The Small Dark Shape

The Elephant Seal. A small dark shape in the water.

The Elephant Seal. A small dark shape in the water.

One Fur Seal pup, clearly doing important field research for the Department of Bad Ideas, kept inching towards the gatecrasher in the rock pool.

A quiet walk through Hiroshima, trying to make sense of the weight of a place that is both bustling modern city and unbearable history. With a hug.

A puffin disagreement, a possible romantic scandal, and an entire cliffside audience behaving as though someone had shouted “fight!” in a school playground.

Over four months at Cape Palliser, I kept returning to the fur seal pups in the rockpools. At first they scattered whenever I arrived. Then, slowly, they forgot about me and returned to the important business of bubbles, seaweed, tiny teeth, ambushes, and small wet chaos.

For four evenings, I drove out to Látrabjarg in search of puffins and found only wind, burrows, and nuffins. On the fifth evening, the cliffs were suddenly full of them; calm, golden, unhurried. I had the quiet privilege of sitting among them for a while.

The settings I use beyond shutter speed and aperture, attempting to demystify RAW vs JPEG, white balance, focus modes, exposure modes, and more, in a camera-agnostic way.

How I learnt to move to manual camera settings by controlling the Exposure Triangle: The holy trinity of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO.

My set and forget camera settings. Simple, reliable, and designed to help me avoid fiddling, to stay focused on what I see.

How I found a photography setup and gear that supports my autistic brain and flow. And why the best tools are the ones that fit the way I see and feel.