my problems defined, I compiled a list of requirements for designing a physical manifestation of my ideal setup.

Requirements:

1. Analog (a large piece of this is bringing ideas into reality, so I wanted to create a physical/material artifact as quickly and as frictionlessly as possible.

2. Readily Visible (somewhere I can walk past it or stand and stare at it)

3. Flexible and rearrangeable

4. Low stakes (I don’t want to be concerned with costs or starting over)

5. Aesthetically pleasing

6. Semi-permanent (currently renting)

7. Mirror the pages and navigation of this website

8. Allow me to zoom in and out (see the website as a whole or isolate one idea/topic)

9. Enable starting, stopping, and picking up where I left off quickly

10. Shareable (with a tight selection of people)

Here is what I ultimately came up with:

1. Analog - several years ago, I bought these giant legal pads of graph paper for an art project; I lined up four of them to match the main areas of my website.

2. Visible - the right wall of my office is visible to me 50+ hours a week, so I nailed that one.

3. Flexible - blue painter tape and sticky dots are wonderfully temporary and re-stickable.

4. Low Stakes - I think the entire setup costs less than 20 dollars, and I have hundreds of each component paper, note cards, and dots in reserve.

5. Aesthetically pleasing - this could be improved upon, but it's not terrible for a minimum viable prototype.

6. Semi-permanent - see flexible. No holes were created in the wall during the installation process.

7. Mirror website - while the order is out of wack, the big pieces are there

8. Zoom in/out - I love being able to see everything all at once and being able to pluck a card off to isolate it. Nailed it!

   

9. Start/stop - this is the aspect I put the most thought into and am most proud of. What I love about this setup is whenever I have a spare 5,10, or 20 minutes, I can stare at my wall of possibilities, hone in on one that I’m inspired to write about at that moment, pluck it off the wall, put it up in front of me while I write and really narrow my focus. I can also make notes on the card about where I left off for the next time I pick it up or where I’m stuck so I can keep that on simmer while doing something else.

   

10. Shareable - while this isn’t necessarily portable, I can share this with anyone I invite to my home/office. (or take a photo)

This piece you are reading is the first I’ve written using my new method, and it was significantly more enjoyable and far less brute-forced into existence. I enjoyed thinking through and bringing it to life, and I’m now looking forward to refining my process over my lifetime as a writer.

Lastly, while working through all this, I’ve decided to start fresh; I will put all of my previously hoarded light bulbs into a metaphorical storage locker for safekeeping and let them age. If the same ideas are quality enough to surface again, I now have a process to capture them AND a method to work through wiring them up to see if they glow.

In embracing this new method, I have discovered a practical solution to writer's block and unearthed a pathway to elevate my creative output. The physical manifestation of my ideas on my office wall is a constant source of inspiration and focus. With each passing day, I find myself honing in on the seeds of ideas that can now be nurtured into reality.

Standing before my wall of possibilities, I am filled with a renewed sense of purpose, excited to embark on this journey of continuous improvement.

With spirited resilience.

AP

In this musing, I reflect on the limitations of our mind-finger connection and the elusive gap between our taste and our ability to bring our vision to life.

Rather than offering a simple solution to overcome writer's block, I aim to explore the complex interplay between our imagination and the physical act of creation. It is in this exploration that we may find insights, solace, and renewed determination to persist in our creative endeavors.

In yet another bout of productive procrastination, I listened to the Tetragrammaton Podcast with John Mayer, where he very thoughtfully attempts to articulate the torturous wonder that is the creative process. I highly recommend listening to the entirety of the episode, if for no other reason than it’s reassuring to hear a creative of John Mayers caliber also struggles with the same shit we void shouters wrestle with.

Coming off a literary hangover from reading William Gibson’s sci-fi classic Neuromancer, I’ve been stewing on the issues of modernity, and while most of the futuristic world he conjures isn’t something I would hope to see in my lifetime, I would seriously consider having some technology implant that could record all my thoughts as text. I constantly have these inner dialogues and streams of ideas that I want so badly to share and communicate with others, but when I sit down at my keyboard or try to record myself or write them down in a notebook, everything goes silent. The thoughts stop, or they get jumbled in a dense fog of overwhelm. Thoughts that were exploding with energy and excitement seconds ago are diminished to insignificance as I attempt to record them. Rick Rubin has a passage about this phenomenon in his book The Creative Act. He says

“Turning something from an idea

into a reality

can make it seem smaller.

It changes from unearthly to earthly.

The imagination has no limits.

The physical world does.

The work exists in both.”

- Rick Rubin

Allow me to riff on this for a moment. These five sentences get to what, for me, is the very essence of what Steven Pressfield refers to as the war of art. Taking something from your mind where it is limitless, unbound, vivid, and exciting and transferring it to reality. The constraint here seems to be the function or ability of the electrical impulses to travel to our extremities in such a way that they are transmuted in the correct sequence of keystrokes so they capture the essence of these thoughts with some semblance of the fidelity and nuance formed in the imagination. The current state of my mind-finger connection leaves much to be desired. This gap I’m experiencing, Ira Glass explains eloquently in his quote:

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal…”

― Ira Glass

In my current moment of despair, the distance between my taste gap, brain, and fingertips feels like a chasm I will never bound. Critical bits and bytes of information wander and are lost in their translation journey, never to be recovered in their same form or sequence again. It's a frustrating and disheartening experience, but the more I study the creative process, I realize this is just part of it.

My conclusion is simply to keep showing up, keep putting words on the page, and keep hitting publish.

I need to remind myself this is an infinite game. To keep playing, I need to persevere with spirited resilience.