What I learned about creativity from a 9-to-5 that takes you places — and the hours you have to fight to keep.
There's a version of your week that belongs to someone else. The meetings, the deadlines, the Teams pings that arrive before you've had your first coffee. Office hours. You know exactly what they are because you live inside them Monday through Friday, sometimes longer. They're not bad. They pay the bills and pay for the gear. They give structure to days that would otherwise dissolve. But they are not yours.
Then there are the other hours.
The 5am wake-up in a hotel in Mexico City, three floors above a street that's just starting to stir, before the work day begins at nine. The production in Prague that turns into two hours of walking before a single meeting happens or even before a single word is said. The Saturday morning back home when the light does something specific to the street outside and you're already reaching for the camera. These are Street Hours. And for the past few years, they've been the some of most important parts of my week.
Here's the thing I didn't expect: the 9-to-5 gave them to me. Not intentionally, not as a perk. But work has taken me to places I wouldn't have gone on my own, and left me with a few free hours in cities I barely know. The only choice I had was whether to sleep through them or go find out what the street looked like before the rest of the world woke up.
I want to be clear about something: I'm not a professional photographer. I have a full-time job and photography is what I do when the work day ends, or before it begins, or in the gap between a Tuesday dinner and a Wednesday morning call.
I do carry some serious gear, tho. Today I shoot with a Leica Q3 43 and a Sony A7RV and that is something that may require a quick explanation. The gap between serious gear and a hobbyist soul isn't a contradiction. it’s who I am. I like gear, I’m a Geek.
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Being a non-professional means I overthink things. I do it constantly, and I do it on my professional life as well, but I've made peace with it. I stand on a corner in Prague at 5:30am genuinely unsure which lens to reach for. I start an edit and chase it down three different directions before landing somewhere. I look at a finished image and wonder if the crop is right, if the shadows are too heavy, if what I felt in the moment actually made it into the final product.
None of that is a problem to be fixed. That's what it sounds like when someone cares about something they haven't mastered or don’t feel like they need to master. And I think there are a lot of people out there doing exactly the same thing, who never hear that described out loud because most photography content is built around people who apparently have all the answers.
This isn't that. I'm figuring it out as I go, and I'd rather share the uncertainty than perform a confidence I don't have.
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When you only have a few hours a week to make photographs, something clarifying happens anyway. You stop waiting for the perfect conditions. The urgency is built in. When you're in an unfamiliar city and the light is changing and the workday starts in three hours, you stop deliberating and you start moving. The constraint does something to you that no amount of free time ever managed to replicate.
What I didn't expect was that it would also change how I see. When you're shooting under that kind of quiet pressure, you pay attention differently. You're not documenting the street. You're reading it. Looking for the thing that won't be there in ten minutes. That's the real Street Hours practice. Not the gear, not the editing workflow. The act of showing up to a block of time you carved out and deciding to see.
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There are weeks when I almost don't go out. The couch is comfortable. The week was long, but when I do go, I come back different every time. Not better, necessarily. Just clearer. Photography has become a counterweight to everything else, a way of being present in a world that spends most of its time pulling your attention in many different directions. When I'm shooting, I'm not thinking about the Monday morning meeting. I'm looking at a person about to walk through the light. I'm there.
This site is built around that idea. Photography as a practice, not a career. As a way of paying attention. And if you're someone who also overthinks the gear choice, loses an hour chasing an edit that won't cooperate, or sets an alarm for 5am in a city you barely know just to see what the street looks like before breakfast, then I think you're going to feel at home here.
That conversation is kind of the whole point.