What’s poppin’, people? It’s Dante, currently walking the streets of Philadelphia with the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome.
Today I’m just thinking about radical detachment from the outcome of your photography and why this will transform your practice.
I’ve been photographing with high-contrast black and white on the Ricoh for nearly four years now, and ever since adopting this practice, I’ve completely reframed the way that I engage with the medium—from my mindset, my philosophy, my technique, and, of course, the output of the imagery.
From Documentary Photography to Life Affirming
I’m coming from a place where I was photographing with the documentary humanist approach to photography, interacting with humanity, traveling the world, and telling stories from the streets of Israel and Palestine to the slums of Mumbai to the villages of Zambia, Africa, and beyond.
I’ve traveled all over with the hopes of pursuing my next best photo.
However, over the past four years of my journey, I’ve completely simplified my process to this act of life affirming.
The act of me taking a picture is essentially disconnected from the outcome of the picture.
Instead of going out there in hopes of improving my photography or making a great frame, I’m reframing and re-engaging with the medium through simply saying yes to the day.
Through saying yes to life.
When I’m photographing, truly, I’m detached from the outcome. I’m not worried about whether or not the photo will be good or bad.
That’s a really liberating place to be because it allows you to simply go out and practice prolifically and endlessly without ever burning out because you’re not improving.
What Does Improvement Actually Mean?
For me, improvement isn’t necessarily a metric that you can tick off based around your compositions becoming stronger or the impact of your frames becoming more interesting.
For me, improvement in photography is simply having the curiosity and the audacity to keep going out there and practicing.
When you reframe the way in which you’re engaging with the work through this mindset shift of detachment, it puts you in this flow state of simply making new photos.
And I think that’s where we want to be.
Simply on the street, engaging with the medium daily.
I realized over my journey that this is the only path to actually achieving mastery or anything great. It’s going to require you making lots of frames and repeating the practice daily without much excuse.
Focus on What You Can Control
Whether or not you come home with a good or bad photo, or whether you see something interesting, is out of your control.
What’s in my control is showing up and practicing daily.
Walking.
Moving.
Being engaged with reality.
When I frame photography this way, I find more joy and meaning in the act of practicing because I’m no longer dependent upon the outcome.
I’m using photography as a way for me to simply engage with life more deeply—to find more appreciation and gratitude for the experience of seeing new things, experiencing new things, and meeting new people.
Detachment Changed My Technique
This has also unlocked new ways for me in terms of technique.
I’m photographing with macro mode. I’m photographing landscapes, details, textures, and more abstract imagery of simple geometric shapes, shadows, and forms.
I’m not only focused on one way of photographing.
I lend this technique to the detachment because, in the past, I was caught up with ideas that I had preconceived in my head about what makes a great photograph.
It’s important to study the masters and to have an understanding of the history of photography, what makes a great composition, and what creates something with impact.
But I think that in order to improve, you actually have to go beyond that.
You have to go beyond these basic preconceptions.
I would essentially limit myself with what I photographed previously because I had an idea of what was worth photographing.
But now that I’ve detached from the outcome of the photography, I’m actually photographing much more differently.
Photography as a Visual Diary
The mindset shift for me has been one thing, but the output and the way in which I engage with the medium is the next.
When I’m taking pictures, I’m treating it as a visual diary.
I’m treating it as a way for me to remember the day, a way for me to relive my experiences, and a way to create memories.
As much as I’m photographing and using the external world around me—photographing strangers, people, and things—the photographs I make are a reflection of my internal way that I think and feel about life.
I’m not necessarily looking to make photographs that depict facts.
I’m using photography as a way for me to evoke a feeling and my personal experience of how I think and feel about life.
Through that practice, technique, approach, and mindset shift, I’m now finding endless possibilities with what I’m photographing.
To me, that’s extremely liberating.
Photograph Everything
I’m no longer caught up with only photographing when I think something is necessarily interesting.
I photograph everything now.
I photograph whatever catches my eye and don’t really think about why.
Just simply start shooting, ask the questions later, and discover what it means through years of repetition.
Now that I’m nearly four years into this practice, I’m noticing the patterns emerge in my work and what triggers me to photograph.
The different kinds of photographs I’m making are intriguing to me, and I’m always becoming surprised by what I find in my frames because I’ve let go of the outcome.
I’m seeing something new each day through the practice of liberating myself creatively, photographing everything, and not getting caught up with boxing myself into one way of operating.
Cultivate Your Instincts
Being detached from the outcome has a lot of different benefits.
You’re liberated from the output determining whether or not you’re improving.
You remove these ideas of whether the photo is good or bad.
Then you have more opportunities to photograph freely without hesitating, and you start to cultivate your instincts much more clearly.
Then you photograph differently.
You photograph in a variety of ways.
Through making these kinds of frames that are new, fresh, and interesting, you start to discover new things and increase your curiosity.
Then it becomes this flywheel effect of fulfilling that curiosity, going back out there, and photographing again.
Find Joy in the Mundane
The shift is going from being dependent upon the output or the outcome being great to focusing more on the way in which your internal state is activated through the practice.
Simply cultivating joy and meaning in the mundane.
Finding yourself out there walking and photographing.
I think this is where you can start to thrive as a photographer.
It’s important to recognize the passage of time and just how much time it takes to find those moments that shine.
Don’t get dismayed if you didn’t make a great frame today.
Focus on what you can do right now or tomorrow.
Don’t get caught up with the frames you made yesterday.
Just focus on what you can do today.
And what’s in your control is moving and photographing.
By detaching, you’re going to start photographing. I promise you this.
It’s the biggest mindset shift that has liberated me, and so I’m just sharing it with you today.
Let the chips fall as they may. Don’t get caught up with the outcome. Embrace the passage of time and trust in the process.
How I Use AI to Automate My Street Photography Workflow
Yo, what’s poppin’, people? Dante.
Today, I want to share with you some thoughts about automation and street photography and how we can use AI to enhance our workflows.
Studying Japanese Photography With AI
Here we have a study guide that I developed for a book titled First, Abandon the World of Certainty, which contains contributions from Kōji Taki, Takuma Nakahira, Daidō Moriyama, Takahiko Okada, Mike Amano, and Yutaka Takanashi.
This is something that I think is actually incredible about AI.
I have this rare book that I purchased in Tokyo titled First, Abandon the World of Certainty, which I’ll show you here.
I have it on my bookshelf.
The text is all in Japanese.
I picked this up in this pretty cool bookshop in Tokyo, and I was really intrigued because it contains the missing works, I suppose, from the Provoke movement.
I guess Provoke 4 and 5.
There is Provoke 1, 2, and 3.
And then I discovered this book.
The work itself inside is very interesting. Very blurry, very grainy, very out of focus, very mysterious work that I am just enamored by.
However, the philosophy behind Japanese photography really intrigues me, and this book specifically contains a lot of Japanese text.
And so I did the work of actually transcribing and translating all of the Japanese text within this book into English.
I used artificial intelligence with services from ChatGPT, Claude Code, and even ElevenLabs to create an audiobook and PDF files that are downloadable and legible.
I’ve created summaries of the book using these services and have even developed a printed study guide with some of the best quotes from the work, some of the most important ideas from the work, so that I can actually study more deeply the philosophy behind that kind of photography.
This is what’s incredible about AI. It allows me to take something that was previously inaccessible and transform it into something I can actually study and learn from.
Automating Photography Zines
As you can see here, I’ve been making documents for myself about how I make zines at home.
Pretty much cataloguing all the materials that I need and creating QR codes to open up links on Amazon for somebody to purchase if they’d like to.
