The Evening Class

I started attending an evening class in photography about eight months ago. The class meets once a week in a studio attached to a community arts centre.

I had taken photographs for years on my phone and occasionally on a proper camera. But I had never understood what I was doing technically. I worked entirely by instinct and sometimes luck.

The teacher, a professional photographer in his forties, started us with the fundamentals: aperture, shutter speed, ISO. The technical vocabulary, once unfamiliar, became comprehensible within a few weeks.

But the most interesting lessons were not technical. They were about looking. About noticing what the light is actually doing, not what you assume it is doing. About patience: waiting for the right moment rather than pressing the button the moment you raise the camera.

My photographs are better now. More importantly, I look at the world differently. Walking to work, I notice things I would have passed without registering.

That widening of attention was not what I signed up for. It has turned out to be the most valuable thing I have gained.