In 2014 I read a short essay that completely changed the way I work. It was called “No More Forever Projects,” and was written by Diana Kimball Berlin. I still think about it every time I start something since.

The core idea is simple. We tend to load our starting moments with promises. We announce a thing as lifelong, ongoing, a movement, the start of something big. We tell ourselves the weight of that promise is what gives the work meaning. Diana noticed the opposite was true. The promise of forever did not create momentum. It created a slow pressure that made the work harder to sustain and heavier to carry.

She took a lesson from our mutual pal Jamie Wilkinson who had a different rule:

Or, in practical terms: Treat every project as a one-time thing, with a beginning you celebrate and an ending you actually reach. If it turns out to be worth repeating, you can always choose to do it again. As Diana put it, “By ending well, you give yourself the freedom to begin again.”

When I read that the first time I felt such a sense of relief and calm. For years, many of my ideas died in my own head. Not because they were bad idea, but because they were too big. I would get a spark for a project, and within an hour I had designed a whole cathedral. I would map out the book, the exhibition, the events, the webshop, the membership, the five-year arc. I built a destination so far away that I needed skills I did not have and money I had not earned, all before I had made a single photo.

So, in the end, I would make nothing. The idea would sit there, getting more elaborate and more impossible, until the weight of not starting was louder than the excitement of the idea itself. I had a graveyard of ambitious projects without a single photo taken.

Maybe you know this feeling? There is a project you keep meaning to start, but it keeps getting bigger and further away the longer you wait.

Diana’s essay gave me a form of permission to do the opposite of thinking big. It helped me to think small and finite, and to decide the ending of a project before I started. Now every project I make has a wall built into it from day one. A timeframe or a number. A shape I am not allowed to think past.

The Best Medicine was a community documentary project about 101 English-language comedians. That was the whole brief. Not a media empire about comedy. One hundred and one portraits, then a zine from that work and a show to launch it.

Vliegwiel was about 100 startup founders and their thoughts on what the Dutch government could do to help them build better and stronger for the benefit of the country. Then a zine from that work, and a launch party. That was the plan, and our secret hope was that we’d get a government official to receive the first copy which worked out in ways better than we could have dreamed up when the newly appointed minister of economic affair attended our launch and did just that. Read more about it in Process 231 and 238.

Creatives In/AMS is a weekly photo essay series about Amsterdam-based creatives that runs for one year, which means 52 people and then a finish line. I worked on CI/AMS for nearly five years and just started publishing these stories on a dedicated website at CreativesIn.co which looks like this:

My photo book NOTICE was built out of a body of work I made in Vancouver during the first few months of the pandemic, when I went on a meditative photo walk every day for 123 days in a row. Why 123 days? Because that’s how many days I was there for once I started the walks. That was not planned out in advance, but just how life happened. What I did plan was that I was going to put the work in and build a daily creative habit by going on these long 10k walks every afternoon. It flowed from there.

I use this system for everything, not just my photography projects. My comedic video series The Chain was a 6-episode season, with a beginning, a middle, and an end I could actually reach. It turned out to be so much fun that I wrote a second season with 5 more episodes, to be filmed soon. Here is the first season:

My latest project community documentary project 26 in 2026 has its limit sitting right there in the name. In case you missed it, that’s my project for which we photographed 26 year old Amsterdammers and asked them how they felt about the future. We shot it on a brick of Kodak film that expired in the year 2000 (the year of the sitters’ birth) in a single marathon studio day just yesterday. Here is what I came home with at the end of the day:

This project has several built-in limitations: 1 studio day, people who are 26 years old and live in Amsterdam, how many rolls of film I had from the year 2000.

These numbers are not a cage. They provide the frame work and the limitation that lets me start. When the scope is fixed, the project stops being a vague forever and turns into a list of doable steps. Photograph one. Then the next. The finish line is close enough to see, which means the start is close enough to take.

Something we know to end, a finite numbers, does not mean small or unserious. Some of the work I am proudest of started as an experiment with an end date. Finishing one project well is what gives me the energy and the freedom to begin the next one. So if you have a project you keep putting off because it feels too big, I want to offer you the same permission Diana offered me.

You do not have to build the whole cathedral. You do not need the webshop, the gallery show, or the perfect plan before you take the first frame. You need a subject you care about, a limit you can see the end of, and the willingness to start this week.

Here is the simple version I use:

1. Pick one subject, place, or question you keep returning to.

2. Give it a finite shape. A number of photos, a number of people, a number of weeks. Something you could actually finish.

3. Decide now what the ending looks like. A zine, a small set of prints, a single post, a wall in your hallway. Name the finish line before you take the first photo.

4. Make the first picture this week. Just one.

That is the whole method. No forever. Just a beginning that already knows how it ends.

Share this issue with a friend who gets stuck and could get something out of reading it.

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Your Turn — Giveaway

I would love to hear from you in the comments: what is a project you have been putting off because it feels too big? And what would a finite version of it look like? Give it a number or an end date right there in your comment. Sometimes saying it out loud is the whole start. I will randomly select one of the comments as the winner of this week’s Process Giveaway and they will receive a package with some surprise goodies, including some film, a book from my collection, and more.

Leave a comment

NEXT WEEK: A surprise, also for myself.

Quick note: we were gonna start with the Process Workbook Vol. 5 issues this week, but for scheduling reasons we had to move this back two weeks. Very excited to start on it with you all!

And finally, a thank you to for writing the article that inspired this issue. Read the original here.

Warmly,

Wesley

P.S. Chapter 3 of 52 of my new series Creatives In/AMS was published. It’s about leatherworker and designer Chenda Fekkes. Check out the chapter on the CI/AMS website or on IG.

P.P.S. All my film is developed by Carmencita Film Lab. They’re the best and they clearly love what they do. Use code PROCESS for a free upgrade.

Few Ways To Support Process

If Process adds something to your week, here’s how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo book NOTICE Journal Volume One or the Process Workbook series. Volume 5 just came out and is an 80-page step-by-step guide on how to make your own book or zine.

ORDER PWB5 HERE

Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and 100% off all five Workbooks. Not a member yet? Join here.

• Process Photo Club members get the PWB5 for free, plus all four previous workbooks (€60 in savings on day one), 40% off my photo books, 30% off workshops, and more.

Subscribe now

Browse the Process Archive for more articles.

Last Saturday, thirteen photographers spent a full day together in London for the first ever in-person Develop Workshop, co-hosted by myself and Shane Taylor of Framelines. I can still feel the warm afterglow and I want to tell you what made it so special.

Sometime next week, we will share short video which will show you the room better than I can describe it, but for now I will share some stills in this issue.

The day started with Shane’s session, about finding one’s artistic voice. This is that mysterious special something that bubbles up underneath the photographs we make and make them uniquely our own. Shane ended with a collaborative work session that had the room full of genuine excitement as everyone leaned on and into each other, trading ideas and reactions, building on what Shane had opened up. It was such a lovely sight to behold, especially know it usually takes a group much longer to get there.

Then a short break, and it was time for my session, which focused on turning ideas into projects with a thought out plan and practical steps to take next. My goal is always to help you hone in on the idea that moves you most, crystalize the purest version of this idea, and then help you plan out the specific steps, goals, and tasks that get you to completion and publication.

To do so, I walk people through a set of core questions I usually only ask one-on-one, and the work happens on the page before we talk about it out loud. There’s lots of writing and thinking in my sessions, with practical examples from my own career.

Then in the second half, we talk as a group. And it was amazing. People shared, generously, and more than I expected. Project ideas and underneath the ideas, the doubts. Is this feasible? Is this too big? Is this worth doing?

My style of teaching is to create a safe space where I can gently push people to think more ambitiously, and to share my own experiences to map theirs onto. I want to demystify and encourage. For every doubt you have, I have three solutions or ideas because they were also my doubt. I have stories, I have failures, and I have successes.

The room held this energy so well. Someone would put a half-formed idea on the table, unsure, almost apologizing for it, and the room would catch it. Support, feedback, a gentle question that made it sharper. It was a warm room.

People felt like they could say the thing they weren't sure about and not feel small for it. I never allow any negative self-talk and gently shut it down when it pops up. In this room, things are possible and we are worthy of trying them out and giving it our best.

It’s so incredibly satisfying for me to watch people go from not quite sure to embracing excitement and feeling a level of control over their ideas that maybe they hadn’t yet felt. Vague ideas became clear ideas with a plan. People landed on the why of their project, and the what, and a real sense of the next step.

I push for goals bigger than we tend to set on our own, because I can tell you from experience that more is possible than we let ourselves believe. Press coverage. Showing the work publicly. Things that feel out of reach when you’re alone with the idea, and a lot less so when someone who’s done it is sitting across from you saying go further.

We ended with a photo walk, though honestly it was barely about photographing. It was thirteen people walking through London still talking about the projects that had surfaced, still working it out together. And then the most ridiculous, perfect ice cream before we all went our separate ways.

I felt full and not just from the ice cream! Thank you to everyone who attended. The afterglow I mentioned already has me excited for the next one. I also want to thank our friends at picdrop and the Zetter Bloomsbury who helped make the workshop possible with their support.

Next Workshop

Shane and I are doing the next one on Saturday, September 5, in London. Tickets and full details will go up in a week or two, and I’ll share them here as soon as they’re live.

If you want to be first in line, just reply to this email and let me know you’re interested to attend. I will make sure that the folks who do will hear about it before it goes public since the tickets go fast once public.

Here is a generous testimonial about this most recent one, from attendee Simon:

If you’d like to share this newsletter issue with a friend who might be interested in the next workshop, please do. You can use the button below.

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Speaking up future workshops, Berlin is high on the wish list for us. The photo community there is one of my top favorite ones in Europe, and we’ve had an amazing Process Photowalk there with our friends at Safelight. It’s a great city to photograph as well. I wrote up a list of 10 of my favorite Berlin spots to photograph for the folks over at MPB, featuring photos by my friend Austin Fassino, a great Berlin-based photographer. Check it out here.

NEXT WEEK: Some thoughts on starting projects knowing they will end, and relieving ourselves from the pressures of long term thinking.

Warmly,

Wesley

P.S. Chapter 2 of 52 of my new series Creatives In/AMS was published. It’s about creative director and visual creative Victor Brangolo of Oedipus Brewing Company. Check out the chapter on the CI/AMS website or on IG.

P.P.S. All my film is developed by Carmencita Film Lab. They’re the best and they clearly love what they do. Use code PROCESS for a free upgrade.

A Few Ways To Support Process

If Process adds something to your week, here’s how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo book NOTICE Journal Volume One or the Process Workbook series. Volume 5 just came out and is an 80-page step-by-step guide on how to make your own book or zine.

ORDER PWB5 HERE

Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and 100% off all five Workbooks. Not a member yet? Join here.

• Process Photo Club members get the PWB5 for free, plus all four previous workbooks (€60 in savings on day one), 40% off my photo books, 30% off workshops, and more.

Subscribe now

Browse the Process Archive for more articles.

A few weeks ago I loaded a Mamiya 645 Pro with a roll of Kodak Ektacolor Pro Gold 160 ISO filmt that expired in the year 2000. The camera was built in 2000. The film expired in 2000. And the people I’m about to photograph for my next Community Documentary project, 26 in 2026, were all born in 2000.

I love when a project tells you what it wants to be.

26 in 2026 is exactly what it sounds like. Portraits of people who are, were, or will be twenty-six in 2026. All shot on this brick of expired Kodak that has lived in my freezer for the last ten years, and somewhere else cold for the fifteen years before that.

To make sure this time, energy and film investment into this project has the best chance of succeeding I scheduled a test shoot to see how the film responded to light. Expired film is unpredictable, and I needed to know what I was working with.

Why expired film is hungrier for light

Film loses sensitivity as it ages. The chemistry gets sluggish. Colors shift. Shadows start to swallow detail. The general rule of thumb is one stop of overexposure for every decade past the expiration date. This Ektacolor Gold was 26 years expired, so the math suggested somewhere around 2 1/2 stops of extra light.

I shot it at ISO 32 instead of the box speed of 160. That’s 2 1/3 stops of overexposure. Close enough to the rule, and a number I felt good about based on how this film has behaved for me before.

The idea is simple. We give the film more light than it asks for, so the parts that have weakened still get enough to register something. The trade-off is a slightly softer image with shifted colors and a gentler contrast curve. Which, for a project like this, is exactly what I want.

The test shoot

I invited eight friends to sit for me: Joseph, Carrie, Camille, Noelia, Irum, Adi, Apoorva, and Agustin. None of them are turning twenty-six in 2026, but that’s not the point. The point was to see how the film handles skin tones, light, and the kind of quiet, attentive portraits I want to make for this project.

The results came back from Carmencita better than I had hoped. Warm, soft, a little bit dreamy. The colors are slightly off in the way old film should be off. Skin tones held up. The frames have that quality I love in expired film: like the image was already half-remembered before it was even made.

A bonus roll

While I had everyone there, I also pulled out my Hasselblad 500cm and loaded a roll of Kodak PXP that expired in 1986. PXP is my favorite black-and-white film of all time. I have one brick of it left, and I’m slowly figuring out what it deserves to be used for.

Box speed is ISO 125. I shot it at ISO 12. That’s about 3 1/3 stops of overexposure, which sounds aggressive until you remember this film is forty years past its date.

I shot it handheld at 1/30th of a second, which I knew was risky. Some of the frames have a soft shake to them. I don’t mind. There’s something about a slightly trembling frame on forty-year-old film that feels honest to what it is.

I’ll figure out what project this last brick of PXP wants to be. I have some ideas. More on that another time.

What’s next

The test confirmed what I needed to know. The film works, the exposure is right, the look is what I want. Now the real work starts: preparing for the actual 26 in 2026 shoot which will take place at Studio 13 on June 6th. We have a small amount of slots open still. I can’t wait to sit them down in front of a camera built the same year, and making portraits on film that has been waiting in the cold for half their lifetime.