I’ve got work that I’m developing automatically here inside these manila folders, where the work is automatically chronologically timestamped and sequenced using the metadata from my files, creating a fully formatted zine that I can print out automatically at home.
Essentially, you upload 36 photographs, and you make a zine automatically.
All you have to do is print it out at home and staple it.
Here we have a contact sheet that is automatically generated alongside the manifest document.
The workflow is easy and repeatable to the point where I’ve been cataloguing all of my photographs in a physical and digital archive that I store here in my home and online.
Building the Flux Photography Archive
The way that I’m storing my photographs online is actually really radical and interesting.
There are around 1,200 photographs, and I actually have them all organized on a timeline.
On the left-hand side, you can pick out any month, any day, any time, and look at the photograph that I made on that particular day.
You can view the information with the camera settings.
You can download the JPEG file.
I even implemented a feature where you can add a photograph to a cart.
There’s a cart feature here on the side of the archive, and if you select 36 pictures and add them to a cart, anybody who uses my archive can generate one of these automatic zines.
However, with my personal backend, when I upload photographs to my own archive, the archive automatically ingests the work and creates full project pages.
The contact sheet, the sequencing, the physical PDF file, the project page, and the zine are created instantly.
I can click download PDF, access this PDF, and print it out at home.
And the craziest thing is, I’m not doing anything.
I’m simply uploading new work that I select to my website, and the project is automatically generated.
The URL is created.
The PDF is created.
The zine is created.
A ZIP file containing all the original contents is created.
A contact sheet is made.
And then all you’re left to do is print the work.
It’s automatically recognizing when 36 new pictures are uploaded to my website to create that project.
Anytime I have 36 new pictures, a full webpage and physical zine are generated.
And it’s open source and accessible to anybody in the world.
Archiving Philadelphia With GPS and AI
I’ve also created a system for archiving my city.
While I hit the streets of Philadelphia, implementing the Ricoh GR World app into my workflow is allowing me to create GPS timestamps for each file.
I can catalog different streets and automatically create projects where I’m archiving my city on a map.
Here we have the first street that I walked on, Broad Street.
You can click on any of the different points on the map and look at the photograph.
It’s pretty incredible what you can do with AI because these projects are automatically generated.
I have a full system that’s taking over the backend of my practice.
I’m making the selections still and picking what pictures to put within these projects.
However, the map that’s generated, the project page that’s generated, and the zine that’s generated from these projects can all be done automatically.
I have this full map of my city that I can update whenever I create a new project.
We have documentation of how many streets I’ve walked, how many photographs I’ve made, how many miles I’ve walked, and how much time I’ve spent working on the project.
Flux TV: Turning Old Video Into an Automated Archive
I have a TV that I’ve been working on.
I have a couple of different CRT TVs.
Here we have one that I showed inside of a gallery.
Essentially, the work that I’ve been making using this old-school Handycam is on display.
Here we have this old Sony Handycam.
What I’ve been doing is creating this system where I essentially have a Raspberry Pi, which is a small computer hooked up to this TV.
I’ve used software that I programmed this remote with so that I can actually cycle through different channels on the device.
You can see my name, the channel, and I can go through different videos that I’ve produced.
What’s going on in the backend is that these video files that are produced are weird MPG files or something.
In order to properly create videos, upload videos, and work with the videos, I needed to create a system to extract the video and convert the files to MP4.
And so I created a suite of software.
I’ve been using Claude Code to create my own software.
For instance, here you see Flux TV, which actually connects directly to the Raspberry Pi.
I have Flux Capture.
When I dock this Sony Handycam into my computer, Flux Capture automatically runs.
It automatically detects when there are new files to ingest, converts the files to MP4, and stores them on a NAS drive.
And so I have my own cloud.
Flux Extract: Contact Sheets, GIFs, and Video
Here we have the Flux Extract tool.
With this tool, I can essentially drag in any of the video files I make, and it will automatically create a screenshot and a contact sheet every second.
I can create short-form videos from this.
I can also create GIF files with little animations.
Actually, you can see here on the Flux TV archive.
When you go through, you can watch the video that’s presented on the TV, but you can also see that there are GIF files that are automatically extracted and generated from these videos that I’m producing.
Which is pretty cool.
One of the things I did recently is archive and put online all of my old home movies from my childhood.
You can see old home movie footage from stuff that my dad recorded on a Handycam when I was a little kid.
Which is pretty cool.
There’s footage of me rollerblading and stuff like that.
I’m basically using AI to help me with all these projects.
For instance, I had to take these video files from a DVD, extract them, and create digital files.
Then I used services to create all these GIFs using Claude and other tools.
Look at that.
Oh, that video clip is so good.
And so I have these little CRT TVs displaying the work.
Flux Contact Sheet Studio
Going back to the suite of software that I’m making, here we have Flux Contact Sheet Studio.
You can basically upload your photos into this little studio, and then it automatically generates contact sheets like this.
With these contact sheets, there are QR codes associated with each individual small thumbnail photograph.
You can scan a QR code and access the digital twin file directly on a webpage.
I can go through my work physically and then access the work digitally very easily.
One thing I do with these contact sheets is have them all cut out into these small little thumbnails.
Then you can sort them into little groupings of photos and find the digital files when needed.
Which is extremely helpful and a very innovative and interesting way that I’ve been using AI in my photography workflow.
One of the other automatic zine generators I made creates these smaller zines.
As you can see, we have this tiny little pocket-sized zine.
Flux Print Studio and the Flux Aesthetic
Back to the suite of software, we have Flux Contact Sheet Studio.
I even have Flux Print Studio, where you can print photos with captions and timestamps below, showing the date and time in the Flux style.
Using the Flux aesthetics.
All of my documents are using that same typeface and same style.
I’ve created a full knowledge base of what Flux is using Claude and creating websites using Amazon.
I basically have these websites built using Amazon and am creating them as subdomains on my main website using WordPress.org.
I can even have the tools here on the website.
There’s the Flux Generator.
You can upload your own 36 photos and generate your own issue.
You can even submit it to me and have it added automatically into a catalog.
People all over the world are submitting work to me.
This is some work from a different photographer over there in Germany.
Other people can even use the geotagging tool.
I still have that on there.
Open-Sourcing the Flux System
I have this wiki.
This wiki is essentially just open-sourcing everything that I’m working on.
I should definitely update this soon.
But basically, it’s a knowledge base on how I’m building the archive and how I’m building these different tools.
If anyone wants to run Flux or essentially adopt this system, hopefully the wiki contains enough information that you can feed it to your own AI and create your own agent that will help you adopt a similar streamlined workflow.
I’m trying to make Flux something that is open source, that anyone can use and benefit from in some way.
Using AI to Select Photographs
One of the radical things is that sometimes you have a bunch of different photos from a scene.
Let’s say you made a photograph of a fire hydrant and you have five different variations or ten different variations.
You can send them to ChatGPT and have it analyze the different frames for you and tell you the filename that it suggests you select.
And I’m going to be honest with you.
It’s still important for you to make the human decision at this point with AI until it learns your preferences.
This is something I’m going to continue pushing and working toward.
Making it so that the archive is studied by my agent, so that when I allow the AI to make selections for me, it will understand my aesthetic sensitivities and tastes.
But nine times out of ten, when I tell you the AI is going to select the photograph that you want anyway, it really helps with the fast workflow.
Keep the Photography Workflow Simple
In terms of workflow, it’s so simple, guys.
You don’t need any crazy camera.
I use the Ricoh GR.
I have an iPad Pro.
I use the built-in Photos app, and I simply tap and select the photographs that I want to keep.
I create simple folder structures using the Photos app.
