The most incredible, fascinating, and innovative thing about the Ricoh GR is that you cannot strip a camera any further down than this.
Essentially, the camera is reduced to its bare bones: a small black box with a shutter button.
When combined with my workflow—high-contrast black and white, small JPEG, automatic settings—you strip photography down to the simplest possible solution for making a photograph.
It returns photography to the essence of the medium itself:
drawing with light.
When fully adopting this workflow and experiencing photography as a way of being, all that remains is pure instinct.
Over time, through consistency and compounding practice, photography becomes effortless. The flow state becomes inevitable. Your authentic expression begins to arise.
Once you understand that photography should not interrupt your everyday life—once you realize that wearing a camera around your neck becomes a burden—the solution becomes obvious.
The closest thing to not having a camera at all is the Ricoh GR.
Currently walking around Philadelphia, coming out of the market. Got some raw milk here — 100% grass-fed. Cold winter days. Where’s the sun? Where’s the rays?
Today’s thought is about happiness — and why I believe photography is the ultimate way to experience life and cultivate joy in your everyday existence.
Just looking up at these beautiful birds flying from canopy to canopy — the canopies being these tall skyscrapers and buildings. When you’re around people in society, walking the streets with your camera and photographing, this to me is paradise.
I always have a camera with me. Today we got the Ricoh GR III.
And when you always have a camera with you, it becomes a superpower. It feels like anything is possible. I feel unstoppable.
It gives me the ultimate excuse to be present. To be grounded. To engage with life.
The Physicality of Joy
In the modern world, we have unlimited food options. You can order Uber Eats, sit at home, watch Netflix all day, and never move your feet.
But the physicality of life is what makes life beautiful.
There’s something exciting about surrounding yourself in the chaos of the street.
Photography is my excuse to return to a childlike spirit of play — to treat the world, to treat the street, like a playground.
Life can become a prison. But you have the key to unlock the door to the playground.
It’s a matter of perception. Of how you feel internally.
I can’t control the weather. The conditions. Whether I come home with a “good” or “bad” photograph.
But I can control:
My curiosity
My vitality
The state of my body
And so I prioritize health.
Photography becomes an extension of my physical practice. I’m walking. Moving. Training my body. Wearing barefoot shoes. Feeling the concrete beneath my feet.
Light cardio. Looking around. Engaging the sights, the sounds, the smells.
If you wake up lacking physical vitality — how will you ever cultivate curiosity? How will you practice your photography?
Enthusiasm comes from vitality.
Theos — meaning God. To be enthusiastic is to be possessed by God.
I want to wake up possessed by that spirit. To release my inner daemon when I’m on the street.
There’s no rational reason I do this. There’s an obsessive quality to it. Something that propels me to the front lines of life.
When you’re outside, you thrive.
When you’re inside, sitting, living on standby — your soul slowly dies.
Outside the Passage of Time
When you’re walking and photographing, you exist outside the passage of time.
We have a past. We have a future.
But neither are of concern.
All that matters is this moment — when you click the shutter.
Street photography is stepping into the stream of becoming.
Not dwelling on yesterday’s photos. Not thinking about tomorrow’s project.
Just affirming:
My next photograph will be my next best photograph.
Even on the same mundane streets every day, there are infinite ways to articulate the mundane.
Curiosity fuels inspiration.
But inspiration isn’t external.
Inspirare — to breathe into.
Life breathes into you. Animation. Consciousness. Movement.
When you raise the camera to your eye and truly notice — life becomes a dream.
Don’t think of life only as it is. Think of what it could be through your interpretation.
Subtraction & Instinct
Practically, I use a compact digital camera — the Ricoh GR — high-contrast black and white JPEGs. Automatic settings. Everything baked into the file.
Photography becomes effortless. Flow state becomes inevitable.
Flow happens when thinking dies.
Motivation lies in movement.
To cultivate your authentic way of photographing, you subtract.
Remove decisions:
Color or black and white
This lens or that lens
This camera or that camera
Choice is an illusion.
Left and right are distractions.
Freedom comes from eliminating options.
When you remove noise and distraction, what’s left?
Instinct. Intuition.
That irrational pull to press the shutter — that’s your authentic expression.
Through repetition. Through discipline. Through going out daily.
Instinct is the purest reflection of who you are.
In a world where we endlessly consume, a compact camera gives you the ability to create.
To express.
Play the Game
Stop taking your life and photography so seriously.
Let the chips fall as they may.
Embrace play.
From that state — flow emerges.
The question that keeps me out here:
What will reality manifest to be in a photograph?
What you see isn’t necessarily what you get. What you get is what you didn’t see.
That surprise — those nuances and details — fuel curiosity.
The more I experiment, the more I wake up eager for the day.
But it requires forgetting what you think you know.