If you know someone turning twenty-six in 2026 who would be a good sitter, send them my way. I’m building the list. You can share this issue with the button below.

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Warmly,

Wesley

P.S. Yesterday’s Develop Workshop in London was an incredible day with a wonderful group of photographers. Shane and I had a blast and we will announce new workshops soon. Recap coming next week.

P.P.S In case you missed it, last week we launched a year-long project of photo essays about Amsterdam-based creatives and their workspaces. Follow along on Instagram at @creativesin_ (1 post a week) and with the monthly newsletter. The website is now live with the first photo essay, about painter Nora Boeke. Find it here.

P.P.P.S. All my film is developed by Carmencita Film Lab. They’re the best and they clearly love what they do. Use code PROCESS for a free upgrade.

A Few Ways To Support Process

If Process adds something to your week, here’s how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo book NOTICE Journal Volume One or the Process Workbook series. Volume 5 just came out and is an 80-page step-by-step guide on how to make your own book or zine.

ORDER PWB5 HERE

Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and 100% off all five Workbooks. Not a member yet? Join here.

• Process Photo Club members get the PWB5 for free, plus all four previous workbooks (€60 in savings on day one), 40% off my photo books, 30% off workshops, and more.

Subscribe now

Browse the Process Archive for more articles.

I sat across from sixty-eight people in one day, inside a hand-painted former church at the edge of Amsterdam. Here are two of my favorite portraits from the day:

The church sits at the center of Ruigoord, an artist village on the western edge of the city, surrounded by the industrial port but never swallowed by it. Since the 1970s, a community of artists, makers, and free spirits has lived and worked here on its own terms, protecting a way of life that feels increasingly rare. Being welcomed and trusted to make these portraits was very special to me.

Sitting with each person, one after another, I kept thinking about how much we need places like this. Places where imagination is treated as essential rather than optional, and where people are free to live and create on their own terms.

This is the kind of work I call Community Documentary. It started in 2013 with a project called One of Many, a two-year road trip across twelve American cities photographing their creative communities. Since then I’ve kept coming back to this format: a defined community, a marathon of portraits, conversations that go beyond the surface, and a final piece of physical work that lives outside the algorithm.

Projects like Vliegwiel (102 Dutch startup founders, see Process 238) and The Best Medicine (101 comedians, see Process 193) both came from this same approach.

One year ago this week, and the Why of it all

A year ago, The Best Medicine launch event happened at De Balie. The night was sold out and the room was full of comedians I’d photographed, their friends, their families. At some point in the evening I noticed people walking around with copies of the zine, asking each other to sign them. Almost like a yearbook. My heart!

My friend Mash told me she would keep her zine forever as a way to remember her community and what it felt like to be part of it in this exact moment in time. My heart again!

This is what makes it so special to work on this projects. The work isn’t only the photographs. The work is also the object the community holds, signs, passes around, and keeps. That’s what Community Documentary actually does when it works.

Ruigoord, where it is now

The Ruigoord portraits have now all been posted on my Instagram over the last few weeks. You can check them out over at @wesley. Next week, my friend Maxwell George will visit Amsterdam from New York City and we will start working on the Ruigoord zine together. Maxwell designed the NOTICE Journal cover and all five Process Workbooks, and he is such a wonderful collaborator.

What’s coming, and the bigger news this week

This Wednesday, May 20, I’m launching the Community Documentary project I’ve been working on for the past five years.

It’s called Creatives In/AMS, and it’s a year-long weekly photo essay series about fifty-two creatives in Amsterdam and their workspaces. For next year, every Wednesday will see fresh photo essay released. Painters, filmmakers, designers, ceramicists, writers, musicians, chefs, tattooists, and many more. Wildly different disciplines and wildly different backgrounds, all living and making in the same city.

When I moved to Amsterdam five years ago after twenty years in New York, I started this project in part because I wanted to meet people. Long ago I learned that the fastest way to find your people in a new place is to make a project that gives you a reason to knock on their doors. This is that, here, now, five years after arrival.

Each creative I photographed will be interviewed by my friend and wonderful writer . Her essays are as curious and warm as her conversations.

There are three ways to follow along:

• Every Wednesday on Instagram. Starting this Wednesday, May 20, I’ll post a preview slideshow and quote from that week’s creative at @wesley on IG.

• Every Wednesday on the website. The full essays, with Josephine’s writing and the full image selects, go up weekly at CreativesIn.co. The site goes live this Wednesday with the first essay.

• Once a month, the newsletter. Four weeks after launch, we will start sending a dedicated Creatives In/AMS newsletter with previews of the previous month’s four creatives and links to their essays. Just once a month, on purpose. I want to be respectful of your inbox. The weekly rhythm lives on Instagram and the website. The newsletter is the calm monthly digest and you can sign up here.

I cannot wait to share all of these wonderful stories with you over the course of the next year. Once a week, a new story about a creative and what keeps them going. I would love for you to follow along, on Instagram or by signing up for the newsletter:

Creatives In/AMS by Wesley Verhoeve & Josephine Jongbloed

Creatives In/AMS is a monthly newsletter featuring photo essays about the inspiring creatives shaping Amsterdam’s cultural landscape and the spaces where they work.

YOUR TURN: GIVEAWAY

When you think about your own creative community, who are the people you’d most want to photograph if you had a year to do it?

Drop a line in the comments so we can all be inspired by each other. In exactly one week, I will pick a random comment to win a $150 Gift Certificate to the Moment Store, to put towards film, gear, or accessories.

Leave a comment

NEXT WEEK: The results of a test shoot I did with a rare Kodak film that expired in the year 2000, in preparation of my next Community Documentary project.

Warmly

Wesley

P.S. All my film is developed by Carmencita Film Lab. They’re the best and they clearly love what they do. Use code PROCESS for a free upgrade.

QUICK NOTES

• LAST SPOTS for the LONDON WORKSHOP, MAY 23 — Together with my friend Shane Taylor of Framelines I will host a day-long workshop focused on two questions: What is my unique voice? and How do I turn that into a real project?
  
  Morning sessions, communal lunch, afternoon street shooting. €275 (£250). Info and tickets at developworkshops.com. Process Photo Club members get €75 off, just email me at hello@wesley.co for the code. Only two spots left!
  

• Process Workbook Volume 5: today is the last day — If you pre-ordered Process Workbook Volume 5: How to Make a Photo Book or Zine in 12 Steps, it will land in your inbox today. Thank you. I cannot wait to see what you make!

  
  If you haven’t yet: today is the last day at the early bird price of €9.99. Starting tomorrow, Monday May 18, it goes to €14.99. If you’ve been thinking about it, today’s the day. Order it here.

ORDER PWB5 HERE

• Process Photo Club members get the PWB5 for free, plus all four previous workbooks (€60 in savings on day one), 40% off my photo books, 30% off workshops, and more.

Subscribe now

Browse the Process Archive for more articles

“In my films, I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don’t want to show things, but give people the desire to see.”

That’s Agnès Varda speaking. I came across the quote recently and I loved it.

There’s a difference between showing someone a thing and making them want to see.

Showing is a one-way transaction. The desire to see is something else. It’s contagious. It’s the part of photography I care about most.

Varda spent her life pointing her camera at people or ideas that she felt the world wasn’t paying enough attention to. She didn’t do that to inform, but to infect us with her curiosity. After watching her films, you walk outside and might find the world looking just a little different. A stranger at a bus stop suddenly looks like a possible portrait.

This desire to see, and the curiosity that sits at the foundation of that desire, is central to my personal work outside of my portrait and client work. There are things in the world I will always be drawn to. Because they inspire that curiosity and my compulsion to interpret and re-contextualize what I see.

One of those things I am always drawn to is reflections I encounter out in the world. For this issue, I focused on the latter and searched my archives using Excire and typing in the keyword: reflections .

I picked ten of my favorites out of twenty years of archives. Here’s the first one.

I took this photo in Utah over ten years ago when visiting the Salt Flats outside of Salt Lake City. They’re magical. It was so quiet. I was so still.

To reflect on reflections is perhaps a bit meta, but putting these ten images together into a little series was a fun exercise in re-contextualizing. It’s the world looking at itself and me looking at myself, sometimes literally like in this half-frame diptych.

During the first three springs I lived in Amsterdam I was processing lots of big life changes. I walked the streets and photographed as my way of reflecting on it all and ended up being obsessed with using scooter mirror’s to capture moments.

I think the reason I kept taking these pictures is that a reflection forces me to see twice. Once for the thing in front of me, once for the thing behind me, and a third time for the strange new image that exists only because of the surface in between.

This one was taken in Vancouver during the first few months of the pandemic. My friend Alex had just moved there and even though everything was on lock down, we could still go on socially distant photo walks together.

Reflections make me to slow down. They ask that I notice that the world is layered, even when it looks flat. That a different perspective on a familiar sight can provoke excitement. I think this is what Varda meant when she said what she said.

This one was taken during the quietest of morning moments on the Japanese island of Naoshima. I wrote about it in more detail in Process 213.

During my time in Vancouver, I was lucky to be able to explore some of the stunning nature outside the city. This was the view mere feet away from the cabin we stayed in on the Sunshine Coast. It brought me a lot of calm. I stared at it for a long time before taken this photo. Again, a very quiet moment and being in awe of natural beauty.

This is an outtake from the series I made in Amsterdam when I first moved here and was going through said life changes. In addition to all the literal mirrors, the water in the canals was another favorite subject for me to re-contextualize my thoughts in this new city. The best ones were collected in NOTICE Journal, Volume One.

While I was in Vancouver, I went on a long daily photo walk for 123 consecutive days. I would often pass by the house of what I assume was a passionate classic car fan. I never got to meet him, but I photographed many of his beautiful car. The body of work I made during this period became my first photo book NOTICE.

Another shot made on the outskirts of Vancouver, but before the pandemic hit. This was a lovely day where a long bus ride with friends brought us to a basin still within city limits and it was perfectly still.

Another one of my favorite scooter mirror shots. This time a bit meta as I snapped a shot of one scooter, using the mirror of another.

Dark fall days in Amsterdam always lead to the moodiest of images. I love how the drops of rain on the hood of this car look like surreal blips of air coming out of the chimneys on the roofs seen in this reflection.

My Thoughts On These Images

Looking at these together, I notice I’m rarely the subject, and even when I am, it’s in a pairing with someone or something else. That makes sense to me because to me the role of the photographer, at least in the way I love to be one, is to witness, interpret, re-contextualize, observe, comment, share. It’s not be center myself.

I love Varda’s line. Let’s read it one more time:

“In my films, I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don’t want to show things, but give people the desire to see.”

I hope that I inspire curiosity and a desire to see with my work. My first photo book NOTICE was a breakthrough for me because it was the first time I realized and verbalized that I like to inspire others. In this case, to slow down and notice the random bits of beauty and wonder all around us in our immediate surroundings.

It’s also what I try to do here with Process, every Sunday. Not to give you, dear reader, a thing, but to send you back into your own week looking a little more carefully and hone in on your own point of view as you notice the way a puddle reflects a building, and how your phone on the table during a dinner may catch a smile from across the table. It’s all magic to me. I hope you let it be magic to you as well. Thanks for reading.

If there’s a friend who would enjoy this issue, do me a favor and send it to them. Thank you :)

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NEXT WEEK: a deeper look at my Community Documentary work, an anniversary, and previewing the upcoming two communities.

One last thing: you have one week left to preorder Process Workbook Vol. 5 at €9.99 (it goes to €14.99 on release). This one walks you through making your own zine or book. More in Quick Notes below.

Waving from springy Amsterdam, talk to you soon.

Wesley

P.S. I found this week’s images using Excire, which tags and organizes my photos locally on my computer. No uploads, no monthly subscription, no AI training on your work. I use the standalone software but they also have a Lightroom plug-in.

Excire was kind enough to sponsor this issue and offer Process readers 15% off with code PROCESS. I use it nearly every day in my workflow, not just to search my archive but also to filter duplicates out of client shoots and a bunch of other useful things. I was already using it before they sponsored Process, and they had no say in what I wrote here.

P.P.S. All my film is developed by Carmencita Film Lab. They’re the best and they clearly love what they do. Use code PROCESS for a free upgrade.

Quick Notes

• GET PWB5 FREE WITH PROCESS PHOTO CLUB — Process Workbook Vol. 5: How to Make a Photo Book or Zine ships May 17th and walks you through it in 12 steps. Process Photo Club members get it free, plus all four previous workbooks (€60 in savings on day one), 40% off my photo books, 30% off workshops, and more.
  

  Subscribe now

  Just want the workbook? Preorder for €9.99 through May 17th (€14.99 after). Background in Process issue 241.

  PREORDER PWB5 HERE

• LONDON WORKSHOP, MAY 23 — I’m teaming up with my friend Shane Taylor of Framelines for a day-long workshop in London focused on two questions: What is my unique voice? and How do I turn that into a real project?
  
  Morning sessions, communal lunch, afternoon street shooting. €275 (£250). Info and tickets at developworkshops.com. Process Photo Club members get €75 off, just email me at hello@wesley.co for the code.

Browse the Process Archive for more articles

Last summer I went to Ukraine for two weeks and made the most meaningful body of work of my life. I’ve been quietly editing it ever since. This fall, it becomes a book and it will be called NOTICE Journal, Volume Two (NJV2).

NJV2 is built around a question: what does it mean to hold on to normal life when the world around you is anything but? I photographed family life in the countryside and in the city. Cooking dinner, laughing around a table, visiting the burial place of a son on what would have been his birthday. The quiet power of routine as resistance. I’ll share much more about the work itself in the coming months.

But today I want to tell you about something else, because, well, I write a newsletter called Process: So I decided to make this book entirely in public.

Every decision, every step, every mistake. I’m letting you in on all of it.

