Blog #18 – The People Behind the Lens Cap

When Junior and I went to Lofoten earlier this year, we stopped at Hamnøy for what was supposed to be a quiet sunset. I’d seen the photos a hundred times online, that famous little bridge with the red cabins and snow-capped peaks behind. When we got there, the bridge wasn’t quiet at all. The footpath was jammed shoulder to shoulder with photographers in identical down jackets, tripods overlapping, everyone guarding their spot for the same postcard view. The sound of shutters clicked like a line of soldiers. I looked once, sighed, and decided I couldn’t be bothered fighting for a square foot of snow. Junior, on the other hand, was straight in there. It was on his list. He got the shot. I stayed back, watched, and took mine the next day with the drone once the crowd had gone. The next morning he was up again for sunrise while I stayed wrapped in the duvet trying to figure out how much beer and vodka we’d had the night before.

The view next to the Hamnøy bridge taken on my iPhone!

That scene stuck with me though. Earlier that same day we’d gone out to a supposedly remote church that Junior had marked for a drone shot, only to find it buzzing with half a dozen others doing the same thing. It felt less like the Arctic and more like Heathrow for drones. Between that and the Hamnøy bridge crowd, it made me think about who we all are when we pick up a camera. Everyone lined up in those places was there for the same reason, but probably for very different ones too. Some chasing light, some chasing likes, some chasing peace, some just ticking off a location from a list. It’s funny how photography can look identical from the outside and still mean completely different things underneath.

Once you start paying attention, you notice that photography has its own social ecosystem. The phone photographers move light and fast, snapping everything from coffees to clouds, never weighed down by kit bags or indecision. They’re often the ones who actually capture life as it happens because they’re not worrying about aperture values or file formats. Then there are the street shooters, wandering cities with headphones in, convinced they’re invisible while standing two feet away from their subject. Half of them shoot from the hip, half pretend to adjust their settings while secretly waiting for the perfect expression.

The film crowd operate in their own time zone. Every click feels deliberate, every mistake part of the charm. They’ll talk about grain structure and colour rendition like it’s fine art, then spend an hour online arguing whether expired film still counts. Someone online recently called film “bougie” and “hipster,” which made me laugh considering I’ve spent half my evenings trying to stop 1960s shutters from sticking and scraping light-seal foam off my desk. There’s nothing luxury about inhaling that much dust.

The drone photographers hover somewhere between pilot and artist. They get accused of cheating because their shots look too perfect, too effortless. But they’re the ones standing in sideways rain trying to calibrate a compass while everyone else is warm inside a car. They spend more time staring at weather apps than viewfinders. Their work divides opinion, yet they’re also the only ones still finding genuinely new angles.

My drone shot of Hamnøy

Then there are the professionals, the ones who crossed the line from hobby into livelihood. I’ve never made that leap, but I’ve thought about what it must feel like. When every click has a price tag attached, does the magic fade? When your creative outlet becomes your deliverable, does that pressure change how you see the world? It must be strange when something that once gave you freedom becomes something that schedules you. Meanwhile, the amateurs keep dreaming of reaching that point, assuming it’s the ultimate goal. Maybe both sides envy the other for reasons they don’t say out loud.

There’s also a big grey area in the middle, the enthusiasts. People like me. We’re not professionals, but we take it seriously enough that our families know to budget time for “just one more shot.” We buy tripods we don’t really need, spend hours in Lightroom experimenting, and carry far too much gear “just in case.” There’s an endless curiosity that keeps you moving between digital, film, and drone, chasing the feeling of learning something new. That part never seems to wear off.

I went to my first camera fair this morning. Whole different kind of tribe there. Mostly older blokes with white hair, braces over jeans, and those photographer vests with twelve pockets. The air smelled faintly of dust and old leather, a mix of nostalgia and WD-40. You could tell half the cameras on display hadn’t taken a picture since the 60s, but they were still polished within an inch of their lives. The tables were stacked high with boxes of filters, cracked lens caps, light meters that may or may not work, and stacks of photo magazines from decades ago.

People were haggling over lens caps for 50p, flipping through bargain bins full of questionable Soviet cameras, and swapping stories about the ones that got away. Conversations drifted from the best film for low light to how digital “just doesn’t have soul.” I got chatting to one seller and came home with an undisclosed number of vintage cameras (don’t tell Emma) and six expired rolls of film for a tenner. There’s something comforting about being in a room where everyone understands why you’d get excited about a camera that leaks light and smells faintly of mildew. It was 1000 percent about the cameras, and that’s what made it brilliant.

My already out of date photo of the vintage camera collection

What I liked most about that fair was the honesty of it. Nobody there was pretending. They weren’t thinking about social media algorithms or client briefs. They were just there to handle old cameras, trade stories, and maybe find the one piece of kit that would finally complete a long-lost setup. It reminded me that photography, for a lot of people, starts as a kind of collecting, of objects, of images, of moments that feel like they might mean something later.

Somewhere in all of this sits the constant question of identity. What actually makes someone a photographer? Is it owning gear, taking risks, making money, or just noticing things other people miss? I still don’t know. I’ve seen people with no interest in f-stops capture better moments than those of us obsessed with them. I’ve seen working photographers online turn ordinary light into something that makes you stop scrolling and wonder how they saw it that way.

For me, that line between amateur and professional feels more like a change in purpose than in talent. A professional has to deliver, an amateur gets to explore. The professional’s images might end up on billboards, the amateur’s might end up forgotten on a hard drive, but the drive to keep shooting comes from the same place. Both feel the same pull when the light suddenly shifts and something catches your eye.

Every time I think about those photographers lined up on the Hamnøy bridge, I think of how similar we all looked from a distance. Same gloves, same frozen fingers, same intent stare through the viewfinder. And yet I can’t help asking myself, why were we even there? I’ve seen that exact photo hundreds of times before. I could Google it in seconds and save a few thousand pounds in travel costs. But still, there’s a difference between looking at someone else’s photo and standing there in the cold air, watching the light change for yourself.

When you’re there, the photo stops being about originality and starts being about presence. You hear the wind moving through the fjord, you feel the cold through your gloves, and you notice small things that never make it into the postcard version, a seagull cutting across the sky, the sound of Junior’s drone lifting off, the way the red cabins reflect in the water for just a few seconds when the clouds part. Those are the bits that make it yours, even if the composition’s been done a thousand times.

Maybe that’s what keeps people coming back. It isn’t about being first or unique, it’s about being in it. Photography gives you an excuse to look properly, to stand still long enough for something to happen. Whether that’s a sunrise at Hamnøy, a bargain-bin Praktica at a camera fair, or a test roll of expired film that might not even develop, the reward is the same. You were there, you noticed, and you tried to make something out of it.

Whether it’s film or digital, drone or phone, an old Voigtländer from the 30s or a brand-new Sony, it all comes from that same urge to stop for a second and hold onto what’s in front of you. That shared habit ties everyone together, no matter how different our reasons. We’re not all the same, but we definitely understand the same pull, the need to look, to frame, and to see something worth remembering.

Another drone shot of mine from Norway. Another example of an angle not see as often, but to me the bands of light make this photo.