Going slow. Being present. Being prepared.
Photography becomes a visual diary.
Maybe I won’t live forever.
But at least I can leave behind some photographs.
Through photographing my everyday life — for myself — I’m never lonely.
No matter how mundane things seem. No matter the external circumstances.
Through the camera, you can always find meaning.
You can always uplift something.
Photography fuels me with curiosity, enthusiasm, and vitality.
What’s poppin’, people? It’s Dante, currently walking around Center City Philadelphia with the Ricoh GR III, just snapshotting my way through life.
And today I’m thinking about creative constraints — and how they actually lead to creative freedom.
The Illusion of Choice
We have this illusion of choice in life.
You can go left. You can go right. You have Coke. You have Pepsi.
There seems to be unlimited choices we can determine and choose ourselves. We have this sort of idea of free will.
But I believe the true path to liberation and freedom is eliminating all the choices and recognizing that the real path to freedom is onwards and upwards.
Simplify Until Photography Disappears
In a creative context, that means simplifying your workflow to a point where photography does not get in the way.
For me, that looks like:
A compact camera that fits in my pocket
One focal length
Automatic settings
Everything baked into the file
No processing
It simplifies everything from the ground up.
All I’m left to do is point and shoot.
I have a black box, a button, and a little LCD screen on the back that lets me see the composition.
That’s it.
Constraint Liberates Instinct
When I streamline the approach and give myself a technical constraint, a creative constraint, I can liberate the way in which I create.
On the street, I recognize the instinct.
That instinct pulls my body to respond to the pigeon in flight and press the shutter.
It’s not rational.
It’s an irrational pull.
Photography is physical.
Yes, it’s visual — you’re putting together a frame, recognizing moments, watching the background, waiting for alignment.
But realistically?
The instinct. The intuition. That’s where your authentic expression lies.
Your vision sharpens through repetition inside constraint.
If you want your own unique vision, your own unique approach, you have to embrace the creative constraint.
With consistency. With repetition. With competition.
But it’s only possible through the constraint.
Decision Fatigue Kills Flow
Unlimited decisions lead to burnout.
Which camera? Which lens? Color or black and white? Left or right?
That decision fatigue clouds the mind.
And I believe it leads to stagnation.
But when I give myself a creative constraint, I enter an endless flow state — of motivation, of production, of clicking that damn shutter and responding to my gut.
The Goal: Flow State
What I seek on the street is the flow state.
Street photography is about embracing spontaneity. Embracing the unknown. Being in the now.
So I can simply be there — and be prepared to respond to that gut feeling that propels me to click the shutter.
Where photography becomes effortless.
Where the flow state is inevitable.
Freedom Through Elimination
Freedom lies where there are no more choices to make.
From that state, you can create infinitely.
A thousand different ways. An infinite number of possibilities.
It’s a paradox.
But I believe this is the path to creative freedom:
Remove the choices. Stick to one. Run and gun with it.
Today I’m thinking about photography as a way of unlearning — what that means, and why I’m thinking about this.
Essentially, the ultimate challenge for a photographer is to find new ways to play the game every single day.
And my ultimate aim is to never miss another sunrise ever again in my life.
The reason I say this immediately is because the orientation of a photographer — and the way you feel about life generally — is what influences what you put within your frames and how you play this game. And that game lies in the mundane.
Whether or not you have enthusiasm for the day, for the mundane, will ultimately reflect back in your photography.
If you’re waking up eager — marching through the snow… look at all these freaking snow tracks I left, this is crazy — I think that is the ultimate place to be.
So essentially: by unlearning photography, by unlearning what you think about life generally, you’ll wake up with this insatiable curiosity for engaging with life and engaging with humanity. And that will propel you out there onto the front lines of life to practice daily — and to infinitely find yourself returning to the sunrise.
Streamlining the practice so photography doesn’t get in the way
Some simple, practical ways I’m achieving this goal of eternally returning to photography every single day — despite how mundane things may seem — is by embracing a very streamlined process:
using a compact camera
snapshotting loosely with compositional decisions
using a JPEG file that requires no processing
having everything technically set in an automatic way
Photography shouldn’t get in the way.
And stripping away color — using high-contrast black and white — has been providing me a solution to the mundane nature of life. For me, that looks like returning to the essence of the medium:
light.
Finding joy in simple things — the way light casts upon surfaces, people, places, and things — and photographing in a way where I’m curious about how light will render in an image through the lens of my camera.
Experimentation, openness, and letting the photograph surprise you
What I’m doing with my practice these days is endlessly exploring experimentation — tinkering, exploring — with this sense of openness to what will reveal itself when I look at the images.
A lot of times what I think I see when I make a photograph isn’t necessarily what I get back.
What I get back in the photograph is often what I didn’t see.