And, better yet, I’ve made you a brand new Process Workbook so you can create your own book or zine alongside me as you follow along with each step of the process.

It’s called Process Workbook Volume 5: How to Make a Photo Book or Zine. It’s an 80+ page guide that breaks the whole thing down into 12 manageable steps you can take one at a time, every two weeks, over the coming months, or at your own pace. Image selection. Sequencing. Layout. Writing. Cover design. Budgeting. Distribution. Launch. The full picture. Here is the cover, designed by Maxwell George.

It’s the workbook I wish someone had given me when I was making my first book and it is made up of all my years of experience, all my lessons learned, and all my mistakes, so you can benefit from all of that as well.

This book essentially says: yes, you can do this too, and here’s exactly how, and you’re not going to have to figure it out alone.

PREORDER PWB5 HERE

I’m building it the same way I’ve built every Workbook so far. Based on what I’ve learned curating 96 exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York City, and the books I’ve made over the past decade, and on every conversation I’ve had with photographers who told me they’ve wanted to make a book for years but didn’t know where to start.

You don’t need to be ready. You just need to be curious, excited, and have a desire to make a zine or a book from your photography, whether it’s a fancy printed object, a low-cost printed object, or a beautiful PDF.

How this is going to work

PWB5 ships to pre-orderers on May 17th, so well before we begin the process.

On June 7th, I’ll publish the first step issue here in Process: Step 1, Defining Your Project. From there, every other week through the spring and summer, I’ll walk through all twelve steps, sharing exactly how I’m applying it to the process of making my own new book NOTICE Journal, Volume Two. This will make it practical, and real.

There will be videos too! My friend Shane Taylor of Framelines is going to make a new zine of his own alongside me and I will be part of that process as we go through the same steps from the workbook for his zine. We will make some videos about it and show the messy reality of two photographers building two very different books at the same time. More on that soon.

The idea is simple: You order the workbook. You watch us do the work, and you can follow along and make your own project at home. It can even be a group photo zine with your friends. By the time my book ships in October, you’ll also have finished yours!

This is perhaps the most ambitious thing I’ve ever tried to do with Process, and I’m very excited about. Ahhhhh!! (that’s me doing an anxious but excited scream).

The best way to come along: Join the Process Photo Club

If you’ve been on the fence about becoming a paid member, this is a good moment. Photo Club members will get PWB5 for FREE included in their membership, along with all four previous Workbooks (an immediate €60 saving!).

Members also get 40% off my photo books, 25% off workshops, and more is coming soon. It’s the closest thing to a backstage pass to everything I’m making. To become a member, check out the PPC perks page or click below.

Subscribe now

If you’d rather just grab PWB5 on its own, the early-bird preorder price is €9.99 through May 17th, and €14.99 after.

PREORDER PWB5 HERE

Why I’m doing this in public

My goal with Process has always been to demystify and encourage. To take the things that feel mysterious or intimidating about photography and break them down into something doable. To help more people use this medium to tell stories they care about and can be proud of.

Making a book is the most intimidating version of that for many photographers. I’ve heard from so many of you over the years who’ve said you have a project in you, you just don’t know how to turn it into an object you can hold. PWB5 is my answer to that. And making my own book in public alongside you is my way of proving the framework actually works.

This is genuinely a little scary for me. Making a book is intimate work, and showing every decision and stumble means I can't pretend afterwards that it all came easily. But I think that's the point.

I’d love to have you along.

And if there’s a friend who you’d love to make a book alongside, please send this issue of Process their way. It helps a lot. :)

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NEXT WEEK: a deeper look at my Community Documentary work, an anniversary, and previewing the upcoming two communities.

Lots of good things ahead. Thank you for being here for them.

Warmly,

Wesley

Upcoming Workshop — London

May 23, London — Shane Taylor (Framelines) and I are co-hosting a day-long workshop in London to help photographers answer these questions:

1. What am I actually trying to say with my photo?

2. How do I turn that into a real project?

Morning sessions, communal lunch, afternoon street shooting. Info and tickets at developworkshops.com.

The price is €275/£250 and Process Photo Club members get €75 off (just email me at hello@wesley.co and I’ll send you a discounted booking link.)

Browse the Process Archive for more articles
Note: All my film is developed with love by Carmencita Film Lab. Use code “PROCESS“ for a free upgrade.

Last week I was walking to the post office to drop off some book orders and when I turned onto a side street I saw something beautiful. A brick building, a big tree, and a shadow falling across the wall in a way that only happens for about twenty minutes a day. The branches looked drawn on. The brick was glowing.

I slowed down and stared at it as I walked past. I thought about detouring for a quick shot, but the post office closes early and I figured I’d be back in five minutes.

I dropped off the packages and walked back to find…it was gone. Just a building and a tree, missing a shadow.

I’ve missed moments like this before and I know there’s no way I won’t miss more in the future. But it was a good reminder that inspiration or found beauty doesn’t wait for our schedule to clear. It shows up when it shows up and knocks on your door. You pause or you miss it.

A lot of the work I’m proudest of, the books, the portrait projects, and even this newsletter, none of it came from a clean plan. It came from small interruptions I chose to follow against my "better judgement". Creativity is rarely efficient nor convenient.

This coming week, if you have space for it, try to notice the knock. The found beauty.

Think about a first practical step to move forward with that idea you keep brushing aside. You don’t have to drop everything. But could you give it five minutes? Might be all it needs.

If you think someone you care about could also use this reminder? Share this issue with them. I’d appreciate it.

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See you next Sunday, when I will be very excited to tell you about the next Process Workbook and the next three next big Community Documentary projects I am working on.

Warmly,

Wesley

Quick Notes

• In Press — My portrait of Samuel Beek, founder of startup Schematik, was featured in yesterday’s Financieel Dagblad newspaper. My first time having work printed on pink paper!

• Workshop — May 23, London — Shane Taylor (Framelines) and I are co-hosting a day-long workshop in London for photographers who could use help answering these questions:

1. What am I actually trying to say?

2. How do I turn that into a real project?

There will be morning sessions, communal lunch, afternoon street shooting. Info and tickets at developworkshops.com.

The price is €275/£250 and Process Photo Club members get €75 off (just email me at hello@wesley.co and I’ll send you a discounted booking link.) Not a member yet? Check out the PPC perks page or click below.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Camera + Tools

Camera: Pentax LX, Fujifilm X100F, Canon EOS R5 and the Canon RF 24-70 mm f/2.8 L IS USM.

Lab: All my film is developed with love by Carmencita Film Lab. Use code “PROCESS“ for a free upgrade.

A Few Ways To Support This Work

If Process adds something to your week, here's how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo book NOTICE Journal Volume One or the Process Workbook series. Every physical order includes a limited edition Creatives In/AMS preview zine, a surprise, and stickers.

Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and 100% off all four Workbooks. Not a member yet? Join here.

Subscribe now

🗃️ Browse the Process Archive.

A nice lady walked into the room already apologizing.

“I should warn you, I’m really not photogenic. We can try, but I’ve never liked a photo of myself. Ever. So good luck.”

She was an executive of a fast-growing financial company and had raised serious money, hired serious people, and was about to do a serious press campaign and her pr team was making her get a new portrait.

I get some version of this speech almost every shoot. From CEOs, to engineers, to VP’s of Marketing. The only exception is usually people from the sales department, because they’re used to selling themselves and their employer. The words change a little but the meaning is always the same: please be gentle with me, I am about to be uncomfortable for the next hour.

I’ve come to believe after years of doing this work that most people don’t dislike being photographed. They dislike being photographed badly. They’ve sat through enough stiff, fluorescent-lit, “okay now turn slightly to the left and smile naturally” sessions that the whole experience feels like a dental appointment. They show up braced for impact and anticipating the same feeling of photo day at primary school.

The job, before any of the photography happens, is to remove that feeling and create a lighter and more comfortable atmosphere.

I shoot tethered1, which means the images appear on a screen within seconds of me taking them. Within the first four or five frames, I can ask them if they’d like to take a peek and turn the screen around. To show someone what they actually look like. Not the version in their head from their first 2021 corporate ID, but the version that exists right now with someone paying attention to them. I show them what I see.

I get to watch their shoulders drop with relief and more often than not it inspires a:

“Wait, that’s me?”

Yes. That’s you.

“That’s not so bad…I like it. Let me move my hair a bit.”

This work means so much to me because I’m not a technical photographer who memorizes light ratios and lens math. I mentioned this in a recent issue and it bears repeating, because it’s the whole game. I'm a storyteller who likes people and happens to use a camera.

When I walk into a corporate office or a co-working space or a stuffy boardroom with bad ceiling lights, I’m not thinking about the lighting setup first. Thankfully I am able to bring an assistant who had that skillset. I’m thinking about the person in front of me and what would make them forget, even for thirty seconds, that they’re being photographed.

That’s when the good frames happen.

A lot of company portraits look the way they look because the photographer is solving a technical problem. Get the face lit. Get the background clean. Get the smile. Move on. The result is functional. It does the job. It will not embarrass anyone.

But it also will not do anything for anyone. It won’t make a candidate scrolling your team page pause and think, “oh, these people seem like humans I’d want to work with.” It won’t make a journalist pulling press images think, “this company has taste.” It won’t make the executive themselves want to actually use the photo.

I’ve been lucky to do this work across a wide spectrum. I’ve photographed founders in their living rooms at 7am, before the kids were awake. I’ve photographed executives like Michael Dell at events where I had about 30 seconds to make it look good. I’ve photographed working actors who needed headshots that captured something real, not the glossy LA template. I’ve photographed teams at financial firms where everyone was wearing the same shade of grey, and we still found a way to make it feel like them and not like a stock photo.

The common thread isn’t a lighting style or a location or a pose. It’s the approach. Treat the person like a person. Move quickly so they don’t have time to overthink. Show them the results in real time so they can see for themselves that this is going to be okay. Make a few jokes. Ask about their actual life and their job. Get them to laugh, then take the picture right after the laugh, when their face is still soft. It helps to be genuinely curious. That’s always been my main skill.

This approach didn’t come out of nowhere. It comes directly from my community documentary work. When I photographed 101 comedians in two days for The Best Medicine2, I had about three minutes per person. Three minutes to walk in, settle them down, get something real. When I shot Vliegwiel3, the same constraint: 102 Dutch startup founders, each of them busy, each of them used to being photographed badly, each of them needing to feel like the time was worth it.

Because Vliegwiel was an art project, I had the freedom to push it a little further than a normal client shoot. Black and white. A specific mood. A consistency across all 102 portraits that turned them into something bigger than the sum of their parts. That kind of artistic latitude isn’t always available on a corporate job, but the eye I built making it absolutely is. Every founder I photograph for Vliegwiel makes me better at photographing the next executive who walks into a stuffy office and says “I’m not photogenic.”

The art practice feeds the client work. The client work funds the art practice. Each one makes the other one better.

Back to the founder from the beginning. We shot for about four minutes. She picked her favorite frame within ten seconds of seeing it on the screen. She emailed me a few days later to say it was the first photo of herself she’d been able to use without wincing in years.

This is the part of the job I love the most. To provide that moment when a person sees themselves and recognizes what other people have been seeing all along.

If your company, or your founder friend, or your team is due for portraits and you’re tired of the functional kind, you know where to find me. I’d love to make something that doesn’t look like everyone else’s.

But that’s not really what I want to ask you about this week.

What I actually want to know is: what’s the best portrait you’ve ever taken of someone you care about? The one that surprised you but especially also that person. Tell me about the person, the moment, why it worked. I think a lot of us are quietly insecure about our ability to photograph the people in our lives, and I want to hear about the times it worked.

Drop it in the comments. I’ll read every one and I will pick one randomly to win a $150 gift card to the Moment store.

Leave a comment

See you next Sunday, when I will tell you about the next big project I am working on. It’s about an amazing artist village.

Warmly,

Wesley

Thank you, as always, for reading. If this issue moved you, the best thing you can do is share it with one friend you think would appreciate it.

Share

Giveaway — Your Turn

Here’s my question for this week’s giveaway:

What’s the best portrait you’ve ever taken of someone you care about. The one that surprised you because it captured something special fueled by your curiousity and care for this person. I think a lot of us are quietly insecure about our ability to make portraits of the people in our lives, and I want to hear about the times it worked.

Leave your answer in the comments and inspire others with your curiosity. I’ll pick one commenter at random to receive a goodie bag including some rare film, some zines and prints, and a few other surprises.

Leave a comment

NEW WORKSHOP ON SALE NOW

May 23, London — Shane Taylor (Framelines) and I are co-hosting a day-long workshop in London for photographers who care about their work and could use help with the questions:

1. What am I actually trying to say?

2. How do I turn that into a real project?

Morning sessions, communal lunch, afternoon street shooting. Info and tickets at developworkshops.com.

The price is €275/£250 and Process Photo Club members get €75 off (just email me at hello@wesley.co and I’ll send you a discounted booking link.) Not a member yet? Check out the PPC perks page or click below.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Camera + Tools

Camera: Canon EOS R5 and the Canon RF 24-70 mm f/2.8 L IS USM.

Lab: All my film is developed with love by Carmencita Film Lab. Use code “PROCESS“ for a free upgrade.

A Few Ways To Support This Work

If Process adds something to your week, here's how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo book NOTICE Journal Volume One or the Process Workbook series. Every physical order includes a limited edition Creatives In/AMS preview zine, a surprise, and stickers.

Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and 100% off all four Workbooks. Not a member yet? Join here.

Subscribe now

🗃️ Browse the Process Archive.

Last Wednesday at 9.30am in the morning, I stood on a stage at Pakhuis De Zwijger in front of 300+ people and handed my new zine to the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Heleen Herberts.

The zine weighs almost nothing. A small run of 500 copies, a beautiful object designed by my friend and longtime collaborator Maxwell George. Inside are 102 portraits of Dutch startup founders and builders, an essay by my project partner Robert Gaal, behind-the-scenes images by Harry Orange, and 16 policy proposals we put together based on the conversations Robert had each of the 102 people while I was photographing them.