I don’t use Lightroom.
I mean, I still have Lightroom because I have my old RAW files and stuff.
But as you can see, all of the dates here with the photos that I’ve made, I go through small thumbnails like this, point and click, favorite, and just use the Photos app.
It’s just so much more simple.
The greatest thing about Apple, macOS, and iOS is that you can just AirDrop shit back and forth between different devices.
It’s super nice.
I’m currently experimenting with the Mac mini using this setup right now because I have some ideas about how I can use the Mac mini.
But that’s pretty much it.
Just sharing what’s going on in my brain this morning.
I think AI is extremely powerful.
If you’re a photographer and you’re looking to enhance your workflow and help yourself make things, there are definitely some innovative solutions that I’ve found.
I’m sharing that with you so maybe you can also find ways to use AI.
Archiving My Thoughts and Uploading My Brain to the Internet
This is actually a folder.
There are multiple folders.
In these folders, there are thousands of pages of my actual, I guess you’d call it intellectual property, whatever you want to call it.
It’s my own thoughts. This is me.
All of the videos that I’ve been uploading, all of the YouTube archive, all of the website archive, have been transcribed directly in my voice and printed out into these documents so I can read through my thoughts.
I can revisit my thoughts.
Watching my old YouTube videos.
Reading my old blog posts.
This is an extremely powerful way to create.
Essentially, you just take the audio file and transcribe it.
You can even simply upload it to the Voice Memos app on your desktop if you’re using an Apple computer and have that automatically transcribe the video.
Then what I do is copy and paste the transcripts from my audio files and format them using ChatGPT into a Markdown file.
I use the iA Writer app on my iPhone, iPad, or computer to create PDF files and Markdown files.
I can then copy and paste those and put them onto blog posts.
Once these audio files are transcribed and made into text on my website, now I have this infinite archive.
My brain has been uploaded to my website.
And so if you ask ChatGPT:
What does Dante think about layering?
What does Dante think about health and fitness?
What does Dante do other than photography?
ChatGPT will send you the answer.
And so I’m cataloguing myself, archiving my work, archiving my videos, et cetera, for AI.
That way, in the future, I don’t know.
I just think this is the future.
I think that this is interesting.
The Digital Cyber Monk
Yeah, I’m a cyber monk.
Check this out.
I got a tatami mat recently.
I’ve been drinking tea and sitting on the floor.
Basically, this is the digital cyber monk setup.
Got the gym set up too.
Standing desk is pretty awesome.
You can just have a standing setup.
Basic laser printer.
We’ve got the Brother monochrome printer.
Got some label makers.
Phomemo sticker maker and label maker.
Canon SELPHY CP1500.
That’s pretty much all I need to make my zines, which is awesome.
You just need a pretty heavy-duty stapler.
Like a Bostitch heavy-duty stapler type jawn.
This one, I think, can staple up to 40 pages.
I don’t know what it is, but you need the heavier-duty stapler because the zines with 36 pictures are around 44 pages or so.
This is what I pull up onto the tatami mat with.
Check it out.
The AI cyber monk.
Got the cool teapot.
And then when it comes to how my brain is coming up with these ideas, I basically just fuel myself with burgers and meat.
Then I have the capacity to innovate with technology and my photography.
So that’s how it’s done.
The Future of Photography and AI
If you found this video useful or insightful or entertaining or whatever, visit the website.
Welcome to Flux Archive Session Number 17, where we look at some of the photographs I made along my black-and-white photography journey.
Here we’re looking at photographs made from March to April of 2024.
Without further ado, let’s jump right into the work.
The Flux Protocol
Every Flux Issue starts with a protocol page, which describes how the Flux Issues are made.
Essentially, you can create your own zine at home using my Flux Generator. You upload 36 pictures, and it will automatically chronologically timestamp and sequence the work as it was made.
You can see each photograph has a caption with the time, date, your name, and a sequence number on the top right.
The first frame I made here was in Miami along Hollywood Beach’s bay.
This is a photograph I made of my mother’s hand as she was talking on the phone. I simply made this intimate close-up photograph, I believe using the Ricoh GR IIIx at the time, photographing with the 40mm and isolating that hand against the beautiful water, sky, and horizon line.
I’m really treating photography as a visual diary.
These moments I made when visiting, I believe, my brother for the first time in his new home in Miami.
Here we have a photograph I made the first day I found myself in his home. You can see myself in the photo. You can see my brother in the photo. You can see my mother in the photo.
The photography that I’m making is personal to me.
The Surprise of Reflections
I’m using the balcony and the reflected surface of the window through that sliding door to create this strange effect where I’m framing my brother Julian within the area where my camera is located and showcasing my face at the top of the frame.
There’s that repeated gesture of his hand and my hand, my mother coming through, and the trees in the background.
The surprise of photographing through a reflective surface is incredibly intriguing.
Here we have a photograph I made in, I believe, Brickell. I don’t know exactly if it’s Brickell. It’s that fancy area where there are lots of malls and shops.
I’m just isolating some subjects in that shaft of light in the downtown Miami area.
Light Is the Essence of Photography
Maybe a good topic to think about today is gesture and light, and the simplicity of using light in your photography.
Light is the essence of the medium itself.
Phos meaning light.
Graphe meaning writing or drawing.
We’re drawing with light with our photography. We’re writing with light.
By wielding light, you can find that there is infinite potential to photograph things simply due to the way the light itself interacts with surfaces.
Whether they’re discarded objects like bricks or a car moving by, light can transform the ordinary.
When this car came moving by, I only had a split fraction of a second to respond. I moved my camera quickly and photographed from the hip because I had that instinct, that pull to photograph this interesting subject.
It was an interesting car, but the way the light interacts with the vehicle elevates that normal vehicle to something a little bit more intriguing.
It adds mystery and ambiguity with the shadow area and exposed highlights.
Light itself can elevate a mundane scene to something more extraordinary.
Let Light Guide You
Whether I’m photographing buildings popping up along the Schuylkill River or sculptures throughout my city, I’m finding the use of light itself to sometimes be the thing that makes the photograph interesting.
We have scenes with lots of deep black areas in the shadows and simple elements exposed in the highlights.
There’s a person sleeping under a blanket on a bench in Rittenhouse Square, isolated from the rest of the park. The lighting adds drama and mystery to the frame.
Then the way light casts upon the gravestones and illuminates the cross creates a powerful spread from left to right, using this subject almost like a ghost and photographing this empty gravestone.
Light itself guides me.
Whether it’s a cloudy day or a sunny day, I’m still thinking about the way light interacts with things.
Really, I find light to be my primary interest a lot of the time when I’m out shooting.
It really is light itself.
I hope you can see that through these images.
Look at the way I’m looking at the sun peering beyond the clouds and the way that line casts towards the horizon.
Look at the way the light reflects off the river and onto this stick.
I’m simply looking at light.
Looking at Light and Life
Of course, I’m looking at life too.
I’m curious about gesture. I’m curious about how things occur on the street and the way people interact with public spaces.
But once again, I’m looking at light.
I’m looking at the clouds up above as a mystery to me.
By photographing the light and the clouds, I’m returning to that essence of the medium of drawing with light.
I’m looking up at the clouds and creating this sort of sketch of the clouds, separating that scene from the background.
I’m looking at the mannequin in the mall and photographing the eyes revealed in relationship to the silhouette.
I’m using the light and the shadow area to create that geometric shape of the figure moving by.
Intentional Composition, Unintentional Sequence
There are decisions that I make intentionally with the way that I compose things.
I’ll photograph through a reflective surface, through glass, using the reflected light from a window and waiting for a subject to walk by.
