Finding Calm in Space: Photography as Visual Meditation
My Quiet Place Through the Lens
In a world that moves fast, with minds that rarely slow down, my quiet place had always been through my camera. Taking photographs and losing myself in the process has always been how I calm my mind.
When my mind feels tangled and restless, I find clarity and calm in space. Open space. Visual space. Breathing space.
Space as a Form of Calm
Framing, capturing, following — it’s those moments that take you into thinking about nothing else. It’s a kind of visual meditation. You focus entirely on what’s in front of you: the light, the shape, the balance looking through that viewfinder. Everything else fades. If you’ve felt it, you know it. The act of seeing — really seeing — and translating how a scene makes me feel into an image brings stillness.
I don’t mean space in the astronomical sense — not planets and stars — but the space around you. The kind of space everyone needs in some form. For me, it’s the kind that makes me breathe deeper, think more clearly, and feel my mind unclutter. When the world is busy and thoughts are constant, space can quiet that noise and let you exist in the moment.
A Balmy Evening at Dungeness
A few weeks ago, I took a photograph at Dungeness that captured exactly that. We had just been to The Pilot for dinner on a balmy July evening during the heatwave. The pub was buzzing — full of chatter, laughter, and the steady clink of cutlery on plates, filled with enormous portions (if you’ve been, you know). I like that atmosphere, and I like watching how people move within it, but after we’d eaten, we walked to the beach to watch the sunset.We crossed the shingle ridge and there it was — space. The air was still and balmy, the sky shifting through soft pinks and pale blues that blended the line between sea and sky. Across the pebbles, the deep tracks left by the lifeboat cut through the beach — a bold reminder of both human activity and purpose in a quiet setting.
The Power of Visual Meditation
One moment, no rush. With every breath, I felt another knot of thought loosen. That’s the thing about this kind of visual meditation — your body slows to match your attention. The calmness of that place filled me in a way that’s hard to find elsewhere.
The visibility was so clear that we could see France on the horizon, blended into the fading colours of the day. It wasn’t dramatic, just a thin dark line within the softly blended tones of the evening, but it made the moment feel larger. We didn’t need to be anywhere grand or far away to experience something memorable.
Photography as a Constant
That’s what I look for in my work: places and moments that make you stop, look, and notice. It’s not about perfection or staging. It’s about what’s real — the textures, the colours, the natural changes in light, and the sense of space that wraps around you.
Sometimes that space is found in wide landscapes, sometimes in a quiet corner of a city street. It doesn’t have to be remote to give you that pause. The important thing is how it feels in the moment — whether it slows your thoughts and makes you aware of where you are and who you are.
When I look at that photograph now, the same calm comes back. The soft tones, the open sky, and those lifeboat tracks pull me straight into that evening. That’s the value of holding on to certain images — not just because they’re visually pleasing, but because they hold a specific feeling that can return whenever you need it.
Photography gives me that over and over again. It’s not just about producing images to share; it’s about creating a record of moments where the noise stopped. Times when the space was the only thing I was focused on.
In a fast-moving world, finding those pauses matters. For me, the camera is what gets me there. It turns the simple act of looking into something active, something that clears space in my head. Whether I’m standing on a beach in Dungeness, walking down an empty street, or sitting in a park, for that short time, everything else steps aside.
That’s what keeps me going back to photography. Not just the images themselves, but the calm found in the act of making them — a quiet, visual meditation that I can share.
