The photos I didn't take

I carry my camera most places. It's a little Ricoh GR III that lives in my pocket, so a lot of my day is half-spent watching for the perfect shot. A bird drops down by the bench I'm on and starts working at a piece of bread, or the bus slides past a corner where the light's catching someone just right. For a second, it feels exactly like the kind of thing I'd want to capture.

Then I reach for the camera and it's already over. The bird flies off. The bus has already pulled past the corner. I find myself holding the camera up at nothing.

It happens more than I'd like, and it used to bother me more than it should. Photography is mostly about passing moments, and they don't wait for you to be ready. Time and experience are the only counterbalances. You get faster with both. The more you carry the camera, the better your eyes and hands get at catching the moment a half-second before it happens.

Some moments just move faster than you do, and no amount of practice or preparation fixes that. Part of becoming a better photographer is making peace with that fact. Not every shot was ever really going to be in your hands. You work with the ones you get, and you keep on the hunt for more.

Some misses, though, I can only blame myself for. I mostly shoot in RAW, but I keep a second profile loaded with a JPEG recipe, a set of color and contrast settings baked into the file. The two sit close enough on the control wheel that sliding the camera in and out of my pocket is enough to bump it over without my noticing. So every so often I get the shot and come home to a JPEG instead of the RAW I meant to take.

Imagine the annoyance. For someone who's actively trying to learn how to edit RAW files to open up the photo and realize it's uneditable because it's a JPEG. But a JPEG is still a photo. If anything, it nudges me to be more patient, with myself and with how I reach for the camera. I have no choice but to accept that some shots were never going to come out the way I pictured. I was still there to see it happen though. That much I get to keep.

And then there are the ones I didn't take on purpose. A while back, I passed a couple on a bench by the waterfront, somewhere in their fifties or sixties, sitting close. It was one of those small easy moments between two people who've clearly been together a long time. I was right there. I wanted it, the feeling of it more than the photo.

But I stood a beat too long, wondering about them instead. What their life had looked like. All the years, the things they'd gotten through, the quiet evenings that must have looked a lot like this one. By the time I came back to myself, the instinct to raise the camera had gone. What I had instead was a long, drifting thought about love that occupied my mind for the rest of the walk.

I still think about them. Sometimes I wonder if I should have taken the picture after all. But I'd rather have it the way I do, as a moment I was present for instead of one I stepped back to frame but couldn't feel.

That tension between presence and the shot reminds me of a scene in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, one of my favorite movies. After a long goose chase around the world, Walter Mitty catches up to Sean O'Connell, a photojournalist, in the Afghan Himalayas. Sean had been on a solo expedition looking for the elusive snow leopard and was camped behind a rocky outcrop, his camera with an enormous telephoto lens pointed at its den.

As Walter and Sean chat, the snow leopard quietly emerges and they both peer at it through the camera. There's a moment where the snow leopard looks at them and they look right back at it. Walter asks Sean if he's going to take the shot, but Sean says he might not. When he likes a moment, he'd rather stay in it than put a camera in the way.

And then the snow leopard scurries away. Sean never takes the shot. And he doesn't look like a man who missed anything.

I used to think that was a strange thing for a photographer to do, but watching Sean changed that. I think I understand it now.