Developing Self-Critique

One of the key elements of my process, whether shooting film or digital, is time. I make a point of not looking at my images immediately after taking them. Sometimes it’s six months or more before I revisit a frame. That delay is deliberate. The emotional charge I carry at the moment of shooting, the instinct, the excitement, the bias is allowed to fade. When I come back to the work, I see the photograph for what it is. Not what I felt. That clarity is essential for honest self critique.

Looking at this image now with fresh eyes, I see it as a play on contrast. Light and shadow, movement and stillness, reality and absurdity.

There’s a pleasing balance to the composition. A woman, silhouetted and in motion, dominates the foreground. Framed in the bay window behind her is a sharply dressed man, what at first appears to be a formal, posed figure. But of course, it isn’t a man. It’s a cardboard cutout of Ryan Reynolds. That small absurd detail flips the whole tone of the image. What might have felt ominous or surreal becomes tongue-in-cheek, playful even. I enjoy that the image can shift in meaning once the viewer realises what they’re actually looking at.

The lighting does a lot of work. The harsh midday sun creates strong contrasts, turning the passer-by into a silhouette and exaggerating the graphic elements of the scene. The white door, the brickwork, the curtains, all of it becomes a kind of visual grid, and Ryan Reynolds just stands there calmly in the middle of it, half-hidden behind the net curtain. It’s absurd, but deliberate.That said, time has also let me see the flaws more clearly. The central post in the foreground is a visual distraction. I can see now that I was focused on capturing the moment and the alignment, but the post cuts through the centre too heavily. I might have been able to shift my position slightly to frame more cleanly.

There’s also a tonal tension in the image. It hovers between being a serious street photograph and a visual joke. The idea was to let that tension sit there quietly, not pushed too far in either direction. But I do wonder if it lands clearly enough. It’s neither surreal enough to commit fully to absurdism, nor entirely rooted in candid reality. It sits in an in-between place. I’m still deciding if that’s to its credit or its weakness.

Being able to self-critique is important to me. I do seek out the opinions of others, but ultimately I judge my work by my own standards—standards shaped by the work of those I consider the best. That means not settling, not being precious, and being willing to look at an image months later and say, “It’s good, but here’s what I’d change.”

This photo may not be perfect. But it holds something of my voice, my humour, and my eye for moments that exist on the border of the ordinary and the ridiculous.