Handing the zine to her was one of the more meaningful launch moments of my creative life so far and I’m excited to tell you why that is today.

How Vliegwiel happened

Vliegwiel (Dutch for “flywheel”) is a project Robert and I co-conceived last year. Robert is a longtime tech entrepreneur and a passionate advocate for the Dutch startup ecosystem. I’m a photographer who keeps making what I’ve come to call Community Documentary projects. We looked at the way this community gets covered in the press, which is mostly through the lens of a few cartoonishly wealthy men, and we knew the reality was different.

The reality is a huge, varied group of people who work incredibly hard and sacrifice safe choice, who come from everywhere, who look like the people you run into at your neighborhood grocery store. We wanted to give that reality a face. Actually, 102 faces.

So over the course of two marathon days, I photographed 102 Dutch founders and builders. All ages, all backgrounds, all stages of their journey, working on everything from climate tech to food to hardware to software to biotech. Robert asked each of them the same question during their shoot:

What should the Netherlands do to make startups more successful?

The answers became the foundation for a page of 16 concrete proposals, organized into four categories: Talent, Policy, Investment, and Culture. We had the ambition to get the zine into the hands of someone who could do something about it.

What I love about shoots like this

When you photograph 102 people from one community, you start to feel something that’s impossible to feel from photographing just a few and one at a time. You start to feel the shape of what moves them. You start to hear the same hopes and frustrations coming from completely different mouths, and you can get a feel for what the community actually is, underneath the headlines and the surface stuff.

With the Vliegwiel founders, something that came up in each conversation was this relentless and unreasonable commitment to solving a problem. It’s the same quality I recognize in the artists and photographers I admire most. It’s a particular kind of stubbornness that refuses to let go of a question once it has you. I walked away from almost every shoot thinking, okay, these people are my people, even though we work on very different things and we have very different lives.

The other thing I love about shoots like this is that most of the people I photograph for Community Documentary projects are not people who get photographed a lot. They walk into the studio or their office and they apologize. They tell me they’re not photogenic. They tell me they hate photos of themselves. They’re nervous, they’re busy, they fidget, they pull at their collars. This happens over and over and over.

And then, when I show them the result on the monitor, I see watch their shoulders relax and watch their face change into a smile or a relieved surprise. I watch them realize that the version of themselves they’ve been carrying around in their head, the one that isn’t photogenic, was just kind of not true.

After the Vliegwiel shoots went out, I started getting messages. Someone asked me to get the file early so she could send it to her mother. Someone told me it was the first picture of themselves they had ever actually liked. Someone told me it was the first time they had felt comfortable while being photographed. These messages are such gifts for me as a craftsperson and a human. It means more than almost anything else.

I keep saying this, but it’s true: getting to give someone that moment is one of the greatest privileges of my job. It has nothing to do with gear and everything to do with slowing down, being present, and actually seeing the person in front of you.

Back to the Minister

So, on April 1st, Robert and I got on stage at Pakhuis De Zwijger and 300+ people from the Dutch startup community showed up. We talked about the project. We opened up the floor and Robert asked people to share their own answers to the question we had asked all 102 subjects. The stories people told were honest and transparent, and the room listened.

Then we welcomed Heleen Herbert, the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate. In the Dutch system, her portfolio covers pretty much the entire world these founders live in: economic policy, entrepreneurship, innovation, and climate. Her job and this community’s work overlap almost perfectly. We presented her with the very first copy of the zine on stage.

Afterward, we hosted a smaller, more intimate conversation between the minister, Robert, me, and a handful of the entrepreneurs we had photographed. The minister and her team took notes. A lot of notes. They listened. They asked follow-up questions. They said, clearly and repeatedly, that they wanted to be an ally to this community for the benefit of the country

I want to tell you what that moment felt like for me personally, because I’m still processing it. I grew up in a small town in a rural, long-ignored part of the Netherlands. Then I moved to New York when I was still a youth and stayed there for twenty years. I built a life and a career there. Coming back home and finding myself on a stage in Amsterdam, handing a zine I made with one of my best friends to a minister of my own government, who was sitting there taking notes about what the community had to say, I don’t have clean words for it. It gave me so much fuel. Fuel for more projects, more conversations, more of this particular kind of work.

One last exciting thing was that that same morning, Het Parool, ran a two-page spread about the project on page six, including seven of the portraits. Het Parool regularly wins international awards for newspaper design, and getting to see the work laid out in their pages was an honor.

What Community Documentary actually is

I want to zoom out for a second and talk about why I keep doing this. I started making Community Documentary projects in 2013 with One of Many, which was about the creative communities of twelve cities across the United States. Around 600 people. It was the first time I felt the particular magic of photographing a lot of people from one world and watching a portrait of that world emerge from the collection.

At that time, I didn’t have this category name for it yet. I didn’t even have a plan. I was just trying to make sense of the world around me and a camera gives me permission to ask questions and dig deeper.

Since then, the format has become the thing I keep returning to. Last year it was The Best Medicine, about 101 comedians. This year it’s Vliegwiel. Later this year, two more are launching: one about Ruigoord, the iconic and historic artist village near Amsterdam, and Creatives In/AMS, which I’ve been working on for five years and which is a spiritual sequel to One of Many, this time focused entirely on the creative community of Amsterdam.

The format is simple.

• Pick a community you want to understand.

• Photograph an unreasonably large number of community members, with care, one at a time.

• Ask them genuine questions.

• Put the work together into something physical.

• Gather everyone in a room. Celebrate them. Give them something they can hold.

What I’ve learned from doing this over and over is that communities recognize themselves when you show them to themselves. And sometimes, the people who can make a positive impact about the community’s future may listen in as well.

I have to give a shout out to my friends at the Newspaper Club here, who have been my printing partner on two zines now. They have done a phenomenal job both times and I can’t wait for the next one. Not an ad, or a sponsorship, we were just a paying customer here, but credit where credit is due!

Giveaway — Your Turn

Here’s my question for this week’s giveaway:

What community, local to where you live, would you love to document? It can be a group of craftspeople, a subculture, a neighborhood, a profession, a hobby club, anything. Tell me who they are and why they pull at you.

Leave your answer in the comments and inspire others with your curiosity. I’ll pick one reader at random to receive a copy of the Vliegwiel zine (which is not available for sale anywhere, the entire run of 500 has been distributed within the community) along with a goodie bag including some rare film and a few other surprises.

Leave a comment

NEXT WEEK: I’ll write about my client work as a portrait photographer for startups and companies, and why those sessions have become some of my favorite work to do. It connects directly to what I wrote above about watching people’s shoulders drop.

Warmly,

Wesley

Thank you, as always, for reading. If this issue moved you, the best thing you can do is share it with one friend you think would appreciate it.

Share

NEW WORKSHOP ON SALE NOW

May 23, London — Shane Taylor (Framelines) and I are co-hosting a day-long workshop in London for photographers who care about their work and could use help with the questions:

1. What am I actually trying to say?

2. How do I turn that into a real project?

Morning sessions, communal lunch, afternoon street shooting. Info and tickets at developworkshops.com.

The price is €275/£250 and Process Photo Club members get €75 off (just email me at hello@wesley.co and I’ll send you a discounted booking link.) Not a member yet? Check out the PPC perks page or click below.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Camera + Tools

Camera: Studio: Canon EOS R5 and the Canon RF 24-70 mm f/2.8 L IS USM.

Lab: All my film is developed with love by Carmencita Film Lab. Use code “PROCESS“ for a free upgrade.

A Few Ways To Support This Work

If Process adds something to your week, here's how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo book NOTICE Journal Volume One or the Process Workbook series. Every physical order includes a limited edition Creatives In/AMS preview zine, a surprise, and stickers.

Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and 100% off all four Workbooks. Not a member yet? Join here.

Subscribe now

🗃️ Browse the Process Archive.

In 2013, artist and director Steve McQueen gave a talk at the Apple Store in Brooklyn. I wasn’t there, but I listened to a recording of it not long after, and I noted down something he said and referred back to it every few years since then. It started with:

“We’re all gonna die, might as well go for it.”

I wrote it down and I carried it with me. Over time, the way these things happen, the idea absorbed into my thinking so completely that I forgot where it came from exactly. It became just a thing I believed, detached from its origin, floating free in my head.

Here is the quote with more context:

“We’re all gonna die, might as well go for it. Risk, try, experiment, fail, fail better. I don’t mind making myself into a fool. I’m way not cool, and I’m happy because I’m just trying to make shit happen. Through experimenting and challenging, you somehow get through and something can actually happen that you never thought would. It’s not about taking risk for risk’s sake, but for the art’s sake. You always fail, because you always come up with a question, and you always try to answer it with the next thing, which then becomes another question. It’s a conversation.”1

A few weeks ago, I was going in circles again about my website. Fine art on one side, commercial work on the other, short comedic films somewhere in the mix. My old worry popped up again. What if someone from the fine art world lands on my site to look at my fine art photo books and sees I also shoot executive portraits for companies as well, or that I do improv on stage, will they take the photography seriously? Should I split everything up? Have separate identities for separate rooms?

I’ve been in this loop before. It never fully resolves, it just quiets down for a while and then comes back.

Then I was offered a beautiful portrait assignment. To photograph my first ever Oscar winner, a Turner Prize winner, one of the most prominent artists working today. Steve McQueen. I started doing my research and prep, the way I do before any shoot, and I put on an interview he’d given while I was strolling around taking some street photos. And there it was. The quote I’d been carrying for over a decade as inspiration and consolation, and I suddenly remembered where it came from.

Full circle doesn’t quite cover the feeling.

The shoot was at Studio 13, my home away from home here in Amsterdam. It was just Steve, my intern Pauline, and me. I put on Miles Davis, the way I always do when I want to settle my nerves and bring some calm into the room. Turns out Steve is a serious Miles fan. We ended up talking about that for a while. I mentioned I’d worked at a jazz label in New York, that given the choice I’d have put on some Coltrane hard bop, but that’s too frantic for a portrait session and most people find it disorienting. Steve agreed. We talked about Brooklyn, and I told him about this full circle quote moment and how it had inspired me for years to keep pushing.

Steve was patient and generous with his time. The Erasmus team had been clear about how much time we had, a full hour which is more than I’d usually expect to get. At some point I got in my head about it, feeling like I was taking too long, even though nothing Steve did suggested that. That’s the lesson I’m taking for myself from this shoot: when someone gives you time and space, take it. Stop second-guessing the permission you’ve already been given.

Steve McQueen works across installation, photography, film, and multi-media projects. He doesn’t seem to sort these into separate rooms or worry about which audience belongs to which work. The thing he’s chasing is the question, and then the next question. The form it takes seems to be secondary. I love this, naturally.

I think about the website worry I was having a few weeks ago and it feels smaller now. Not solved, but smaller. The fine art crowd, the commercial clients, the people who come for the comedy videos: they are all looking at the same person making the same work, chasing down questions, and helping people answer theirs. I don’t need a different door for each of them.

Takeaways

What I got out of this interaction and the 2013 interview:

• Art is Not About Perfection : Viewing art as something that we do to try to answer a question, to create a conversation, not just an idealized final result.

• The Power of Vulnerability: Throw yourself into a creation, accepting the fragility of the process.

• Experimentation: The goal is to experiment and take risks, not to avoid failure.

Congratulations to Steve McQueen on being awarded the Erasmus Prize. And thank you to Lauren and the team at the Erasmus Foundation for trusting me with this assignment. It’s not often that a shoot gives you back something like this.

NEXT WEEK: A recap of the launch event of the Vliegwiel portrait zine, the press around it, and the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs receiving the first copy!

Keep shooting, sharing, feeling.

Wesley

If this letter did something for you, I’d really appreciate it if you shared it with a friend. ❤️

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Giveaway — Your Turn

Is there a quote or idea you’ve been carrying for years that inspires, consoles, or empowers you? Share it in the comments, and if you remember the source, even better.

Leave a comment

One commenter will receive some rare expired film, a photo book from my collection, some studio goodies, and whatever else I find.

Quick Links

• NEW Photography Workshop — May 23, London — Shane Taylor (Framelines) and I are co-hosting a day-long workshop in London for photographers who care about their work and could use help with the questions:

  1. What am I actually trying to say?

  2. How do I turn that into a real project?
     

  Morning sessions, communal lunch, afternoon street shooting. Info and tickets at developworkshops.com.
  
  The price is €275/£250 and Process Photo Club members get €75 off (just email me at hello@wesley.co and I’ll send you a discounted booking link.) Not a member yet? Check out the PPC perks page or click below.
  

  Subscribe now

• Top 10 Photography Locations in Paris — I wrote an article for the MPB website about ten amazing spots in Paris to visit to take pictures. My good friend Dan Umareta is Paris-based and provided gorgeous images for each spot. Read it in full here.

This Week’s Camera + Tools

Camera: Studio: Canon EOS R5 and the Canon RF 24-70 mm f/2.8 L IS USM, Hasselblad 500cm, Mamiya 645 Pro.

Film Stock: Kodak Portra 400, Kodak Portra 400 VC 220

Lab: All my film is developed with love by Carmencita Film Lab. Use code “PROCESS“ for a free upgrade.

A Few Ways To Support This Work

If Process adds something to your week, here's how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo book NOTICE Journal Volume One or the Process Workbook series. Every physical order includes a limited edition Creatives In/AMS preview zine, a surprise, and stickers.

Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and 100% off all four Workbooks. Not a member yet? Join here.

Subscribe now

🗃️ Browse the Process Archive.

This week I’m handing over most of the talking to the pictures. I went through my archive and pulled ten photos of people and places where something felt off. Not dramatically wrong. Just... not quite as it should be. The kind of scenes that made me stop and look twice.