So I’m using abstraction as a solution to the mundane nature of practicing daily.
I can return to the same park every morning. I can return to the sunrise at the same location every day.
But the way the light casts upon that place will never be the same.
You cannot make the same photograph twice.
Everything is in flux. Everything is changing. The light is out of our control. The spontaneous nature of life is out of our control.
What you control (and what you don’t)
We’re not in control of the light. We’re not in control of the conditions. We’re not in control of whether we see something interesting. We’re not in control of whether we create a great photograph.
But what we are in control of is:
how often we go out there and see the world
how often we bring our camera
how often we walk
We’re simply in control of marching endlessly into the unknown — waking up with that empty blank slate, that childlike state of curiosity.
Curiosity requires vitality
I think it’s quite impossible to cultivate curiosity without physical vitality.
Another practical way I’m returning to photography every single day is by never missing the sunrise — always catching the rays — and aligning my physical body, primally, with the light.
Setting my circadian rhythm. Getting deep sleep. Waking up every morning with energy that overflows out of me into the streets when I’m practicing.
I believe that in order to cultivate curiosity, one must possess vitality in their physical body, and it stems from aligning with sunlight.
And yeah — if you’re falling asleep within like five minutes when you go to bed… consider yourself blessed.
When you wake up in the morning, it’s like you’re born again, and everything can become fresh.
But it requires you to destroy all of your preconceived notions of what life is generally.
Unlearning through non-consumption
There’s a lot of noise in the world. A lot of consumption of information.
For the past many years now — around four years — I’ve completely disconnected from the news, from the media. I really don’t consume anything.
I read old books.
I try to make sure I’m in this perpetual flow state — effortlessly living everyday life — and not consuming anything. And through that lack of consumption, I can cultivate my natural and authentic expression with the things I create — with my photography.
So think more about how you can unlearn everything you think you know about everything.
Through that unlearning, you’ll discover who you are.
And if you want to give birth to that dancing star — you kind of have to embrace the unknown.
You kind of have to embrace the chaos, the spontaneity — headfirst — with your practice.
Fail daily with consistency. Show up without expectations of what you will see.
And over time — compounding with consistency — you will find your style, you will find your voice, and you will find your place on this giant floating rock orbiting around this ball of fire that I seek to catch every single day.
That’s pretty much it.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.
I’m walking through the park today thinking about seeing beyond the obvious and the mundane nature of everyday life. When you look at this path, you see beautiful white snow, some trees, and I’ve got my Ricoh GR III.
I can make a photo of that path and look at it one way. Or I can bend down low, look at the details, and make a photo of the cracks. Look at the small things.
Changing Perspective
I can come over here by this tree and get a different perspective by looking up. I can even use the built-in crop mode on the Ricoh GR III to 50mm, turn the flash on, switch to macro mode—make sure I get that macro mode—and photograph a pine cone at very close proximity.
Built-in crop mode. Flash. Macro.
And suddenly, there’s so many more photos you can make on this one small path in the park.
Infinite Ways to Play
That’s the simple message I wanted to share. There’s so much to do. There’s so much to see. Photography is limitless in the infinite possibilities of how you can articulate things.
The ultimate aim of the photographer is to find new ways to play this game every single day.
My personal way forward is photographing daily, in the same mundane places, and finding new ways to play. Finding new ways to photograph the mundane.
I like placing my camera in unfamiliar territory—even in places I think I’ve already photographed. Going close with macro. Photographing landscapes, details, and everything in between.
It might feel like you’ve seen it all, done it all, photographed it all. But there are still so many ways to look with your two eyes.
Abstracting Reality
Another way I like to use my Ricoh is by overexposing.
There’s this stick growing out of the ground. If I overexpose by about two stops, I can create a beautiful abstract shape using macro. It pulls the form out against a white background.
Looking at small details in new ways unlocks an infinite approach to photography.
I can return to photography every single day and thrive in the mundane.
One of my favorite things is photographing in this park because it challenges me to find new ways to see.
The City as a Dream
I think about familiar streets in my city, Philadelphia. It’s an urban environment—lots of people, lots going on. People moving from point A to point B. It can seem very mundane.
But when you raise the camera to your eye and start seeing differently, life becomes a dream.
There are endless opportunities to photograph.
Photography becomes a way to extract an abstract reality.
Beyond Documentation
This is how I’m thriving creatively going forward—embracing abstraction and moving beyond documentation.
I’ve spent many years traveling and photographing reality as it is. But now, making photos of what reality could be by abstracting life brings me more joy.
It doesn’t matter where I am. I find infinite possibility in the mundane.
Photographing twigs. Photographing the sky. Photographing trees. Photographing the path I leave behind in the snow.
I forget everything I think I know about photography.
I’ll even throw the camera out of focus. Why not?
