My Favorite Tool Isn’t a Camera
My Favorite Tool Isn’t a Camera
Photography has always had a gear problem. The culture around it has convinced people that the path to better work runs through a purchase. A new body. A faster lens. The bag everyone's carrying this season. I've watched young photographers drive themselves into serious debt chasing that idea, and it never pays off the way they hope. There's nothing you can buy that someone else can't also buy. Gear doesn't set work apart. (I save my gear lust for stereo equipment and new records)
Before I open my camera bag, before I check a forecast, my favorite tool is already in use. A pair of Traveler's Notebooks, and between them, five notebooks that hold most of the work I do before anything gets photographed.
If you haven't encountered one, a Traveler's Notebook is a slim leather cover made by the Japanese brand Traveler's Company. It holds multiple small notebooks inside a single spine using elastic bands. The notebooks are refillable and interchangeable. You build the system around what you need rather than buying into a predetermined idea of what a notebook should contain. The standard size is tall and narrow, roughly half the width of an A4 notebook. It fits in a jacket pocket and goes everywhere.
Mine are both that size. One is a rich brown and relatively new. The other is olive green and has been with me long enough to show it. The leather has darkened and softened at the corners, and it is creased where it folds. It looks old and beat up, and I love it. On the closure, an elastic hangs a small yosegi charm, a piece of traditional Japanese woodwork, which my wife brought back from Tokyo. It's the first thing my hand finds when I reach for it.
Most photographers I know lead with the camera bag when they talk about what they carry. I think about it differently. The most interesting things in my kit have nothing to do with photography. They don't capture light or store images. What they do is hold the thinking that happens before any of that starts.
The olive green cover holds two notebooks. The brainstorming notebook is where projects begin. Visual ideas, directional thinking, concept queues, and questions I need to work through before I show up anywhere with a camera. By the time I'm on location, that thinking is already behind me. The camera is the last step in a process that starts on paper. The debrief journal lives alongside it. After every project, I write down what worked and what didn't. It came from a suggestion by the amazing photographer Chris Buck. It's not comfortable to read back through. That's the point. The distance between what I set out to make and what I actually made is where the work improves, and you can't close that distance without looking at it.
The brown cover holds a commonplace book, a personal journal, and a habit tracker. The commonplace book is an old idea, a place to collect things that interest you, writing, images, references, fragments that don't have a home yet but feel worth keeping. Mine pulls from everything, not just photography. It's where outside influences live while I digest them. The personal journal and habit tracker sit alongside it because that arrangement has always made more sense to me than keeping those things separate. A photographer's personal life and creative practice affect each other, whether or not you acknowledge it.
None of this operates outside a client's brief. It operates inside it. Most of the work I take on comes with defined parameters, a brand's visual language, a campaign with specific needs, or an editorial assignment with clear direction. The notebook is where I work out how to do more within those parameters, not around them. How to find visual interest inside the constraints. How to get to what a brief is actually asking for and push from there.
The prep that happens before I pick up a camera is what makes the work on set feel considered. That's true whether I have two hours or two weeks.
When someone hires me, they're not hiring a camera. What they're getting is everything that happened before I picked one up. That process lives inside of these two worn leather covers.