The Quiet Between Shifts

Out here, time behaves differently.

There are days I forget what day it is, and honestly, it doesn’t feel like a loss. The routines I used to hold onto like scaffolding—gone. There’s no morning commute. No rush. No plans etched in calendars. Just the slow rhythm of weather, of light shifting across the hills, of birds arriving and leaving with no explanation needed.

Photography has become quieter too.

Not in the way I expected. I thought being surrounded by beauty would mean endless photos—sunrises, misty trees, dramatic skies. And yes, those things exist. They’re here in abundance. But after a while, you stop pointing your camera at the obvious. You stop needing the grand, the spectacular.

Instead, you start paying attention to the in-between moments.

The half-washed mug left on the windowsill. A fence post leaning like it’s tired of standing straight. The way the sky doesn’t ask for attention, but still gives you something every time you look up.

I’ve stopped chasing shots. Now I wait, or I don’t. I walk a bit, breathe a bit. Sometimes the camera stays in my pocket. Sometimes I take a photo that means nothing to anyone else, but feels like a diary entry for a version of myself I haven’t met yet.

That’s the thing about this kind of solitude—it strips away the noise. You’re left with your eye, your instinct, and a lot of space to question what you're even trying to say.

And I think that’s good.

Because when everything slows down, your attention sharpens. The quiet gets louder. You start to notice beauty in things that aren’t trying to be beautiful. You stop asking for answers and just start listening.

Out here, the story doesn’t scream. It whispers. And you have to be still enough to hear it.

And yet—getting to that moment, that stillness, is rare. Because the truth is, I’m working. A lot.

I’m a chef by trade. Photography lives in my chest, but the kitchen pays the rent. The hours are brutal—60, sometimes 70 a week. My hands smell of garlic more than film. My feet ache more than my shutter finger. And the days off? They're not really days off. They’re catch-up days. Laundry. Cleaning. Food shopping. Trying to remember to eat like a person. Trying to feel like one.

By the time I have a moment to breathe, the light has faded and the camera hasn’t moved from the shelf. And that breaks my heart in a quiet, constant way.

Because there’s a kind of grief in loving something you don’t have time to touch.

The irony is, the work that feeds me also starves me creatively. The very thing that keeps the lights on leaves me too drained to chase the light. And still—I try. Even when it’s just with my eyes. Even when the camera stays in the bag.

Because out here, even if I can’t always make photographs, I can still feel them. I can still notice the way the fog hangs low over the hills like a secret. The way light falls across a chopping board at the end of service. The stories are still there. I just have to hold onto them until I have time to tell them.

Maybe that’s the phase I’m in. The collecting phase. The slow burn. The years where I build a mental darkroom full of half-seen images and unrealised ideas. Maybe not every season is made for creating. Some are just for surviving, and saving beauty in your back pocket for later.

And even if I can't always pick up the camera, I know this much: I’ll never stop looking.

And still—I love being a chef. I love the alchemy of it. The heat, the rhythm, the quiet ballet behind the chaos. There’s beauty in feeding people, in building something from your hands that disappears the moment it’s tasted. But photography... photography is something else. It doesn’t vanish. It lingers. It listens. It holds memory in a way no plate ever could. Cooking is what I do—but photography is who I am. It’s the language my soul speaks when the world goes quiet. The part of me that doesn't clock in or out. It’s how I make sense of where I’ve been—and where I’m still trying to go.