This can create a composition from foreground to background and add a sense of depth to the frame.
However, what’s not intentional is the way that sequencing works in these zines.
Everything is done chronologically.
That becomes intriguing when we have patterns and gestures emerging between two photographs that I never intentionally paired together.
The Power of Ambiguity
One photograph was made during the eclipse.
You can see the woman in the background actually has the glasses to view the eclipse.
The eclipse itself wasn’t interesting to me.
Photographing people with glasses looking at the thing doesn’t really intrigue me.
What intrigues me is ambiguity and making a frame that adds a little bit more mystery.
I was simply curious about this gesture.
But the surprise of this subject being activated in the top left-hand corner of the frame really makes the photograph.
That small detail of the face being revealed is something I couldn’t predict.
It’s something I couldn’t make happen intentionally.
Similarly, I was interested in this baby in another frame. I photographed the simple scene of the baby, but I couldn’t necessarily control that gesture occurring in the background.
I simply had the instinct to click the shutter at that moment.
Light and Gesture Are All You Need
Light and gesture are really all you need.
You don’t need much to start practicing your photography.
You don’t need to go anywhere exciting.
I can photograph the river and the clouds or a sculpture in my hometown and still find that I can create images with impact simply because light is the essence of the medium.
Think about light and how you can use light.
Think about gesture and how gesture elevates a scene from something mundane to something extraordinary.
You Really Can’t Make This Shit Up
Here we have the frame of the zine, the most impactful frame I made, of this boy playing with a toy gun against this advertisement upon the wall behind him.
You really can’t make this shit up.
This frame becomes interesting because of that combination of the advertisement and the reality of the hand.
The gun itself looks extremely realistic, and there’s a power to the emotion of the face smiling in relationship to the scary, violent nature of the gun and the small hand of the boy.
You really just can’t make this shit up.
You walk around, and life sometimes just gives you these surprises.
Making Photography Personal
Here we have a spread of me and my mother.
This is a self-portrait that I made, and you can see my hair cast upon the area with the shadow.
I didn’t see that when I made the photograph.
But when I look back at the photo and see the way the light interacts with my face and the shadow play, it gives me that extra level of surprise.
Once again, it’s using light.
I’m using light and simple gestures like me closing my eyes.
Then we have artificial light and my mother looking up towards that source of light.
I’m making very personal imagery of myself and my mother across the spread.
Engaging With Strangers
Here we have two photographs I made of strangers.
In both of these scenes, I interacted with the subject.
I went up to this man with his hook and said, “Yo, that’s a cool hook. Can I make a photo?”
I photographed that hook on his hand.
The areas in the shadows were crushed, and you can see it almost looks like his watch is floating.
Then I interacted with another man alongside the Penn’s Landing river.
It was his birthday.
I remember trying to make a frame of him in a more interesting way than just making a basic portrait.
I used the shadow area cast upon his face to create this look that almost makes him have an eye patch like a pirate.
It’s kind of interesting in relationship to the hook of the man on the left-hand side.
Again, these relationships weren’t planned.
They emerged through the sequence.
Returning to Nature
I love hiking through the woods here in Philadelphia.
We have so many green spaces.
I’m photographing the markings humans leave behind on the trees—etching hearts, etching their initials, and sort of etching their love within the trees.
Then I’m simply photographing the trees themselves.
But once again, I’m looking at the light and the way it interacts with everything.
Let the Photograph Speak for Itself
Here we have this man who was down on Market Street.
He had his hands behind his back. He had a Bible and some cigarettes, and he was asking to be arrested.
I don’t know what he did, but he was repenting and just lying there.
I have no idea why.
And I don’t know that it really matters.
Sometimes the photograph itself speaks for itself.
Then there’s this simple streak of the plane moving.
It was just a weird scene.
I can’t really even describe it with words.
Sometimes you don’t have to.
Light and Gesture
This is a pretty special Flux Issue for me.
And if there’s one thing to take away from it, it’s this:
Light and gesture. It’s all you really need.
Hit the tunnels of City Hall.
Look at the way you can interact with light, people, and gesture.
Create something out there.
That’s pretty much it for this zine.
If you want to create your own Flux Issue, click the link in the description for the Flux Generator and upload 36 pictures.
You can download and print out your own work or submit it directly to me, where I’ll potentially review the work here on this YouTube channel and do a flip-through commentary of your work.
Otherwise, if you want to join the Flux Discord community server, click the Join button on the YouTube channel and you’ll receive a link to join.
Photography Is an Act of Discovery: Follow the Light
What’s poppin’, people? It’s Dante.
Currently walking around this random alleyway here in Old City Philadelphia, and today I just wanted to share some thoughts about light and photography and how it’s completely transformed the way that I engage with life and my practice.
Right now, looking at this artificial source of light, I’m going to photograph these little doorbells.
Looking up at the beautiful blue sky, I see some reflected light upon that brick wall, some shadows that are cast with the harsh light.
And, you know, light ultimately is out of my control.
I find that to be a really powerful way to think about this thing because, ultimately, when I’m photographing something, I’m not necessarily interested in photographing and depicting life as a fact or as something that I’m so sure of.
Right now, I’m looking at the reflected light through this window and the way that it’s abstracting the buildings from behind.
And I’m finding that by chipping away at life and light, by photographing, I can discover new things.
Photography, for me, is an act of discovery.
Recognizing the fact that light is out of my control is empowering.
Photography Is a Physical Act
The only thing I’m in control of as a photographer is where I position my physical body in relationship to the subject, the background, and my instincts to click the shutter.
Photography is a physical act of you moving through the world.
I’m not in control of the weather conditions.
I’m not in control of the light.
I’m not in control of the people that I find.
When photographing, we wield the camera. The camera is our tool.
We have two eyes that are connected to our brain that allow us to see and perceive things, to contemplate, to think, and to rationalize a compositional decision.
But it’s the camera, it’s the lens, the apparatus that we’re photographing with, that’s interpreting light and life through the way the light emanates through the camera’s lens, touches the sensor, and renders the image.
And so this is my long way of explaining the fact that we have the ability to see something, to recognize something, to frame something by moving our body.
But it’s ultimately the camera that’s interpreting life in front of me.
It’s ultimately the camera that’s creating the image and interpreting life and light.
Discover What the Camera Sees
Using this sort of mindset shift—from photographing something as a matter of fact to treating the act of photographing as a way of discovering what the camera sees and how the camera is interpreting everything—has completely transformed the way that I think about photography.
Now, when I’m simply walking and wandering through these streets, I’m curious about how light and life will render upon my camera sensor.
I’m not interested in the way that I can find something interesting or make a photographic story or look for a character or a gesture or something to elevate my photograph.
I’m allowing my curiosity around the way that the camera is interpreting reality to guide me.
You can put me on any street, at any place, at any given time in the world, and I will infinitely find something to photograph because I’m very much aware of the simple fact that light is out of my control.
And what’s out of my control intrigues me.
The unknown as a photographer intrigues me.
The act of photographing is an act of chipping away at life and discovering something.
It’s not a way for me to conquer and say, this is what I want, and this is how I see the world.
It’s actually a way of me unlearning everything and discovering things each day, treating the act of making pictures as experimentation and tinkering, almost like a mad scientist.
Follow the Light
When photographing a surface, I’m really just curious about how the camera is going to interpret that surface, how the camera is going to interpret the way the light casts upon the world.
I’m not dependent on the subject itself.
I’m not dependent on the content itself.
The subject that I chase and what I’m curious about is light.
And so I simply follow the light, and I allow that to guide me and my photography.