I loved sequencing these. I hope they make you look twice, too.

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I’ve been thinking about the kinds of photos that stick with me longest. They’re rarely the ones that explain themselves. They’re the ones that raise a question I can’t fully answer.

A good photograph doesn’t need to resolve anything. Sometimes the best thing it can do is make you feel like you walked into the middle of a conversation and can’t quite figure out what everyone’s talking about.

These ten pictures come from Mexico City, Amsterdam, Berlin, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Paris, Brooklyn, Rome, Vancouver, and Rotterdam. Different years, different cameras, different light. What they share is that small friction. Something in the frame that doesn’t sit easy.

I think we’re trained to look for clarity in photographs. Clean compositions, obvious subjects, tidy stories. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s another kind of looking that I find more interesting: the kind where you’re not sure what you’re seeing, and you stay with it because of that uncertainty.

When I was sequencing these, I noticed something. The photos I kept coming back to weren’t the strangest ones. They were the quietest ones. The ones where the question was barely a whisper.

If you want to try this yourself, here’s a starting point: go through your archive and look for photos you almost deleted. The ones that felt like mistakes or misfires. Look at them again with fresh eyes and ask yourself what question they’re asking. You might be surprised by what you find.

That’s it for this week.

Next week: My experience taking portraits of an Oscar winner for the first time, and one who has greatly inspired me years before this all came together.

Let’s keep shooting, learning, and sharing.

Warmly,

Wesley

Workshop + Zine Launch Event

• Voice & Vision Workshop, London — May 23 & 24 — Shane Taylor (Framelines) and I are co-hosting a day-long workshop I am very excited about. Two dates available, 15 spots each. For photographers who care about their work and want clarity on what they’re saying and where it’s going. Morning sessions, communal lunch, afternoon street shooting. €275/£250. Book at developworkshops.com

• New Zine Launch Event — On April 1st, I'm presenting Vliegwiel at Pakhuis De Zwijger in Amsterdam. The project: 102 portraits of Dutch startup founders, each interviewed by my collaborator Robert Gaal about building a company in the Netherlands. We'll present the findings and the portrait zine to the newly elected Minister of Economic Affairs. Closed event, but email me if you'd like to join. BTS video from the studio sessions here.

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Your Turn — Giveaway

Leave a comment and share with us: do you have a photo that asks a question instead of giving an answer? It can be something that felt like a mistake at first, a scene that still puzzles you, or a frame where the mood is hard to pin down. I'll randomly pick one person to receive a mystery goodie bag from my studio with a photo book, some rolls of rare film, test prints, or whatever I pull from the drawer that week.

Leave a comment

This Week’s Camera + Tools

Camera: Canon 5D Mark IV, Fuji X100F, and Canon EOS R5 and the Canon RF 24-70 mm f/2.8 L IS USM.

Process is supported by Squarespace, which I’ve used to host my portfolio for over a decade. It has made it easy for me as someone without web design experience to present my work professionally to show my work, attract client, and have an online shop to sell my photo books, prints, and ebooks.

If you’re looking for a home for your work, especially if you shoot in series, it’s worth checking out. I can recommend it, based on my personal experience. Use code WESLEY for 10% off any Squarespace subscription.

Lab: All my film is developed with love by Carmencita Film Lab. Use code “PROCESS“ for a free upgrade.

A Few Ways To Support This Work

If Process adds something to your week, here's how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo book NOTICE Journal Volume One or the Process Workbook series. Every physical order includes a limited edition Creatives In/AMS preview zine, a surprise, and stickers.

Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and 100% off all four Workbooks. Not a member yet? Join here.

Subscribe now

🗃️ Browse the Process Archive.

Dear friends,

A few weeks ago a friend sent me a photo of a handwritten note by artist Robert Rauschenberg. It’s from 1981, written on lined paper in thick pencil, and I loved it. I sat with it and mulled it over in the context of my own practice as a photographer.

Most people know Rauschenberg as a painter, sculptor, and he is considered one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. What you may not realize is that he was also a deeply committed photographer. In this note, he tries to explain why. He writes that his interest in photography began in 1949, and that it was “first supported by a personal conflict between shyness and curiosity.” Oh boy, do I relate to that! He then puts it even more practically by writing:

I’ve never seen anyone put it so simply and so honestly! I relate, again!

I don’t think most people who know me would describe me as a shy person. I talk to strangers, I host events, I get on stage to do comedy. But there is a version of me, maybe the truest version, that is still quite uncomfortable at parties or in various social settings. But when I have a camera on me, everything changes. I even bring it to parties sometimes when I know I am low on social interaction energy, because I can always feel like myself and have fun when I’m taking pictures.

When I’m holding a camera, I have permission to look. To really look, in a way that would be uncomfortable without a camera. I can stand on a street corner and stare at the people walking by, out of curiosity and appreciation, and instead of being a weirdo, I’m a photographer. I can walk into a room full of people I don’t know and start a conversation, because I’m there to document something. The camera turns my curiosity into purpose. It takes the part of you that wants to observe everything and gives it a job title.

Rauschenberg understood this in 1949. And by 1981, when he wrote this note, his relationship with the camera had evolved. He writes that he no longer thinks of the camera as a shield but as "my permission to walk into every shadow or watch while any light changes." The defensive concept had become something more open and proactive. Not hiding behind the camera, but using it to move toward things.

To me, that shift from shield to permission slip is one of the most important things that can happen in a photographer’s development. And I think most of us go through some version of it.

My friend Shane Taylor, who runs Framelines Magazine, and I have talked about this a lot. Over time we've both noticed that so many photographers are introverts. The camera draws in quiet, observant people. But being a solitary person makes it so much harder to push your craft and get feedback. Without that, it’s hard to figure out what your work is actually about.

Both of us, independently, started building things to help with that. Shane co-founded Framelines to publish a print magazine, make videos, and started hosting photo walks. I built Process and started doing the same. Now we're teaming up to host our FIRST PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP together in London this May.

It's called Voice & Vision, a full day at The Photographer's Gallery focused on helping you figure out what you're trying to say with your photography, and building a concrete plan to go do it. More details below.

But back to Rauschenberg's note, because there's another line I keep coming back to. He describes photography as:

Archaeology is usually about digging into the past, about uncovering things that have already happened. But Rauschenberg talks about photography as an archaeology of the present, excavating the moment as it happens. In other words: When we take a photo, the moment we documented is already past and gone.

This is the tension that makes photography so addictive to me. Every moment is unrepeatable. The light on that building will never look exactly like that again. The expression on that person’s face exists for a moment and then it’s over. When you’re tuned into that it creates an urgency that’s almost physical. I love that feeling.

Rauschenberg wrote this note forty-four years ago today. He was describing a practice he’d been engaged in for over thirty years at that point. But when I read it, it feels like it could have been written yesterday by any one of us trying to figure out why we keep picking up a camera.

It goes to show that the fundamental questions of photography don’t change. The platforms and the conversation and the gear all change. But the question of why you make pictures, what you’re looking for, what you’re hiding from, what you’re trying to say? All of those stay the same.

If you’re someone who started taking photos because you were curious about the world but unsure how to engage with it, you’re in good company. Welcome to the club. Rauschenberg was right there with us, trying to explain it to himself on a sheet of lined paper.

The camera is a social shield. And then it becomes a permission slip. And then, if you stick with it long enough, it becomes something else entirely. It becomes a way of caring about and understanding the world. That’s what our workshop is about, and Shane and I are so excited to welcome you to it in May. Scroll down for more info.

If this letter did something for you, I’d really appreciate it if you shared it with a friend. ❤️

Share

See you next week! Possibly some preview images of a portrait shoot I have this week with someone whose work I admire very much.

Talk soon,

Wesley

NEW: Voice & Vision Workshop with Shane Taylor, London, May 23 & 24

Shane of Framelines and I are co-hosting a one-day workshop at The Photographer’s Gallery. It’s for photographers who care about their work and could use help with the questions:

1. What am I actually trying to say?

2. How do I turn that into a real project?

Whether you have a body of work but no clear through-line, or you’ve been putting off a long-term project, or you want honest feedback on your photographic direction, this day is built for that. It doesn’t matter where you are in your practice or how technically adept you are. What matters is that you care about photography and want to do something meaningful with it.

Morning teaching sessions, communal lunch, afternoon shooting on the streets together. 15 people max per day. €275/£250. Two dates to choose from. For all the details and to book your spot: developworkshops.com

Process Photo Club members: You get €75 off this workshop (27% off). Email me at hello@wesley.co and I'll send you a discounted booking link. To become a member, check out the PPC perks page or click below.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Camera + Tools

Camera: Hasselblad 500cm, Pentax Espio Mini, Leica M6
My current go-to: Canon EOS R5 and the Canon RF 24-70 mm f/2.8 L IS USM

Process is supported by MPB.com, my go-to for buying, selling, or trading used gear. Everything comes with a 12-month warranty.

Lab: All my film is developed with love by Carmencita Film Lab. Use code “PROCESS“ for a free upgrade.

A Few Ways To Support This Work

If Process adds something to your week, here's how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo book NOTICE Journal Volume One or the Process Workbook series. Every physical order includes a limited edition Creatives In/AMS preview zine, a surprise, and stickers.

Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and 100% off all four Workbooks. Not a member yet? Join here.

Subscribe now

🗃️ Browse the Process Archive.

A few days ago I got a DM on Instagram from a man named Antonio.

He told me he’d found a photo I took of his late father-in-law. A bookstore owner in Buenos Aires. I photographed him in 2018. Antonio’s father-in-law passed away in 2021, and Antonio wanted to share the photo with his wife and daughter.

Before I even clicked the link he sent, I knew exactly who he was talking about.

That doesn’t always happen. I photograph a lot of people, and I remember many (so far!), but some people stick out a bit more than others. This particular man was one of those people.

We didn’t really share a language, but we had an understanding. He was warm, open, quietly proud of his shop. I had walked by, and saw him sitting outside on the steps in front of his shop, and somehow asked if I could take his portrait. He said yes with his whole face. I took one picture, said thank you and kept walking. His name was Enrique Nicolas Tempone, which I noted down in my roll notes, along with the name of his book shop, El Rufian Melancolico, right on Bolivar.

That single frame came back to me eight years later as something meaningful to a family. Which, in turn, makes it more meaningful to me than I can explain. Here it is:

I’ve been lucky enough to spend real time walking cities with a camera and no agenda. Tokyo, Mexico City, Paris, New York, Barcelona, Buenos Aires. Street portraiture is my favorite way to actually feel a place. Not the monuments or the food or the light, though all of that matters too. The people who are all a little bit of the city, who’ve been shaped by it and shaped it back.

Buenos Aires has a lot of bookstores, and I love that about a city. There are these small independent shops tucked into neighborhoods that somehow survive, internet be damned. The owners tend to be a certain type, pulled straight from a charming 1970’s film. Knowledgeable, proud, relaxed. Enrique was exactly that type.

Here are a few more images from my Buenos Aires walks around that same time.

Athon

This is what photography can be and do. It creates a record that outlives the moment and occasionally finds its way back to you in unexpected ways.

I don’t photograph strangers to document them for their families. I do it because I find people genuinely interesting and I want to practice seeing, and because a great portrait is a small act of acknowledgment. It’s an “I see you, you’re worth looking at.”

It's not the first time a photo has come back to me this way. Every now and then I get a message that makes the picture matter more, usually because someone had passed away. One of those moments, probably the most shocking one, was when I heard a young man I had photographed for my series One of Many in Savannah, GA, had passed away. His name was Ahton. I was asked if the picture could be used as part of a memorial, which was a big honor for me.

Antonio’s message reminded me why I still stop people on the street after all these years. Why I still ask. Why I still carry a camera when I have no assignment and no plan.

One photo. Eight years. A bookstore in Buenos Aires.

That’s enough.

If you enjoyed this issue, I’d really appreciate it if you shared it with a friend. ❤️

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Your Turn — $150 Moment Gift Certificate Giveaway

Has a photo ever meant more to you after the fact than it did when you took it? Tell me about it in the comments.

One commenter picked at random will receive a $150 gift card to the Moment shop, where you can find great film, cameras, and gear worth a browse even if you don’t win.

Leave a comment

Next Week: Camera as a social shield, Robert Rausch, and new tools

Talk soon,

Wesley

PS Look at this awesome illustration Tim van Damme made for a Process Roll Notes app I am working on. More on this next week!

PPS If you happened to find yourself here but aren't yet a subscriber, hit the button below and receive Process every Sunday.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Camera + Tools

Camera: Pentax 67ii + 105mm 2.4 + Canon 5D Mark IV.

My current digital setup: Canon EOS R5 and the Canon RF 24-70 mm f/2.8 L IS USM

Film Stock: Kodak Portra 400

Process is supported by MPB.com, my go-to for buying, selling, or trading used gear. Everything comes with a 12-month warranty.

Lab: All my film is developed with love by Carmencita Film Lab. Use code “PROCESS“ for a free upgrade.

A Few Ways To Support This Work

If Process adds something to your week, here's how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo book NOTICE Journal Volume One or the Process Workbook series. Every physical order includes a limited edition Creatives In/AMS preview zine, a surprise, and stickers.

Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and 100% off all four Workbooks. Not a member yet? Join here.

Subscribe now

🗃️ Browse the Process Archive.

This week I got to play with a brand new film stock that was announced a few days ago, and instead of doing a normal review, I made a surrealist short film. Welcome, Harman Switch Azure!

SWITCHING THINGS UP

A few weeks ago, Harman sent me some rolls of a new film they were about to release. It’s called Harman Switch Azure, and it’s unlike anything I’ve shot before. It’s an ISO 125 color film where the colors “switch” in unexpected ways. Blues become orange. Yellows shift to a vibrant azure. Reds transform into purple-blue hues. Skin tones go somewhere completely unfamiliar.

