The Journal

42 Discoveries – What I know Photography #2 VIEWFINDER You need to use a viewfinder when you take photographs. The majority of people don’t because, of course, they use their phones. When you start to use a camera with a viewfinder your photography will improve beyond measure because your engagement with both the subject you are capturing and the process of photography itself will reach a new level. Your sense of flow will increase and therefore so will your mood. Your photography will also improve technically as there is no substitute for holding a viewfinder up to your eye and looking at a bright image within a well-defined frame. At the same time, you are blocking out the rest of the world – which you don’t need right now. In short, there is no better route to the making of good compositions.

Style comes first – everything else that follows on this list will lead us back to it. Style should be the single most important thing about your photography because it’s ultimately how you will achieve true creative fulfilment. 

Walk into a well-designed room, and you'll notice something beyond furniture and paint colours: the objects that signal what the people who live there actually care about. A collection of vintage ceramics.

Your dog checks on you when you're in another room. They know the sound of your car before it turns into the driveway. They sense when you're upset before you've fully realised it yourself. On some level, you understand this isn't training or conditioning, it's something deeper, something that exists in the space between language and instinct.

There's a particular challenge in buying for someone whose devotion to their dog eclipses most human relationships. Walk into any pet shop, and you'll find aisles of plush toys that won't last the week, treat jars shaped like fire hydrants, and novelty socks printed with paw prints. All perfectly adequate. None remotely memorable.

The morning after feels like waking into a house that has forgotten how to breathe. You reach for the lead that isn't there. You listen for the scratch of paws on floorboards that will never come. And somewhere in that silence, a question forms that has no clean answer: How long will this hurt? 

There's a particular quality of light on Hampstead Heath in the late afternoon, when the day begins to soften, and shadows lengthen across the paths. The ponds catch the descending sun, turning from mirror to gold. Dog walkers appear along the tree line, making their final rounds before dusk.

Mauve is one of those very special colours that I’m always drawn to, camera instinctively raised...

The whole world, one dogJonathan Posner’s 635-page passion project began as a pamphlet about his pet. Four years later, it’s become a love letter to photography, Hampstead Heath and one small white dog that changed his life. Peter Dench finds out...