Embracing the Obvious
I thrive in the obvious. In places that are often photographed.
I think about Shibuya Crossing. I always heard it’s the worst place to practice street photography. Too cliché. Too many tourists. Like Times Square of Tokyo.
But when I was there, I made some of my most groundbreaking work.
By playing. By tinkering. By abstracting. By creating small slivers of faces in the light.
That was the most fun I’ve ever had practicing street photography anywhere in the world.
The Way Forward
So I challenge you to embrace the mundane nature of life.
It’s up to you. Your perception. Your ability to articulate.
Go slow. Let life flow toward you. Be ready with your camera.
I look at the world as a canvas. I draw with light. I wield light as the medium. The subject provides infinite opportunity.
Even looking up at the sky—sunrise, clouds, light—it becomes painterly.
Just headed to work. Hopping off the bus. And I’ve already made photographs of trees, twigs, details, and the sky.
Macro with flash. Abstraction. Play.
The Gospel of the Ricoh
There’s still so much to do.
Street photography often limits how we see. We get caught up in clichés and how things should be done.
I say nay.
Embrace play. Let the chips fall where they may. Treat each day as a new way to create.
Today I want to share with you some ideas about photography and how I believe it’s a muscle that you must train daily.
So here we’re looking at a photograph I made in Tokyo, Japan. I remember during this trip — it was two weeks — and I didn’t do a single thing physically but walk and photograph. I’m typically in the gym every single day. But when I came home from that two-week trip and returned to the gym, I felt a lack of vitality in my physical body from those two weeks of absence.
It reminded me how important it is to remain consistent with our practice — whether it’s photography, weight training, or anything in between.
Consistency is key.
With photography, it’s very simple:
The more that you walk, the more that you see. The more that you see, the more that you photograph. The more that you photograph, the more curious you become.
And that curiosity becomes the goal within itself.
Orient Yourself Toward Curiosity
The goal is to orient yourself toward increasing your curiosity each day.
But the question is: How do you cultivate curiosity?
Curiosity is this curious thing. Where does it come from? How can we achieve it?
I believe curiosity is an outward expression of physical vitality.
When your days are filled with enthusiasm — when you’re physically alive — curiosity becomes inevitable.
Think about fatigue.
If you wake up in the morning feeling sluggish, not wanting to get out of bed, it’s going to be nearly impossible to cultivate curiosity — let alone go out and practice your photography.
But if you wake up eager for the day… If you got deep sleep… If you ate nutritious food… If your body feels engaged and ready…
Then let the chips fall as they may.
Embrace the spirit of play and go practice.
Curiosity is born in that enthusiastic state in the morning when you wake up with physical vitality.
Health Is the Ultimate Wealth
I cherish vitality in my body each morning as the ultimate gift in life.
The ultimate wealth is health.
I orient everything in my life around health. I go to bed early. I rise early. I make sure I’m eating properly. I stretch. I do yoga. I strength train.
By remaining consistent and disciplined every single day — almost obsessively — I’ve noticed the results in my photographs improving simultaneously.
I’m becoming more curious about life.
I’m making different photographs than I’ve ever made before.
And it’s because I’ve put physical vitality at the forefront of my everyday life.
Failure Is Part of the Process
When you consider your muscles — how microfibers tear down and replenish during sleep — it’s important to recognize the same pattern in photography.
You will fail.
In order to receive six-pack abs, it requires time. Pain. Suffering. Failure.
With photography, it’s the same.
You might go out every single day and not come home with a great frame. I would say 99% of the time, you will fail.
But through consistency — through time spent doing the thing — you will eventually see results.
Time compounds.
The Goal Is Found Within the Practice
When I frame the telos — the goal — of photography, I frame it autotelically.
The goal is found within itself.
The goal is the practice. The process. The flow state.
When you’re out there photographing, recognize:
The goal is to increase curiosity. The goal is to remain in flow.
By detaching from the outcome — whether that’s six-pack abs or your next best photograph — I can remain present.
And that mindset shift is what propels me toward infinite curiosity, exploration, and enthusiasm for life.
Photography Is Physical
Photography is a physical act.
You can’t sit on the sidelines of life and make photographs.
It requires you to be out there. On the front lines. Physically engaged with the world.
If I neglect my practice, something doesn’t feel right.
It’s the same with the gym.
If I don’t train for a week, two weeks, a month — I have to start from ground zero. It takes time to get back into rhythm.
I just want to perpetually stay on that wheel — incrementally moving my body daily.
Time Spent Doing the Thing
I’m consistent with photography because I recognize the power of time.
I’m not always going to see something surprising.
But I’m still out there.
Because I recognize the passage of time required to make anything great.
By detaching from the outcome and remaining in the flow of production — simply being out there — I cultivate meaning and purpose.