My first instinct was, my regular instinct which is that I am never really all that interesting in making a standard “new film stock review” video or newsletter. I’m not very good at those, and I get bored easily so to just stand in front of a camera and hold up a canister and talk about latitude and grain for eight minutes? More power to my friends and colleagues who can do that, it does serve a purpose, but it’s just not for me and my wacky little ADHD brain.

What I wanted to do instead was use this weird, unpredictable film as a plot device.

Here’s the backstory. My friend is an actor and performer who recently moved back to Amsterdam after two years in India. He needed new headshots. Real ones, for real auditions. So we planned a shoot at Studio 13.

A couple of months ago, I had appeared in a stage reading of Home Alone with Gene Freidenfelds, an Australian standup comedian and filmmaker. You read that right. A stage reading of Home Alone. I played the Joe Pesci part, Gene with his whole 6’4” body played young Kevin. Amsterdam’s English-language comedy scene is a beautiful and strange place. Gene and I got to talking about what we love in short films, and we kept coming back to the same thing: originality. Doing something that could only exist because of the specific people involved.

So we decided to make something small together to see how we worked together. I’m thrilled with how it came out. Check it out here:

The idea was simple. Wesley the photographer (a slightly confused, fictionalized version of me) is doing a normal portrait session with Simon. The assistant, masterfully played by my friend Jens, pops open a roll of Harman Switch Azure. Then things start to get weird. Colors shift. Reality bends. Wesley is alarmed. Simon is excited. Jens is….something altogether different.

We shot it in a couple of hours and had the best time.

After we wrapped the video, Simon and I stayed at Studio 13 and I shot his actual headshots digitally. The Switch Azure portraits may not work for actor headshots but they sure are fun!

When you get the scans back from an experimental film like this, you don’t know exactly what you’re going to see. That’s the whole point. The colors don’t follow the rules you’re used to. A light blue backdrop turns red. Skin tones shift into territory that feels almost hand-painted and let’s call it “dark Smurf” in color. I love the way these came out.

I also ended up taking some pictures of Jens on Switch Azure.

I shot the medium format rolls on my Hasselblad 500cm and the 35mm on my Contax G2. Both cameras handled Switch Azure well, though I’ll say the medium format negatives were richer in the reds than the 35mm one, which I preferred. I edited the 35mm ones to match the 120 to keep the look consistent.

Harman Switch Azure is available now in both 35mm and 120. It’s rated at ISO 125, and Harman recommends shooting it at box speed for the best results. One thing worth knowing: it scans differently depending on your setup. Frontier, Noritsu, and flatbed/DSLR scanning all produce noticeably different looks, so talk to your lab about what to expect.

If you enjoyed this issue, I’d really appreciate it if you shared it with a friend. ❤️

Share

Your Turn — Film Giveaway

What is your favorite film stock to shoot at the moment and why? Leave a comment so we can all be inspired by each other.

I will randomly select one commenter to receive a mystery goodie bag from my studio with a photo book, a roll of Harman Switch Azure plus some rolls of rare expired film, some test prints, or whatever I pull from the drawer that week.

Leave a comment

Next Week: A special and very moving note I receive about a portrait I took on the street in Buenos Aires eight years ago.

Talk soon,

Wesley

PS Look at this awesome illustration Tim van Damme made for a Process Roll Notes app I am working on. More on this next week!

PPS If you happened to find yourself here but aren't yet a subscriber, hit the button below and receive Process every Sunday.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Camera + Tools

Camera: Hasselblad 500cm, Contax G2

Film Stock: Harman Switch Azure (120 + 35mm)

Process is supported by MPB.com, my go-to for buying, selling, or trading used gear. Everything comes with a 12-month warranty.

Lab: All my film is developed with love by Carmencita Film Lab. Use code “PROCESS“ for a free upgrade.

A Few Ways To Support This Work

If Process adds something to your week, here's how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo book NOTICE Journal Volume One or the Process Workbook series. Every physical order includes a limited edition Creatives In/AMS preview zine, a surprise, and stickers.

Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and 100% off all four Workbooks. Not a member yet? Join here.

Subscribe now

🗃️ Browse the Process Archive.

There’s this cliché that every photographer secretly wants to be a filmmaker, and every filmmaker secretly wants to be a photographer. Like most clichés, it’s funny because it’s true.

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to make films.1 Back in the 2010s, when I was still living in New York, I wrote and directed a few music videos. They were scrappy and fun and I learned a ton doing them, but life moved in other directions and for years the filmmaking itch went mostly unscratched. I kept shooting stills. I built Process. I curated exhibitions at ICP. That entire time, somewhere in the back of my head was a voice going: Someday, and that day may never come, you are going to make films.2

Over the past couple of years, that voice got louder. And instead of ignoring it, I started listening and I started feeling more ready.

Taking Steps Towards Filmmaking

It started with documentary-style videos about cameras and photography. Some of you might have seen the one I made with my friend Luc Satter about the Pentax 17.

Or the one about the Kodak Tri-X Disposable camera when it first came out, shot by my buddy Ribsy and edited by Tycjan.

Those felt like a natural extension of what I was already doing with Process. It was me telling stories about photography, just in a different medium. The camera and the film stock were still the subject. I was still the photographer talking about photography.

Then something shifted when my passion for improv comedy and my position in that community started escalating. I joined an improv group here in Amsterdam called Gang of Parrots and was a cast member on the house team of the main improv theater for a few seasons. Through that I ended up surrounded by some seriously talented performers, writers, and comedians.

When you spend enough time on stage making stuff up with people who are fearless about looking stupid, it changes how you think about storytelling. You learn to commit to an idea before you know where it's going. To say yes and build on it. To trust the people you're working with. You're making it up as you go.3 All of which, it turns out, are exactly the skills you need when you're directing actors in a short film or being an actor yourself.

So the videos started to change. I moved from documentary to mockumentary. Then from mockumentary to narrative fiction. I started writing scripts, actual scripts with characters and dialogue and story arcs. And instead of me standing in front of the camera talking about a piece of gear, I was on camera with other people in scenes I’d written. You can see this in the 6-episode first season of my series The Chain, which I recently completed. (See below)

Photography vs Filmmaking

The biggest difference between photography and filmmaking, for me, isn’t the technical stuff. It’s that in photography you can do most things by yourself. You grab a camera, you walk out the door, and whatever happens between you and the world is yours to capture. There’s a beautiful simplicity to that. But filmmaking doesn’t work that way. You need people. You need someone who knows how to light a scene, someone who can operate a camera in ways you can’t, someone who can take your raw footage and shape it into something better than what you imagined. You need actors who are willing to trust your vision even when you’re still figuring it out yourself.

I’ve been incredibly lucky in that department. For the commercial and branded video work, I’ve been collaborating with my friend Alain Galje, who brings a speed and precision to our projects that help my strange surrealist scripts work, like the recent Excire ad below:

For the narrative and comedy stuff, the weird, personal, slightly unhinged videos I’ve been working with my friend Harry Orange as videographer and editor.

The Camera We Use

Harry is the one who introduced me to the Panasonic Lumix S5IIX. He’s been using it as his go-to video camera for a while now, and when I first saw the footage he was getting out of it, I was genuinely surprised. Not because the specs are bad, but because nobody really talks about this camera. In the online chatter, everyone’s debating the latest Sony or Canon releases, and the S5IIX is just quietly sitting there being one of the best hybrid photo/video cameras you can buy for the price.

What I noticed first was how the footage looked. Clean, with great color and a lot of flexibility in the edit. Harry shoots in V-Log, which gives him over 14 stops of dynamic range to work with in post, and the internal ProRes recording means the files hold up beautifully when you start pushing them around in color grading. For our narrative stuff, where we’ve only been shooting with available light in locations we don’t fully control, that flexibility matters a lot.

The other thing I noticed was how small and light the setup was. Harry would show up to a shoot with the S5IIX and a couple of vintage compact lenses, and that was it. No massive rig, no external recorder, no monitor hanging off the side. The camera has a built-in cooling fan so it can record 4K continuously without overheating, the stabilization is good enough to shoot handheld while walking, though at times we used a tripod as well. For our kind of run-and-gun narrative shooting, where it’s usually just Harry and myself and one guest actor, we’re often working fast with no additional crew in public spaces. That minimal footprint makes a huge difference.

Harry also uses it for stills, and the photos are genuinely so lovely. It has the same 24.2-megapixel full-frame sensor and phase-detect autofocus as the Panasonic S5 II, which is already a fantastic stills camera. So when we’re on set and say Harry wants to grab some behind-the-scenes shots between takes, he can use the same camera to get some great publication-quality photos. One camera body, two completely different jobs, both done well.

After a few months of working with this camera, I understand why Harry swears by it. The Lumix S5IIX is one of those cameras that’s better than its reputation. It deserves more attention than it gets, so I thought I’d do my part here in case one of you is looking.

What’s Next?

My 2026 looks very exciting and film making is a big part of that. Earlier this week, I shot a new video about a not-yet-announced new film stock, which I will post next week. I am in pre-production now for the second season of The Chain, which I am so excited about. Especially about all the new guest actors and the mystery at the heart of the story. I’m also excited to dip back into documentary things again to make more videos around my own photography projects, especially the Community Documentary projects that are coming up. So much video, and all of it is about learning towards the next step of an actual short film in the future.

If this letter did something for you, I’d really appreciate it if you shared it with a friend. ❤️

Share

Your Turn — Giveaway

There are three movie reference hidden in this issue, which you can find by looking for three footnotes. Answer the questions in the footnotes by leaving a comment here and I will randomly select one commenter with three correct answers to receive a mystery goodie bag from my studio with a photo books, some rolls of rare film, some test prints, or whatever I pull from the drawer that week.

Leave a comment

Next Week: A brand new film stock! First couple rolls shot, and it’s WEIRD but awesome. Plus, a new….video!

Talk soon,

Wesley

PS If you happened to find yourself here but aren't yet a subscriber, hit the button below and receive Process every Sunday.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Camera + Tools

Camera: Panasonic Lumix S5IIX, which you can pick up second-hand in “as new" shape from our friends at MPB for under €1500. Way cheaper than other more talked about cameras that have the same or less attractive specs as a hybrid camera.

Process is supported by MPB.com, my go-to for buying, selling, or trading used gear. Everything comes with a 12-month warranty.

Process is also supported by Squarespace, which I’ve used to host my photography portfolio for more than a decade. It made it easy for me as a non-technical person to present my work professionally to attract clients and showcase projects. They’re also been supportive of many creative projects throughout the years, including my own One of Many project back in 2015.

If you’re looking for a home for your work, especially if you shoot in series, it’s worth checking out. I can recommend it, based on my personal experience. Use code WESLEY for 10% off any Squarespace subscription.

Lab: All my film is developed with love by Carmencita Film Lab. Use code “PROCESS“ for a free upgrade.

A Few Ways To Support This Work

If Process adds something to your week, here's how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo book NOTICE Journal Volume One or the Process Workbook series. Every physical order includes a limited edition Creatives In/AMS preview zine, a surprise, and stickers.

Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and 100% off all four Workbooks. Not a member yet? Join here.

Subscribe now

🗃️ Browse the Process Archive.

Last week, a project I’ve been working on with my friends and collaborators Robert Gaal and Sanne Koemeesters officially launched. It’s called Vliegwiel, and it’s a portrait series of 102 Dutch startup founders. All shot in two 10-hour days.

I want to tell you what that was like.

The style I chose was to shoot everything in black and white, in an editorial style. To achieve this our setup was very straightforward:

• a white seamless backdrop courtesy of Studio 13, plus some blocks to sit on

• my Canon R5 with the 24-70mm

• a big vintage continuous barn-door light, plus a handheld bounce and a small Godox V1 flash

Each person got a ten-minute slot, which would include a short three to four minute chat followed by three to four minutes of shooting. If that sounds fast, it is. But fast doesn’t have to mean rushed.

The biggest challenge with a shoot like this isn’t technical, but human. When you’re photographing 50+ people in a single day, many of whom have never done anything like this, the risk is that you fall into a formula and it starts to feel like a conveyer belt. Same angle, same crop, same energy. The work gets flat and impersonal. So the question I kept asking myself was: how do I make person number 47 feel as seen as person number 3?

I’ve been doing this work for 10+ years and it’s always fed by my curiosity about the person in front of my camera. Everyone who walked in front of my camera was building something different. I talked to a founder whose textiles company uses human hair fibers. Another one figured out how to grow hardwood furniture from cells, no trees involved. When you’re learning things like that every ten minutes, it’s hard to go on autopilot.

The other thing that made this work was the environment. Robert and our co-producer Sanne Koemeesters handled all the community management (and more). They did an amazing job curating and scheduling the group and made people feel at home. When you walk into a room with a photographer, two assistants, a BTS photographer, a BTS videographer, and two producer-interviewers, that can be intimidating. Especially if you’re not used to being in front of a camera. But nearly everyone walked in comfortable and open, and I think that’s because they felt seen and appreciated before I ever picked up my camera.

What surprised me most was how genuinely lovely everyone was. Not that I expected otherwise, but there was a warmth and eagerness to connect that I didn’t anticipate at this scale. Between sessions, founders were excitedly meeting each other, swapping stories, finding overlaps. It felt less like a photo shoot and more like a community forming in real time.

If you’ve been following Process for a while, you might see the DNA of many of my other Community Documentary projects in this one, and one project in particular. Last year I did something similar with The Best Medicine: 101 portraits of people from Amsterdam’s English-language comedy community. That shoot was all full-body and expression. Comedians are used to performing, so my job was mostly to prompt and document.

Vliegwiel was different. These founders aren’t performers. They’re builders. So I had to take on more of the creative responsibility to find their story in the frame rather than waiting for them to give it to me. I’m very excited about where I was able to push these portraits with more varied and adventurous compositions and crops. Each portrait is its own thing because each person brought a different energy, and I tried to respond to that instinctively rather than forcing everyone into the same mold.