Simplify the Process
The simplest technical thing that I can share with you that’s allowing me to achieve this shift in the way that I see the world has been adopting a simplified and streamlined workflow.
I’m shooting with the Ricoh.
I’m shooting with automatic settings.
I’m shooting with a small JPEG that has high contrast cranked to the max, baked into the camera.
There is no post-processing.
There is no tinkering with my camera settings.
All I’m left to do is respond to what’s in front of me.
By photographing this way, by giving myself this creative constraint and stripping away color and honing in on light and shadow in black and white, I see the world anew each day.
I see it from this fresh perspective each morning, like I’m just born again each day.
And I think this is such a powerful place to be because then I tap into the flow state of simply photographing everything.
I’m curious about the way that light and shadow are casting upon this brick wall and the ways in which the nuances and the details of what I’m photographing go beyond what my naked eye sees.
Seeing What the World Could Be
When I’m going to photograph something, of course I’m looking and recognizing that thing for what it is.
But when I’m photographing something and I reveal the image later on my iPad, I’m seeing what the world could be through the way the camera is interpreting reality.
And essentially, that has completely transformed the way that I think about everything in my life and photography generally.
I find that I can infinitely thrive in the mundane.
No matter how seemingly banal or boring things may be, I know that there are infinite possibilities because of the way the light casts upon the world and gives shape and form to everything around me.
You can’t make the same photograph twice.
You can infinitely return to photography each day by stripping down bare to the essence of the medium itself, which is light.
Welcome to Flux Archive Session Number 16, where we look at some of the photographs that I’ve made along my black-and-white photography journey.
Today we’re looking at photographs made from January 2024 to February 2024. We’re looking at around two months of photography throughout this particular zine.
The first spread is a photograph I made along the Benjamin Franklin Bridge returning to Philadelphia. We have this landscape entryway shot into the zine, looking at the buildings in the background and the skyline of Philadelphia.
Exploring the Unknown
One of the special things about the high-contrast workflow is the way that light renders.
The inner curiosity I have about this practice is simply the fact that when I make a photograph of something, I’m curious about what life will look like photographed.
I’m curious about the way that light will render upon my camera sensor and create an image.
One of the special things that occurs is this sort of vignette effect where the shadows are crushed and the highlights are exposed.
These effects and this way of making an image are things that I can’t really control, and I love the surprise that arises in the frames that I make through the high-contrast workflow.
Through this medium, I’m exploring the unknown.
I’m exploring what it looks like to photograph life with this sort of approach.
I’m not necessarily looking to describe life as fact, but what it could be through the abstraction that high-contrast black-and-white photography provides me.
Whether I’m photographing the gesture or photographing the texture, I’m simply curious about what life will look like photographed.
What will reality manifest to be in a photograph?
Light Is the Photographer’s Superpower
Whether I’m looking at the natural reflected light in the early morning and the skyscrapers up above, or underground in the tunnels of the subways looking at artificial light, I’m always observing how light transforms the world.
Here we have two photographs of two different sources of light: natural reflected light coming off a building on the left-hand side and an artificial single spotlight on the right.
I find light ultimately to be the superpower for the photographer.
The way that light interacts with surfaces and interacts with your camera can provide a surprise.
When photographing a television screen or projector in the Independence Visitor Center in Philadelphia, I held the exposure for over two seconds or so. I sat there and allowed all of the light to come from the TV screen, leaving us with this blank white screen.
Next to that is a moment I made of two twins that I found in the mall.
One thing about photography that I think is extremely important to highlight is that photography has more to do with your ability to engage with humanity and the spiritedness that you carry out there when you practice.
I had the audacity and courage to approach these people, ask for permission to make a photograph, and then, in between our conversation, a candid moment occurred naturally.
That’s how you can get photographs with intimacy.
It’s through engaging with people, being open about your practice, and then becoming a fly on the wall to capture these candid moments.
Photography as a Visual Diary
Here we have two family members, one of my great-aunts and my uncle, photographing through reflective surfaces in both frames.
There’s also a photograph I made of the dashboard of a vehicle and a photograph through, I believe, a napkin stand in Reading Terminal. You can actually see my camera there in the photograph.
I’m treating photography as a visual diary, really just exploring myself through the medium and my personal life.
I’m not necessarily dependent upon the content of the external world being interesting.
This kind of photography is dependent upon my own inner curiosities.
I’m photographing discarded objects. I’m photographing a blank list. I’m photographing these beautiful views that I enjoy in my everyday life along the Delaware.
When I come to this river and look out beyond the horizon, at the light and the water moving, this act of going to the same mundane space every day and photographing the same view reminds me of the infinite possibilities of photography.
You Cannot Make the Same Photograph Twice
You cannot make the same photograph twice.
The light is changing.
The world is moving.
People are out of our control.
There’s this infinite unknown and this infinitely repeatable practice of making pictures.
Photography is essentially endless and infinite.
The external world is always changing, but you too, on the individual level, are always changing.
Every time you step onto the streets, you’re a new person.
Things are new and fresh.
I find that the ultimate test is to walk the same mundane spaces for the rest of your life—or every single day for a year—but still find new ways to photograph things.
Whether it’s getting extremely close and photographing a mannequin, crushing the shadows, exposing for the highlights, and using macro mode, or looking up at the grand architecture and sculpture upon the facade of City Hall and photographing a wider scene.
Photographing in a variety of ways allows me to return to photography daily.
Getting close.
Standing afar.
Looking at textures on the walls.
This approach to photography is liberating.
Photograph everything and find the infinite potential of photography itself to be what inspires you.
I’m not dependent on the world giving me anything.
Photographing With Intention
Here we have some photographs I made during the snowfall.
There are footprints going down the Art Museum steps, and then we have this single subject walking towards the skyline of Philadelphia along the boardwalk of the Schuylkill River banks.
I was standing upon the South Street Bridge.
I actually sought out to make this exact image because I knew it was snowing, and I knew that if I stood upon that bridge and looked out towards the skyline, I would see the beautiful pattern of white snow cast upon the boardwalk.
I went out with intention to make this photograph of the snow on this particular day.
Exposing Intuitively
Here we have this beautiful photograph I made of a woman smoking.
The effect that I achieved with the reflecting light is actually coming from a mirror. There’s a mirror discarded in the garbage.
What I do with my camera is half-press and expose for the subject on the right-hand side, move my camera back to the full scene, and click the shutter.
What that does is overexpose the mirror.
Otherwise, when I’m photographing, the camera is going to take that reflected light into consideration and crush the other area into the shadows.
I work with fully automatic settings using AV mode and program mode, so the way that I expose becomes very intuitive.
I can either increase the exposure compensation or do that small trick where I half-press in the part of the scene that’s in the shadow area.
Bring the Camera Along for the Ride
Here we have fog emerging along the Schuylkill River while I’m simply going for my morning walk.
I’m not going out there to photograph.
I’m simply living my everyday life, bringing the camera along for the ride.
When I arrived at the top of the pavilion where I typically go, I ran into some tourists from Turkey. I remember talking and photographing. They saw my camera and were asking questions, and I continued photographing the lampposts, architecture, and fog on this beautiful day.
I’m using photography almost as a way for me to preserve and archive my city.
If you look at the construction outside of the tunnel of City Hall, everything is changing.
Everything is fleeting.
Preserving Space and Time
I think one of the most powerful ways to simply think about photography is that you’re documenting space and time as it changes.
By making a photograph today, 10 years from now, 100 years from now, these photographs can become impactful simply because you’re preserving space and time.
You’re preserving what it looks like today, in this year.
Here we have another photograph I made of City Hall.
