What Will Reality Manifest to Be in a Photograph?
What’s poppin’, people? It’s Dante.
This morning I’m out here hiking through the woods with my Ricoh GR III, the Ricoh GF-2 flash mounted on top, shooting in manual mode, experimenting with flash and macro, and just letting curiosity guide me.
I’m looking at the trees, the frost, the dew drops catching the morning light — and I’m asking myself the same question I ask every single day:
What will reality manifest to be in a photograph today?
That question is what keeps me returning to photography with childlike curiosity.
Because when I put four corners around life and click the shutter, I’m not documenting a fact — I’m exploring what life could become through the abstraction of reality.
The Surprise of the Frame
People assume that shooting high-contrast JPEGs straight out of camera means what you see is what you get.
But in my workflow, it’s the opposite.
What you get is what you didn’t see.
By boosting contrast to the maximum, using grit, grain, shadows, highlight-weighted metering — the camera reveals something my eyes never consciously registered.
I love that surprise. I love when the photograph becomes more extraordinary than the moment itself.
Photography becomes a way of looking beyond the veil of the everyday.
Light as the Language of the Medium
What I’m really interested in is light — the way it casts across surfaces, people, places, things.
Light is always moving, always changing. And because of that:
You cannot make the same photograph twice.
Not only does the light change — you change.
So as photographers, we should aim to become like the light:
- Always in movement
- Always transforming
- Always embracing spontaneity
That’s where the real magic lives.
Photographing Like Action Painting
The way I shoot these days reminds me of how action painters work.
It’s not about rational thought.
It’s about responding to:
- the subconscious
- the gut
- the instinct to press the shutter
Photography becomes a discovery.
A chance to surprise yourself.
That fine line between order and chaos is where the interesting pictures live.
Flash, Macro, and Creating New Worlds
Experimenting with the Ricoh GF-2 flash in macro mode opens up a whole new dimension.
A simple leaf, a vine, a frost crystal — suddenly becomes its own world.
When the flash carves the subject out of darkness, the background collapses into black, and the photograph becomes ambiguous, otherworldly, mysterious.
Even without the flash, using macro with natural light reveals veins, textures, and tiny surfaces that the naked eye barely perceives.
It’s wild how easy it is to take something from the world and place it into a new world inside the frame.
Transcending the Material Plane
Through this workflow, I’m not just trying to record nature.
I’m trying to:
- reveal the essence of life
- evoke emotion
- transcend the material plane
- create worlds that didn’t exist before the shutter clicked
The sublime — that overwhelming feeling — is what guides my instinct to shoot.
It’s not rational.
It’s a bodily sensation, something flowing through me.
That’s what keeps me in a flow state for hours.
Instinct Over Vision
Often it’s not your eyes or your brain making the photograph.
It’s something deeper:
- the subconscious
- the instinct
- the irrational pull toward a moment
And through that instinct, the camera gives you something that reality alone could never offer.
The photograph becomes a natural abstraction of reality.
That’s the part I love.
The Morning Light
Right now, the frost on the leaves is shimmering.
You can barely see it with the naked eye, you can’t see it on the GoPro, but the Ricoh — with its micro-textures and contrast — will reveal it.
Everything feels animated this morning.
And so the very simple question returns, the question that keeps me clicking:
What will reality manifest to be in a photograph today?