There are moments when something catches my attention just long enough for me to think it might be worth photographing. Not always dramatically, and not always obviously. Sometimes it’s just a shift in colour, or a shape that doesn’t quite belong where it is. Other times it’s a brief sense that something has aligned, even if I can’t immediately say why.
The problem is that I don’t always act on that first signal. I keep moving — walking, driving, travelling through a place with my attention split between where I am going and what I might see along the way. The thought that something might be worth photographing often arrives before I’ve properly registered it.
When travelling, the world often becomes a series of fragments appearing and dissolving without warning — a field with light seen through a car window, a side street when walking through a city, or a street pattern glimpsed from a high-rise building. Each one registers only as a possibility before I’ve already moved on.
That early recognition is easy to dismiss. It rarely arrives with certainty, more often a hesitation or a half-thought that something might be there.
One of the clearest examples came from the top of the Montparnasse Tower in Paris. The view is as wide and direct as you would expect. The Eiffel Tower sits clearly in frame, and the city spreads in every direction. It should be an easy place to photograph, but it didn’t feel that way on my visit.
The viewing areas were crowded, people pressing against the glass to secure space. I waited for a while, letting the movement settle. Then it began to rain, making shooting through the glass more difficult.
We were just about to leave when I turned and noticed something I had been overlooking. The visitors themselves, still shifting and searching for their place at the view, had become more interesting than the city beyond them. The earlier sense that something was there resolved into clarity: there was a photograph here.
It became one of the strongest images from the trip: “Tourists on the Tower”.
And it wasn’t the view I had come for.
Tourists on the Tower
Paris, Île-de-France, France
A more recent example came while driving through the mountains near Shkodër in Albania. We were following a road through a valley when the landscape opened out — lush vegetation, patchwork fields, and light breaking across the slopes that suggested something worth paying attention to, even briefly.
I noticed it, but only in passing. At first I didn’t act on it. It remained an impression rather than a decision.
But as we drove on, that impression stayed with me — a sense I had seen something worth stopping for. Not a finished image, just the outline of one, still forming.
We ended up turning back, and it became my favourite photograph from that day. Not because it was planned, but because I had learned to trust that hesitation — the moment where something begins to register before I can fully explain why, and before I decide whether to follow it.
Omaraj
Albania
What links these moments is not speed or instinct alone, but sensitivity to that early signal. A kind of awareness that develops over time, where certain details begin to stand out before I have fully decided to notice them — and the decision to act on them, or not.
At first, I didn’t trust that feeling. I would let it pass, assuming that anything important would announce itself more clearly. But that isn’t always true. Sometimes the most interesting images begin as something uncertain, almost dismissible. Sometimes I move on before I’ve had time to recognise what I’ve just seen.
Sometimes I ignore that signal. But I ignore it less often than I used to.
And every now and then, I act on it in time and turn back.