One of the challenges that I like to give myself is returning to the same scene, returning to that same tower of City Hall, but finding new ways to make a photograph of that same tower.
That’s a really fun exercise that I give myself to challenge myself creatively.
I know there’s potential for a photograph of pigeons here all the time. They’re always there flying around.
I tried positioning myself in a new way by photographing the tower through the bus stop and allowing the texture of the bus stop and the flying birds to give me that surprise.
Relinquishing Control
There’s a self-portrait I made with shadows cast from a fence upon my face in relationship to shadow play occurring as a man gives some change to somebody on the street.
These kinds of moments you can’t really put together intentionally.
With the Flux system, these photographs are paired without intention.
They’re simply chronologically sequenced.
Sometimes I find the power of relinquishing control of sequencing to be surprising.
The interplay between the shadows in each of these frames intrigues me.
Isolating Subjects From Chaos
Here we have some frames that I made during the Chinese New Year celebration in Philadelphia.
It was a very active day.
However, because there’s so much chaos, it becomes difficult to organize a frame.
One of the things that I do when photographing is try to isolate a subject extremely closely.
Typically, I’m shooting in Snap Focus mode. But if I have a subject extremely close, I click the Fn button and alternate from Snap Focus to Single Point Focus.
I simply go to Single Point Focus, move my camera toward the subject, lock in my focus, and click the shutter.
That’s a simple technique that I use to photograph quickly and instinctively when something is extremely close to me.
I’m moving from Snap Focus to Single Point Focus and isolating subjects from the chaos of the streets.
Finding Abstraction Everywhere
Speaking of environments, I’m oftentimes in nature.
Here we have a photograph of a dead beehive in relationship to a flag raising outside of City Hall.
I have this inner biophilia, this sort of love for all natural things, whether plants or people.
I hope that reflects through my photography.
There are photographs of birds in flight and sunlight, and a photograph of a gesture of hands against the shadow area.
Then there are these Jewish men dancing during the Shabbat celebration on Friday.
Instead of only photographing the obvious moment of the dancing, I looked down at the puddle beneath their feet and used that to make something with more intrigue.
Using the reflective surface of the puddle, I made a more abstract image of the shadows, silhouettes, and forms of the men celebrating, with the gesture of him holding up the Torah, dancing and jumping.
You can see the feet.
And finally, we have that skull on top of a bike’s tire.
The Flux System
Every Flux Issue has a contact sheet in the back with the manifest document and a QR code to access the work online.
All of the work is open source, downloadable, and free.
You can also make your own Flux Issue.
At the top of the description, you’ll find the Flux Issue Generator. Upload 36 pictures. You can submit them directly to me or print out your own work yourself at home.
If I enjoy the work, I’ll review it here on this YouTube channel.
Otherwise, if you’d like to join the Flux Community Discord server, just click the Join button on the YouTube channel and you’ll find a link to access that community.
What’s poppin, people? It’s Dante, getting my morning started here in the Centennial Arboretum.
Just going for a very brief morning walk. And today I’m thinking about change — how to photograph change, why it matters, and what it means to me.
Finding Inspiration in Nature
Ultimately, I find that inspiration in nature is all about recognizing divine creation — the most pure form of art.
The flowers. The trees. The plants. All the things surrounding me in this beautiful, historic green park.
“God created all of this beauty, and we’re here to behold it.”
When I’m around trees, I’m not just perceiving beauty. I’m breathing it in. Fresh air sinks deep into my lungs — the breath of life.
Inspirare: To Breathe Into
The word inspiration comes from the Latin inspirare — to breathe into. God breathed the Spirit into you. Into the trees. Into the flowers. Into all living things.
And that breath? That’s the purest form of inspiration.
Nature Is in Constant Flux
Nature is change. Look at these trees. They’ve been competing, stretching their limbs to the sky, roots sinking into the earth.
Some of these giants have been here a century, maybe more.
“The branches echo the shapes of arteries and veins within my lungs.”
There’s something wild about how the forms of trees, our lungs, even the gut and brain — they all resemble one another. And this connection between mind and gut? It’s critical.
Change in the Body
Through fasting, I enter autophagy. Dead cells clear out. Muscles tear and rebuild as I lift. Each day, I evolve.
“Through change, I find happiness.”
Change isn’t just inside me. It’s all around me.
Drawing with Light
When I photograph, I evoke change.
I’ve returned to the essence of photography: Light.
Fos = light
Grafe = writing or drawing
I’m literally drawing with light.
“The way light casts on surfaces will never be the same twice.”
Like a river, always flowing. I too am flowing — snapshotting my way through life. Always carrying the camera, letting it ride with me. It becomes a visual diary.
Time Stops When You’re Walking
When I’m out walking, moving…
“I exist outside the passage of time.”
Not past. Not future. Just now.
I might not live forever — but I can make a photograph.
A Thought Experiment: The Mortal Soul
If you assume the soul dies with the body — Then life becomes sacred. You champion your everyday with vitality:
Eat good meat
Breathe deeply
Walk upright
Sleep well
Create endlessly
Through photographing from the gut — from intuition — Maybe you can reflect your soul in the image.
Each Morning Is a Mini-Birth
I treat each morning like a mini-birth. Each night, a mini-death.
This keeps me sharp. Focused.
Every day is a finite timeline. Each click of the shutter is an affirmation of life.
“We say yes to life with each click of the shutter.”
Childhood Curiosity and Courage
When I was a little boy in the Wissahickon:
I built teepees out of sticks
Sharpened spears
Climbed trees
Explored the unknown
Built stone bridges over broken streams
Curiosity and courage. That’s what photography should be about.
Photography Has Nothing to Do with Photography
“Photography has everything to do with how you engage with humanity on the front lines of life.”
Wake up like a child again. Exuberant. Playful.
A child plays voluntarily. But as we age, we’re conditioned to dread the alarm clock.
But with a camera in hand? We return to play. We photograph for the sake of it.
The Autotelic Photographer
We make photos not for results or likes or recognition. We do it because we love it.
Detached from outcome
Detached from validation
Driven by curiosity
This is how we evolve. How we grow. How we return to day one.
Seeing Beyond the Veil
When I crank my Ricoh GR screen to high contrast B&W, I feel like I’ve got x-ray vision.
I see beyond the veil.
Want to Learn My Process?
If you’re curious, I created a full slideshow presentation. On my Start Here page at dantesisifo.com, you’ll find:
An hour and 20 minute Ricoh GR street photography guide
Complete setup, philosophy, technique, and mindset
A downloadable PDF you can keep on your phone
I encourage you to check it out.
Become a Vessel
“We are no longer chasing our next best photo. Our next photo is our best photo — because we are embracing change.”
We don’t care about having a “style.” We don’t even care if people recognize the photo as ours.
We are vessels.
Empty yourself.
Fast
Let go
Photograph with your gut
Through intuition, we reflect the truest version of ourselves in the images we make.
Final Thought
This isn’t a technique. It’s a way of being.
Photography becomes a mirror for life. A chance to affirm it. And maybe — just maybe — something deeper can live on in our work.
So yeah. Embrace change. Embrace flux. Set your body in motion and see what you find.
“The future photographer no longer cares about recognition. We simply become a vessel for the medium.”
Today I’m here in Center City, Philadelphia, giving myself the ultimate challenge of walking one alleyway, making 6 photographs in just under 6 minutes, and producing a full DIY photography zine at home using just one 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper.
I’m using the Ricoh GR IIIx, shooting small JPEG files with high-contrast black and white cranked to the max.
With this extremely fast and simplified workflow, I can photograph instinctively and intuitively without thinking.
