Why I still carry a camera

Most of what I do all day produces something that either compiles or doesn't, passes the test suite or doesn't, matches the spec or doesn't. Photography is the one habit I've kept that has none of that. There's no green checkmark for a good photo.

I started carrying a camera properly during my HND years in Kathmandu — cheap, secondhand, mostly used to document street food stalls and half-finished side projects. It's stayed a habit since, through the move to the UK, through an MSc that eats most weekends.

What it's actually for

Not Instagram, not a portfolio page, not "content." The honest reason is closer to: writing code all day trains a very specific kind of attention — precise, literal, outcome-focused — and it's useful to spend some hours a week paying attention to something where being precise doesn't matter and the outcome is just did I notice something worth looking at.

A few things I've noticed line up better than I expected:

• Composing a shot and structuring a function scratch a similar itch — deciding what's in frame and what isn't.
• Both get better with the same unglamorous mechanism: doing it badly, a lot, before doing it well occasionally.
• Neither improves by reading about it more than doing it.

The unfinished part

I have a few thousand unedited photos and no real system for going through them, which is a bit rich coming from someone who'll happily write a data pipeline for anything else. That's next, probably. Or it isn't, and the pile just grows, and that's fine too — not everything needs a pipeline.