A word about Robert, because this project doesn’t exist without him. He’s a serial entrepreneur who is currently building Klime, an analytics startup focused on customer intelligence. But what drives him beyond his own company is a deep commitment to the Dutch startup community. He uses his position and voice to advocate for policy changes that would help the whole sector.

Vliegwiel the broader organization is his, and this Vliegwiel portraits project evolved out of one of our breakfast conversations originally. Robert was looking for a way to put a human face on the people who are building companies, creating jobs, and facing real hurdles that better policy could help address. He was also there when I launched The Best Medicine and these things made a lot of sense together.

Aside from Vliegwiel’s online presence there will also be a limited edition zine that’s coming out of this project will featuring all 102 portraits, an essay by Robert, and a set of concrete policy proposals based on the stories from founders and builders. I’m proud to be part of it and thankful to some wonderful partners who made it all possible, including Mollie, Ingen Housz, Remote, Gemeente Amsterdam, Sendcloud, and Klime.

The launch event is happening in late March or early April at an incredible dream of a venue in Amsterdam. More details on that soon.

If there’s a takeaway for your own work, it might be this:

"Two days, 102 people, ten-minute slots" reads like a a recipe for generic work. But the pressure forced me to be present, to listen fast, to trust my instincts. Some of my favorite portraits from the past year came out of those two days. Like this one.

If this letter did something for you, I’d really appreciate it if you shared it with a friend. ❤️

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Your Turn — Giveaway

Is there a constraint you’ve been fighting against that you could flip into a motivator or knife sharpener? Some examples:

1. Can’t afford color film → Shoot black and white and focus on light over color

2. Want to take portraits but don’t know anyone where you live → Focus on just your own street and make a project about your neighbors

Drop your constraint in the comments, no need to add a positive version of it (but feel free to!) and I will respond to all of them with some ideas.

Leave a comment

One commenter gets a mystery goodie bag from my studio with a photo books, some test prints or film, whatever I pull from the drawer that week.

Talk soon,

Wesley

PS If you happened to find yourself here but aren't yet a subscriber, hit the button below and receive Process every Sunday.

Subscribe now

This Week’s Camera + Tools

Camera: Canon EOS R5 + Canon RF 24-70 mm f/2.8 L IS USM

Process is supported by MPB.com, my go-to for buying, selling, or trading used gear. Everything comes with a 12-month warranty.

Lab: All my film is developed with love by Carmencita Film Lab. Use code “PROCESS“ for a free upgrade.

A Few Ways To Support This Work

If Process adds something to your week, here's how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo book NOTICE Journal Volume One or the Process Workbook series. Every physical order includes a limited edition Creatives In/AMS preview zine, a surprise, and stickers.

Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and 100% off all four Workbooks. Not a member yet? Join here.

Subscribe now

🗃️ Browse the Process Archive.

I want to tell you about something I’ve been working through lately, because I think it might be useful to you too.

Right now I’m juggling:

• A portrait series about 100+ Dutch startup founders (Vliegwiel)

• A five-year documentary project about Amsterdam creatives and their workspaces (Creatives In/AMS)

• A portrait series about a very special artist village and 68 people who work there

• A body of work I made in Ukraine this past summer documenting family life during wartime

• A series of fictional comedy videos (The Chain, and one TBD)

• This newsletter and the Process workbooks

On paper, that looks scattered and insane and maybe even reckless. A few months ago it kind of felt that way too. It wasn’t planned to all come at once, and so I had that familiar feeling of being pulled in too many directions, unsure if any of it added up. You probably know that feeling whether you’re full time, or balancing a day job with creative project and family life. You’re making work, maybe good work, but the thread between it all has gone slack.

So I sat down and tried to figure out what was actually going on by asking myself three honest foundational questions.

The first one:

Who am I as a photographer? Not in a branding sense, but more so in the sense of what it is that I always come back to. For me, the answer was pretty clear once I stopped overthinking it. I find stories about people who I think are special and that deserve more attention, and I share them with the hope that they might inspire someone to pursue or experience something they needed a nudge for. That’s true whether I’m in a sign-painting studio in Amsterdam for my Creatives project, or sitting with family in their kitchen in Ukraine. The settings are wildly different. The drive is the same.

If you feel like your work is all over the place, it might help to look at it this way. Not at the subjects, but at what pulled you toward them. When you stop to really think about it, there’s usually a pretty clear and consistent pattern to be found.

The second question:

What am I actually building?

This is where I got the most clarity. Instead of trying to make one giant project that contains everything, I started thinking of my work as separate containers. Flywheel is about giving a human face to startups by showing the founders who are building companies and creating jobs, the hurdles they face, the lessons they’ve learned. And ultimately, it is our ambition to make the people in government who shape policy aware of how they could better support these builders for the greater good.

Creatives In/AMS is about showing the world that Amsterdam is home to an amazingly talented, diverse, and significant community of creatives that most people outside the Netherlands don’t know about. The Ukraine work is about resilience and holding onto daily life rituals and family under impossible circumstances.

The comedic videos and The Best Medicine are about shining a light on the incredible community of English-language comedy in Amsterdam. Each one has its own tone, its own rules, its own reason to exist. They don’t need to be one thing. They just need to come from the same person.

I think a lot of us get stuck because we try to cram every idea into one project or series. We have to remember that we are allowed to make different things, and actually I would even say we should. Depending on how much time you can spend, multiple projects at the same time, as long as they are in different stages (shooting, research, design, etc.) can be great. It gives each idea room to breathe and keeps you from overstuffing any single one.

The third question is the smallest but maybe the most important:

What am I actually doing when I show up?

Unless it’s a client shoot, I tend to not plan out my shoots very much. I don’t walk in with a checklist or a mood board. I approach it more like improv comedy in the sense that I arrive and respond to what I find. I try to figure out the best way to tell the story that’s in front of me. The preparation isn’t in pre-visualizing the shot. It’s in knowing who I am and what I’m building. That’s what allows me to be open when I get there. This is a life-long project, to be in this mind state and not feel insecure or obsess over other people’s expectations, but it’s worth fighting this fight!

I think this is where the first two questions help the most. When we are clear on your identity, and our projects have their own containers, we don’t need to overthink each individual shoot or walk or afternoon with the camera. We can just show up and be curious. The clarity is already there underneath. It frees you up to be responsive instead of rigid. Think of those people who just have a uniform so they don’t have to spend time thinking about what to wear every morning.

These three questions and elements:

• knowing who you are

• giving your ideas their own containers

• trusting yourself to respond in the moment

It’s not some official system with an acronym, but it really helps me when I revisit them every so often. And if it helps to hear: I still don’t have it all figured out. I’m writing this on a Friday afternoon with a to-do list that could fill a notebook and I am performing an improv show tonight. But the work feels right. And that matters more than having it all buttoned up.

If this letter did something for you, I'd really appreciate it if you shared it with a friend. ❤️

Share

Your turn — Giveaway

What are your containers? If you have multiple projects or ideas pulling at you, drop them in the comments. Sometimes just writing the list makes the thread between them visible. One commenter gets a mystery goodie bag from my studio, with a photo book, some test prints or film, whatever I pull from the drawer that week.

Leave a comment

See you next week!

Wesley

PS If you happened to find yourself here but aren't yet a subscriber, hit the button below and receive Process every Sunday.

Subscribe now

From The Studio

I recently shot a new ad for Excire and I’m really proud of how it turned out. We had a very special co-star and he was very hard to work with let me tell ya! If you want to see what happens when you find duplicates everywhere, not just files on your computer, give it a watch: [video link] or click below.

Check out Excire here, and receive 15% off with the coupon code "PROCESS" at checkout. The video was written and directed by me, and shot and edited by the wonderful Alain Galje.

This Week’s Camera + Tools

Camera: Canon EOS R5 + Canon RF 24-70 mm f/2.8 L IS USM, Fuji X100F, Fujifilm GFX 100S with a Fujifilm GF 80mm f/1.7 R WR

Process is supported by MPB.com, my go-to for buying, selling, or trading used gear. Everything comes with a 12-month warranty.

Lab: All my film is developed with love by Carmencita Film Lab. Use code “PROCESS“ for a free upgrade.

A Few Ways To Support This Work

If Process adds something to your week, here's how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo books (NOTICE, NOTICE Journal Volume One) or the Process Workbook series from my shop. Every physical order includes a limited edition Creatives In/AMS preview zine, a surprise, and stickers.

Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and all four Workbooks free. Not a member yet? Join here.

Subscribe now

🗃️ Browse the Process Archive.

A few years ago, I had an early morning portrait shoot in New York City with the CEO of a startup I was really excited about. The plan was to wake up at 6, go over my shot references, check my gear, and leave the house at 8 to arrive with a 15-minute buffer.

The night before, I almost left everything for the morning since I had an hour or two to do 30 minutes of prep. More than enough. But something nudged me to just do it then. So I packed my camera bag, formatted my card, charged the batteries, laid out my clothes, and went to bed.

At some point in the night, the power went out. I woke up to silence. No alarm. I grabbed my phone: 8:02am.

For about three seconds I felt pure panic. Then I looked over at my camera bag, packed and ready by the door. Clothes on the chair. I got dressed, grabbed the bag, and made it to the shoot on time.

That morning I became a real believer in Today Wesley doing favors for Future Wesley.

Somewhere in my Notes app, I have a document called Smart Things I’ve Learned. It’s a mix of lessons from life, friends, the internet, and, of course, from mistakes. Some are practical, some are philosophical, some are silly but useful.

What connect them it the idea that we have to be kind to the person we’re going to be tomorrow. Here are some of my favorite ways.

GETTING THINGS DONE

Do the hard thing first. I tackle my most dreaded task first thing in the morning. Nothing ruins a day like dragging something awful behind you. And it almost always turns out to not be so bad, which gives me momentum for the rest.

10 minutes is often enough. Even 5. When I stop romanticizing long work sessions, I actually get stuff done. Especially when it involves tasks I’d rather avoid, like admin or accounting.

When overwhelmed, I tell myself: just one thing. I break the big scary task into small pieces. I can do the small piece. That gives me momentum to keep going.

Me first. I try to do the important-for-me thing early. A walk, exercise, writing. Before the day gets hijacked by other people’s priorities.

Speaking of getting things done: one rule I use daily is from David Allen’s classic book and system Getting Things Done. If it takes under 2 minutes, do it right away. Emails, taking out the trash, DMs. Small tasks pile up fast when you let them, and it becomes a mountain of overwhelm.

I had the pleasure of photographing and interviewing David last year and we talked about this and a lot more. You can read that conversation here:

TAKING CARE OF FUTURE YOU

“Don’t put it down, put it away.” I don’t always succeed with this one, but when I do, it makes everything easier, especially having focus.

Dedicated life admin time. I have a weekly session on Sunday morning. 30 minutes. Pay bills, plan meals, reply to straggler emails. It helps more than any productivity app.

The gift list. I keep a running list of things people I care about casually say they like. Very handy come birthday season.

Always be early. I plan to be early. I build in 10 or 15 minutes of buffer. Life has a way of throwing something in the way, like an open bridge in Amsterdam or a subway breakdown in New York. This is an especially important rule thanks to my ADHD.

PROTECTING YOUR ENERGY

“Let me check and get back to you.” Instead of saying yes by default, I buy myself a moment. It’s a small sentence that has saved me from a lot of things I didn’t actually want to do, but the people pleaser side of me could have easily fallen into.

Sleep on it. Sleep solves problems better than late-night overthinking. Almost every time. I don’t do late night anything.

Focus on what I can control. The rest is noise. It reminds me of this quote from a book I just finished and really enjoyed:

“Anxiety is optional. If we crash, no amount of worrying will save you. And if we do not crash, then worrying was not necessary.” — from Critical Mass by Daniel Juarez

SHOWING UP FOR OTHERS (AND YOURSELF)

Say their name back. I always ask how to spell someone’s name when I meet them. It helps me actually remember it. Learning and saying people’s names properly matters to me.

Just listen. When someone vents, I try not to fix it and first acknowledge how hard it must be. This is very difficult for me, but it works so much better than jumping straight into problem-solving mode. Not everyone wants advice. Sometimes they just want to be heard. (This took me years to realize.)

Ask for what you want. Say it clearly, and accept that no is a possible answer. This one is hard for us people pleasers and freelancers, but it’s worth practicing.

Owning less makes everything easier. I’m constantly trying to slim down, which is hard for someone with a collector’s mindset who comes from a place of scarcity. But every time I let go of something, I feel a little lighter.

And one more, just for fun.

Upscale hotels always have clean lobbies and bathrooms. Walk in like you belong. Sit down and do some work, use the bathroom. Works especially well when traveling.

Your turn — Giveaway

I shared mine. Now I want to hear yours. What’s a lesson, trick, or habit that has stuck with you? Something you’d tell a friend? It can be about creativity, organization, time, relationships, whatever. Drop it in the comments.

Leave a comment

I’ll randomly pick one commenter to receive a mystery goodie bag from my studio. It might be a few rolls of expired film, a zine, a random photo book, a test print, or whatever I pull from the drawer that week.

Quick favor: if Process has been useful to you, would you mind sharing it with a friend or two? There's a button below that makes it easy. It's the best way to help keep this going, and I really appreciate it. ❤️

Share

Go do something nice for future you this week. Even something small. They'll thank you for it. See you next week!

Wesley

PS If you happened to find yourself here but aren't yet a subscriber, hit the button below and receive Process every Sunday.

Subscribe now

Quick Notes

• New Video — The last episode of my surrealist comedy series The Chain just went live. I play a version of myself and it’s about creativity, self-doubt, and a mysterious woman who sends me to Paris. The entire first season (all 6 episodes) is now up as a playlist on my YouTube channel. If you missed any or want to watch them back to back, here you go: [LINK]. Season 2 is coming this spring.