The goal of photography is to just start doing, to just start producing, and to just start shooting.
Find Beauty in the Mundane
When I’m out here photographing these textures and different things that I find upon my little walks, I’m not thinking.
I’m not wondering what these photographs mean.
I’m not trying to tell some sort of grand story.
I’m merely following my own inner curiosity and allowing that to guide me.
On certain days, I walk these very mundane lanes throughout Philadelphia, and I find beauty in the mundane.
I find beauty in all of these seemingly ugly or imperfect places, like alleyways here in the city.
If you look closely, you can start to find treasure.
The beauty of photographing with a compact camera like the Ricoh is the fact that I can get extremely close.
When I’m photographing textures, I don’t have to raise the camera to my eye. I can simply hold the camera freely in front of me, maybe vertically, and quickly make a picture.
This is extremely important for my particular workflow because I want to be able to photograph in different kinds of ways, discovering textures, shapes, forms, and things that perhaps in the past I never would have photographed.
Limitation Creates Freedom
I think the limitation of using a small point-and-shoot camera, automatic settings, and small JPEG files has essentially opened up new possibilities for the way that I engage with my photography.
The limitations that I impose upon myself have become one of the things that make me extremely creatively free.
Ever since embarking on this journey of shooting in black and white, I’ve essentially found infinite ways to return to photography.
With these particular photographs, I’m not trying to say anything.
I’m simply following my visual sensitivities.
I’m drawn to the textures, the shapes, the forms, and the simple way that light interacts upon surfaces.
I don’t need to know why something interests me.
I simply respond.
6 Photographs. 6 Minutes. 1 Block.
After walking around this one alleyway in Center City, Philadelphia, I had already made 5 photographs in about 4 minutes.
I even had a fun interaction with somebody along the way and made a portrait.
And so I continued walking, made my final photograph, and completed the challenge.
One block.
6 photographs.
6 minutes.
That’s it.
Now it’s time to go home, print the work, and create the DIY zine.
From the Street to the Printed Page
Back home, I used my Flux Mini Zine Generator to turn these 6 photographs into a physical photography zine.
The entire zine is made using just one sheet of 8.5 by 11 paper.
Nothing fancy.
Just regular computer paper from Staples and a simple Brother monochrome laser printer.
With the Flux Mini Zine Generator, you can upload 6 photographs directly from your iPhone, iPad, or computer.
The photographs automatically sort chronologically, although you can rearrange the sequence however you’d like.
You can add your own title, name, issue number, location, and even a QR code on the back linking to your website.
Once you’ve arranged everything, simply export the file, print it, fold it, and make one cut down the middle.
And that’s it.
You have a physical photography zine.
I’m certainly no master of origami, and my folding wasn’t perfect.
But that’s the point.
It doesn’t have to be perfect.
It doesn’t have to be serious.
The goal is simply to get it done.
To have something physical from your walk.
Just Start Making
I think we can get so caught up in the idea of what photography should or shouldn’t be.
We think we need to travel somewhere interesting, photograph something extraordinary, or create some grand story.
But what if we simply embraced the mundane?
What if we walked one block, followed our curiosity, made 6 photographs, and printed them?
What if we stopped worrying about what our photographs mean and simply started producing?
For me, photography is about discovery.
It’s about responding to the world intuitively and instinctually, following my curiosity, and finding beauty in places that perhaps I would have otherwise overlooked.
And through the simple act of printing these photographs, I now have something tangible from this fleeting moment in time.
One alleyway.
One block.
6 minutes.
6 photographs.
One sheet of paper.
One zine.
Don’t overthink it.
Just start shooting.
Just start producing.
Just start doing.
Make Your Own Zine
If you’d like to make your own photography zine, you can use my Flux Mini Zine Generator to upload 6 photographs and turn them into a printable zine using just one sheet of paper.
And if you’d like to join the community, come hang out in the Flux Discord server, where we share work and discuss photography.
Yo, what’s poppin’, people? It’s Dante, currently walking down JFK Boulevard. Who killed Kennedy?
And yeah, today I’m just thinking about the philosophy of photography and my personal journey of discovering novelty in the mundane nature of life, and why I find that the orientation of my practice is towards fulfilling personal meaning and purpose in the mundane nature of life.
The Camera Is an Excuse to Say Yes to Life
What that looks like is simply treating the camera as an excuse for me to stay engaged with the world around me—for me to say yes to life and my surroundings.
I’m not necessarily looking for an outcome, looking to impress somebody, or make something that’s impactful on a viewer’s eyes.
But genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, I can express to you that the way I’m engaging with the medium these days is simply as a way for me to orient myself towards finding joy, finding love, and finding myself immersed in life.
The camera becomes this excuse for me to see something new, to go out there and explore, to get close to people, and to engage with my senses.
The sights, the sounds, the smells of the streets. The sort of visceral experience of being physically engaged with life.
What this provides me is this ability to tap into the eternal now, outside of the passage of time where we have these distractions of the past and the future, which cause anxiety and this sort of feeling of uneasiness.
Photography becomes a way for me to essentially not take life so seriously and find myself in this playful, childlike state.
Photography as Play
You can see this frame I just made of myself in the mirror. It’s kind of funny.
I’m just playfully experiencing life through the medium, and I feel like the way it puts me in this state of play is the ultimate reason why I practice photography.
Because I believe that with life, as we evolve and get older and go through our lives, things can become a chore or a burden or feel like work.
To have something like this that puts you in this playful spirit, this childlike way of looking at life with curiosity—to me, this is a life worth living.
And I think with street photography specifically, it requires courage. It requires your heart. It requires your spiritedness to go out there and explore the world and get close to humanity.
The Ethics of Street Photography
The ethics behind this thing are interesting.
It’s like, am I permitted to photograph tragedy?
I don’t know.
I think that if you see something interesting, if you see something that compels you to make the photograph, whether the thing itself is sad or glad or happy, or something that will enrage a viewer or make them mad, if you have that empathy in your heart where you’re photographing from a pure state of curiosity about everything and what you see in your city, what you see in your town, then I think that it’s okay to photograph whether or not the subject is smiling or has a frown.
When I look at these childlike drawings on the floor, these to me are some of the purest forms of art.
I think that if you’re caught up in your mind and you’re thinking too much about whether or not something is ethical, whether or not something is good in terms of the quality of the photography, or the subject that you’re photographing, these judgments can cloud your ability to cultivate your authentic expression.
I allow myself to photograph freely and loosely without really thinking.
The portrait I just made of that sleeping man upon that little ledge there is pretty impactful.
There’s a sort of closeness to the composition that I made despite me not interacting with the human or the scene. I cropped into 50mm so that I could emphasize the face and the gestures of this man.
Yes, it’s a sleeping man who seemed to be distressed to some capacity. He seemed to have an unwell sort of appearance. There’s something in his eyes that clearly looked like he was tired.
I’m not sure of his story.
But I think that through photography, I can get closer to humanity, uplift these stories, and champion the world around me through engaging deeply with everything.
Whether I find myself playfully engaging with childlike wonder, photographing in a forest, or trotting along these streets and stomping through the alleyways of Philly, I find that there is something out there worth photographing.
It just requires this sense of openness, eagerness, and curiosity.
Everything Around Me Is Inspiring
Everything around me is inspiring.
Looking up at the towers, looking up at City Hall. There’s the photo I made of the snake in City Hall on my shirt.
Looking at the grit, the grime, the trash, the people sleeping, the people moving, the businessmen, the workers on the street cleaning.
There’s something about the quality of the light that’s intriguing.
Look at this light.
Sometimes just the way the reflected light abstracts and creates shapes is intriguing.
