Office Hours vs. Street Hours

There's a version of your week that belongs to someone else. The meetings, the deadlines, the Teams pings that arrive before you've had your first coffee. Office hours. You know exactly what they are because you live inside them Monday through Friday, sometimes longer. They're not bad. They pay the bills (and pay for the gear). They give structure to days that would otherwise dissolve. But they are not entirely yours.

Then there are the other hours.

The 5am wake-up in a hotel in Mexico City, three floors above a street that's just starting to stir, before the work day begins at nine. The production in Prague that turns into two hours of walking before a single word is said. The Saturday morning back home when the light does something specific to the street outside and you're already reaching for the camera. These are Street Hours. And for the past few years, they've been some of the most important parts of my week.

Here's the thing I didn't expect: the 9-to-5 gave them to me. Not intentionally, not as a perk. But work has taken me to places I wouldn't have gone on my own, and left me with a few free hours in cities I barely know. The only choice I had was whether to sleep through them or go find out what the street looked like before the rest of the world woke up.

I'm not a professional photographer. I have a full-time job, and photography is what I do when the work day ends, or before it begins, or in the gap between a Tuesday dinner and a Wednesday morning call. This site is built around that idea. Photography as a practice, not a career. As a way of paying attention.

And if you're someone who also carves out whatever time you can, sets an alarm for 5am in a city you barely know, or reaches for the camera on a Saturday morning before you've fully decided to — I think you're going to feel at home here.

That conversation is kind of the whole point.