• Shout Out — My good friend has been hard at work on a beautiful fine art photo book. I’ve been helping him with sequencing, curation, and strategy, and I’m so proud of how far Pie has come with this project. After years of traveling to the furthest outposts in Chile, where he has been documenting the solitude and strength of the last remaining generation of Gauchos, he is ready to share these stories. His Kickstarter has been live for only a few days and he’s already almost at 100%. Check it out here: [LINK].

This Week’s Camera + Tools

Camera: Canon EOS R5 + Canon RF 24-70 mm f/2.8 L IS USM, Pentax 67ii + 105mm 2.4.

Process is supported by MPB.com, my go-to for buying, selling, or trading used gear. Everything comes with a 12-month warranty.

Lab: All my film is developed with love by Carmencita Film Lab. Use code “PROCESS“ for a free upgrade.

A Few Ways To Support This Work

If Process adds something to your week, here's how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo books (NOTICE, NOTICE Journal Volume One) or the Process Workbook series from my shop. Every physical order includes a limited edition Creatives In/AMS preview zine, a surprise, and stickers.

Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and all four Workbooks free. Not a member yet? Join here.

Subscribe now

🗃️ Browse the Process Archive.

That’s musician Jeff Buckley. I heard it recently on of my very favorite podcasts1 and haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

There’s a version of creative advice that tells you to study the greats, learn the rules, master the craft. And that’s not wrong. But Buckley is pointing at something else. He’s saying that the thing that makes your work yours isn’t something you find outside of yourself. It’s already in there. It’s in the strange impulses and in the things you’re fascinated by to the point that it almost embarrasses you. That stuff isn’t a bug in your creative system. It’s the whole point. You may assume that the way you see things is perfectly ordinary and boring, but it’s not.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of photography, but I’ve also been thinking about it through my other creative life. I’ve not mentioned it here often, because I wasn’t sure it belonged in this newsletter. For the past five years, I’ve been performing improv comedy on stage in Amsterdam. I train weekly, I perform multiple times a month in various countries, and it has quietly become one of the most important parts of my creative practice. And it has impacted my confidence as a photographer and writer tremendously as well.

In improv, there’s a teacher and performer named Matt Walsh who put it this way when talking about the insecurities that beginner improvisers may feel, especially in a scene about a topic they aren’t very familiar with:

"If you’re trying to be funny, that’s where you get in trouble. You are enough. You don’t have to put on a show or develop tons more knowledge or fake anything. If you’re in a scene on stage, you have plenty of information in your brain and you have plenty of life experience, so just use that and respond how you would respond. It’s about coming to terms with: I know enough, and I can handle any situation, because I can revert back to how I myself would behave in any situation."2

Buckley and Walsh are saying the same thing. You are enough. You know enough. You are uniquely yourself, and the actual work you have to do is making the mental switch to acknowledge that and let it guide you.

More and more, I’ve been letting these two sides of my creative life talk to each other. You can see it in my narrative video series The Chain, and in the photography videos I’ve been making that have a comedic twist. It took me a while to allow myself to blend these worlds, but once I did it started to feel more like me.

This is also what guided my approach to the next photo book I’m working on now, shot in Ukraine last summer. When I went there, I knew I wasn’t going to photograph the war the way conflict photographers do with a focus on the destruction, the frontlines, the violence. That work is vital, and I have deep respect for the photographers who do it. But I knew it wasn’t me. It’s not what I’m drawn to, and I’m probably too scared to do that work as well.

What I am drawn to is noticing the small details of daily life and the environment of home. A family in the countryside, holding onto routines. The quiet power of normalcy as an act of resistance. Cooking, spending time laughing around a table, visiting a burial place on the birthday of a lost son. A younger version of me might have felt like I should photograph the more obvious subject, the more dramatic story. But leaning into what I was actually drawn to allowed me to be my full self in the work. That’s when the pictures started to feel true.

I see this in my client work too. A big part of what I do is photograph executives and teams for companies. Portraits for websites, recruiting, press. I love this work. I love meeting the people, helping them feel seen. But for years, I put pressure on myself to shoot in the polished “headshot” style I thought clients expected. Clean lighting setups, safe poses, technical precision. It was stressful, because I was trying to be someone I’m not.

I’m not a purely technical photographer who memorizes light ratios. I’m a creative storyteller. And once I accepted that and stopped performing a version of photographer I thought I was supposed to be, that’s when the sessions became fun. The results got better.

My favorite moment in any corporate shoot is when someone walks in, clearly dreading it, and says something like "I’m really awkward in photos" or "I’m just not photogenic." I calm them down, bring some lightness into the room, and because I shoot tethered, I can show them within minutes that they actually look great. I get to watch their shoulders drop. I get to hear them say, "Oh wow, okay, that’s... actually... nice?"

More than once, someone has told me it’s the first picture of themselves they’ve ever liked. That means so much to me, every time.

The most powerful experience of this kind was when a comedian I photographed for The Best Medicine told me the portrait I made was the first photo in years they could show their mother. One where they looked healthy and happy, after a long stretch of struggling. When I think back to that moment, I still have to swallow down tears. What a privilege, to be able to give someone that.

You may not be the most technically advanced photographer. But you are the only expert on seeing the world through your eyes. No one else has your specific brain, your specific history, your specific set of obsessions and blind spots and tender places.

If there are stories you want to tell, don’t wait until you feel ready. Don’t hold back because you think you’re not good enough yet. Make the work. Try to document what you see the best you can. You’ll get technically better with time. You already have a point of view now, and it’s yours. You just have to stop apologizing for it.

Listen to Jeff: Have faith in your deepest eccentricities. Your dumbest banalities. Your epic romanticism.

Listen to Matt: Accept what’s already inside of you, without fear.

Do you know anyone who needs to read this essay? I’d really appreciate it if you’re share it with at least one friend. It helps Process going and growing.

Share

Scroll down for the PROCESS GIVEAWAY to win some fun stuff.

See you next Sunday,

Wesley

Quick Notes

• Interview — I sat down with Matt Jacob on The Mood Podcast for a lovely and wide-ranging conversation about creativity, what fuels me, and how I think about my work. [Listen here.]

• New Videos — All five episodes of my comedic video series The Chain are now collected in a [YouTube playlist]. Next week: the season finale, where we finally find out who’s been sending the assignments and why. If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the premise: A photographer (me!) gets a mysterious text message. What follows is a series of strange assignments from an unknown sender, each one leading to the next, each one pulling him deeper into something he doesn’t quite understand. It’s a deadpan surrealist comedy about creativity, confusion, and trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Your Turn — Giveaway

Leave a comment and share with us: What's something you're drawn to that you've downplayed or second-guessed? A subject you keep returning to but thought was too simple or not "serious" enough. It can be a type of light, a recurring subject, a style you've been afraid to lean into, or an interest you thought didn't belong in your work. I'll randomly pick one person to receive a photo book from my collection + some goodies from my studio and rare expired film.

Leave a comment

This Week’s Camera + Tools

Camera: Canon EOS R5 + Canon RF 24-70 mm f/2.8 L IS USM, Fujifilm GFX 100S + Fujifilm GF 80mm f/1.7 R WR, Olympus Pen-F

Process is supported by MPB.com, my go-to for buying, selling, or trading used gear. Everything comes with a 12-month warranty.

Lab: All my film is developed with love by Carmencita Film Lab. Use code “PROCESS“ for a free upgrade.

A Few Ways To Support This Work

If Process adds something to your week, here's how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo books (NOTICE, NOTICE Journal Volume One) or the Process Workbook series from my shop. Every physical order includes a limited edition Creatives In/AMS preview zine, a surprise, and stickers.

Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and all four Workbooks free. Not a member yet? Join here.

Subscribe now

🗃️ Browse the Process Archive.

This week’s issue is short, visual, and a little weird, on purpose. I’m sharing a few portraits made with a lens that has no business shooting people, plus two archived moments I’d almost forgotten about. Oh and my favorite selfie ever.

Quick Notes:

• Process app — I’ve started coding for the first time, building my first little app: a simple system for keeping film roll notes, based on the method I’ve used for over a decade. Once ready, I’ll share it with the Process Photo Club community first.

• New Video — Episode four of the mysterious Paris video series is out. If you’ve been following along, you know where this is headed. If not, check it out here.

• Internship — This is the last week to apply for my internship program. Info here.

The Wrong Lens

A few weeks ago, I drove to The Hague with my friend and videographer Harry Orange to shoot a video with Samuel Wuersten, the artistic director of Holland Dance Festival. The video was for their upcoming 20th anniversary season, and we filmed it inside Amare, which is a this stunning temple of a building. Check out the video here.

After we wrapped, I had about 15 minutes before Samuel had to leave. I’d borrowed the Canon EF 11-24mm f/4 from MPB for another project, and it was sitting in my bag. This lens is massive, heavy, and famously not designed for portraits.

It’s the kind of glass that is perfect for architecture, landscape, or astrophotography. It’s very much not meant to use close-up with humans. It’s a very interesting lens, and the widest so-called rectilinear full-frame lens ever, which means it doesn’t produce that typical “fisheye” distortion, while still being crazy wide.

I had 15 minutes, one of the most respected figures in the international dance world standing in front of me, and a lens that could make anyone look like they’re about to drop into a halfpipe.

The question I wanted to answer: Could I make this non-traditional lens feel intentional, maybe even expressive, without it turning into a gimmick?

We shot inside and outside Amare, moving quickly but not rushing. Samuel has this calm, curious energy, and he seemed genuinely interested in what we were doing with this weird chunk of glass. When someone’s engaged, you can feel it through the lens.

Would I choose this lens on purpose for a portrait shoot again? Absolutely not, but it was a wonderful challenge to get something out of such a “wrong” lens that could still work for a simple editorial feature portrait. Check out how little distortion the lens produces, even at such a crazy wide focal length. And just wait til you see the video we used it for, that’s when this lens really shined very brightly.

Takeaways

Here’s what stuck with me from that 15-minute window:

• Use the “wrong” lens sometimes. It forces you out of autopilot. You can’t rely on what you know, so you start experimenting. That’s when interesting things can happen.

• Speed sharpens intuition. When the clock’s ticking, there’s no time to second-guess. You trust your instincts, and often they’re right.

• Unusual gear creates conversation. People get curious. That curiosity loosens them up, and suddenly you’re not just taking their picture. You’re collaborating.

Shout Out: The Holland Dance Festival runs February 4–21, 2026, across several Dutch cities. Full lineup here, the opening night is already sold out and many shows are close to selling out so grab those tickets fast.

Dance From The Archive

After finishing this issue, I opened up my Excire program and typed in one keyword: “dancing.” The two gems below popped out of a larger batch of almost 1500 images that corresponded to the keyword.

Niina and Dave, Studio 13, 2021 — Shot on the Pentax 67ii. I’d almost forgotten how much I loved this one. This was the same day I was the first person to test shoot the Kodak Tri-X Disposable camera. (Check out Process 042 and 043 for more.)

Soul night at Paradiso, 2023 — One of my all-time favorite nights in Amsterdam. Shot on the Contax G2, Kodak Portra 400, 28mm.

A quick shoutout to the Excire team: they just won “Best Imaging Software” at the Photography News 2025 Awards, beating out industry giants like Adobe and Capture One (which are both great too). Pretty amazing if you ask me!

If you haven’t tried Excire yet, it’s software that lives on your computer, no subscriptions, no uploading, no data training. It helps you search your archive using smart keywords, detect duplicates, and cull faster. I’m grateful for their support and Process readers get 15% off with the code PROCESS at checkout. For more, go here.

Giveaway

Leave a comment and share with us one creative constraint you want to try this year? It can be a lens, or a rule, or a type of film, or a format. Anything really. I'll randomly pick one person to receive a photo book from my collection + some goodies from my studio and rare expired film.

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Thanks for reading. See you next week.

– Wesley

A 5-second favor: if Process has been useful to you, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. It’s the best way to help keep this thing going, and I’d really appreciate it.

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This Week’s Camera + Tools

Camera: Canon EOS R5 + Canon EF 11-24mm f/4 (using an adapter)

Big thanks to MPB for loaning me this lens. (Yes, this is the same one we used when shooting the video that led to my tumble down the stairs and a few weeks on crutches. That video’s coming soon.)

Oh, and I’d be remiss not to share the insane selfie I took with this lens. Possibly my favorite selfie? Ever? Keep scrolling.

Process is supported by MPB.com, my personal go-to for buying, selling, or trading used gear. Everything comes with a 12-month warranty.

Process is also supported by Squarespace, where I’ve hosted my portfolio for the past 10+ years. They has always been there to support and empower creativity and I’m thankful for it. They sponsored my first big Community Documentary project, One of Many, back in 2014, and I’ve rebuilt my portfolio site on their platform at least five times since. Below is the landing page of the latest version, shout out to my friend Samuli Jokinen whose tasteful design helped me elevate the look and feel.

Their latest version makes it easier than ever to build something clean and pro, no coding required. If you’re looking for a home for your work, especially if you shoot in series or want to tell visual stories with some control over how they’re presented, it’s worth checking out. I highly recommend it, based on my personal experience.

Use code WESLEY for 10% off any Squarespace subscription.

Lab: Developed with love by Carmencita Film Lab. They’re the best and put so much care into getting it right. Use code “PROCESS“ for a free upgrade.

A Few Ways To Support This Work

If Process adds something to your week, here’s how you can help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo books (NOTICE, NJV1) or the Process Workbook series from my webshop. Everyone who orders something physical gets a free copy of the very limited edition Creatives In/AMS preview zine and some stickers.

Process Photo Club members get 40% off my book NOTICE, and 100% off all four Process Workbooks, and more. Not a member yet? Join here for instant access.

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Alright, you made it to the end so you deserve this ridiculous 11mm selfie, taken with the same Canon EF 11-24mm f/4 lens I used for the portraits of Samuel.

🗃️ Browse the Process Archive.