There are days when I pace the streets endlessly, Leica in hand, chasing fleeting moments as they unfold in the urban theater. But on this particular afternoon, I chose stillness over motion.
I found myself beneath a striking architectural oculus in London – an oval cut-out in a ceiling that perfectly framed the sky – and I decided to slow things right down. Rather than hunting, I would fish.
I saw potential in that frame: if a bird, a plane, even a drifting cloud moved into just the right position, I knew it would make the image. So I set up, locked my exposure at 1/4000 sec, f/8, ISO400, and waited.
For an hour and ten minutes, I stood there with my Leica M-E and 50mm Summilux-M lens poised, watching the light shift, and the clouds creep.
I must have looked ridiculous to passers-by – camera aimed upward, entirely transfixed by what, to them, was just an empty patch of sky. I was chasing a perfect moment: the hope that something, anything, would drift into the bullseye of that geometric void.
It never quite happened. Nothing hit dead center. But I did get something – this solitary seagull gliding lazily through the top third of the frame, its wings cutting across the bright white sky like ink.
Not what I envisioned, but beautiful in its own right. And with it came a kind of quiet satisfaction. The image isn't the one I planned, but it’s the one I earned through patience – and that makes it a keeper. It tells its own story, one I couldn't have scripted even if I’d tried.
That pause, that deliberate stillness, shifted something in my approach. Instead of charging headlong through city streets, I began noticing scenes I might normally walk past - compositions already halfway formed, waiting only for a subject to complete them.
I spent the rest of the day doing just that: finding frames and letting the world bring something to them. A new method for me, and one I’ll definitely return to. There’s something to be said for just standing still and watching the world go by…
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