The shapes that form upon this street vendor’s cart here, and the way that the light is reflected—it creates these abstract shapes and forms that I’m also intrigued by.
As much as I’m curious about humanity, what intrigues me is this surprise and serendipity that arises through the way in which light and life render upon my camera sensor.
Going Beyond Reality
When I’m photographing, I’m not only interested in humanity and reality as it is, but what it could be through my own subjective and personal interpretation of the world.
I find that through crushing the shadows, exposing for the highlights, and adopting a high-contrast black-and-white workflow, I’m able to much more easily tap into that flow of letting go of what I know.
So that way, when I photograph something, I’m actually receiving a surprise, quite literally, due to the fact that I’m abstracting the world through black-and-white photography.
That surprise is what’s keeping me curious to continue practicing, to continue looking, to continue photographing.
I’m not looking at life as it is, but what it could be.
Through abstracting the world through black-and-white photography, I find infinite possibility.
I find infinite wonder and joy for life because of it.
This is a big part of my philosophy: going beyond reality, almost looking beyond the veil, beyond the ordinary.
And then everything is interesting.
I become inspired much more easily.
Remove the Friction
By removing all of this friction from the practice—from these decisions of color versus black and white, whether or not to go left or right, whether or not I use this camera or that lens—using automatic mode and having everything baked into the camera in terms of post-processing, I can enter the flow state of simply photographing, noticing, and being present in the moment.
This to me is why I love photography.
It brings me to the moment.
By stripping away all of the superfluous technical aspects of the practice and putting this camera that is compact, that fits in my pocket, on my wrist, and just always having it with me, I find this sort of superpower in my life where every day is rich with meaning.
Because now I’m open.
I’m receptive.
I’m cultivating my instincts.
I’m responding.
I’m just sort of living and being present.
And yeah, that to me is why I love photography.
Ultimately, I think those are my thoughts about this thing.
I’m gonna keep trotting around the city here, skipping around barefoot in Center City.
Shout out to Philadelphia, the birthplace of America.
What’s poppin’, people? It’s Dante, currently walking around Penn’s Landing here in Philadelphia.
Today I just wanted to talk about photography, treating photography as a visual diary, and essentially why the medium inspires me daily and why I continue photographing.
Photography as a Way to Affirm Life
Ultimately, I photograph as a way for me to affirm my life.
It provides my life with this deep sense of purpose and meaning, where every fleeting moment, every little intricate detail around me is fascinating and interesting again.
Almost like I’m reborn each day again.
And so the ultimate reason why I love photography is because it keeps me engaged with reality and curious about things.
When I’m photographing things, I’m honestly just merely curious about what it will look like photographed.
The act of making a photograph is an act of discovery, of learning and growing each and every day.
I never want to feel like I’ve mastered photography or I’ve learned everything.
The way that I engage with the medium is through openness and this sort of receptivity to the sights, sounds, and smells of the street—and that curiosity guides me and moves my feet.
Ultimately, the photograph becomes a reflection of my courage, of my heart.
Photography Is an Embodied Act
In order to photograph, it requires you to be an embodied reality.
It requires you to take risks, to cross the street, to go out into the street and engage with people, to photograph.
It’s a very physical, embodied act.
I practice photography because it keeps me out here in the world and keeps me engaged with every fleeting moment.
And I think that’s a really powerful reason to continue photographing despite the outcome of the images I’m making.
I’m simply fulfilling my goal within itself of increasing my curiosity, of continuously practicing and clicking the shutter each day.
When I’m clicking the shutter at something, I’m merely saying yes to life.
I’m waking up in the morning from this enthusiastic blank slate where I’m trying to learn again each day.
I’m trying to almost get into this period of meditation when I’m photographing, where I slow down my physical body and remain open to everything around me.
That’s the period where I find fulfillment and joy in life.
Detach From the Outcome
I like to simply go with the flow.
I enjoy photographing from this sort of pure blank slate state, and in order to achieve that, I need to detach from the outcome of the images and any preconceived idea of what kind of images I should be making.
Frankly, when I photograph, I don’t have a goal in terms of a gallery show.
I don’t have a goal in terms of producing a book.
I don’t think about the output.
I’m really just immersing myself in what’s around me and responding intuitively and instinctually to everything that triggers me.
That could be the smallest thing—a texture or crack beneath my feet, the tall buildings that are looming, the people and the movement.
There are so many different things I can photograph in my day.
So I remain open to photographing everything.
I don’t really limit myself to what it is that I’m seeking to achieve or photograph, or confine myself to too many parameters or boxes.
Photography as a Daily Record
When I’m making pictures, it’s merely a photographic diary of my day.
That means I’m creating a daily record of how I experience space and time throughout my life.
I’m not looking or seeking or striving or hunting.
I’m simply living my everyday life, bringing my camera for the ride, and photographing whatever I find.
From that state of being, where photography is integrated within my everyday life, it becomes effortless and easy.
And I find that sort of place to be where my instincts can really shine.
When the practice is frictionless, I can really hone in on my intuition, my instincts, and what I gravitate towards photographically, purely and authentically.
A Frictionless Photography Workflow
Ultimately, I go through the work, cull it, and sequence it chronologically in my own self-published zines that I produce at home using my own LaserJet printer.
I have a system on my website where you can create a 36-sequence chronological zine that showcases the photography timestamped and sequenced through space and time without any funny business.
Basically, you just upload and drag and drop 36 pictures, and it will automatically generate a 44-page zine with a contact sheet.
You can even submit it directly to me, and I can print it out and review it on this YouTube channel.
It’s the system I’ve developed to create the output of my work where I have no friction from the ground up.
I’m simply shooting with a small, compact Ricoh GR camera.
I use the automatic settings.
I use a small JPEG with high-contrast black and white cranked to the max.
No post-processing needed.
I simply cull through my photos on my iPad Pro or my iPhone.
Then, when I go home, I back them up, upload them to my generator, print the work out, enjoy it, and move on.
36 Frames of Everyday Life
I create a daily record of my day through 36 frames.
I think that act of removing friction—from post-processing to sequencing to any software involved with photography—can really help you stay engaged with reality and the medium, observing, living, and experiencing life.
Because that’s what this is all about for me.
It’s the physical act of staying engaged with reality.
Treating photography as a visual diary allows me to stay perpetually moving and never stagnant.
So yeah, those are my thoughts of the day.
Just wanted to share some ideas with you about how I engage with photography.
I’m just gonna continue walking and enjoy the rest of my day.
Thank you for watching, and I’ll see you in the next video.
A God wink is a seemingly small coincidence or unexpected event that feels like a personal sign from God.
It’s the feeling that something happened at exactly the right moment, almost as though God were quietly reminding you:
“I’m here. I see you. Trust Me.”
Examples of God winks
You pray about something, and later someone unexpectedly says exactly what you needed to hear.
You meet someone at an unlikely moment who profoundly changes your life.
A door closes, only for another opportunity to appear.
You encounter a Bible verse that speaks directly to something you’re experiencing.
A series of coincidences seems too meaningful to ignore.
Is a God wink biblical?
The phrase itself isn’t biblical, but the underlying idea relates to divine providence—the belief that God actively sustains and guides creation.
Proverbs 3:5–6 teaches us to trust in the Lord rather than relying entirely on our own understanding.
From a Catholic perspective, it’s important to distinguish between recognizing God’s providence and interpreting every coincidence as a supernatural message.
A God wink is not necessarily proof that God is communicating something specific. It can simply be an invitation to gratitude, prayer, and trust.
The beautiful idea behind a God wink is that what appears accidental to us might have meaning within God’s providence.
