About · The story
It started
on a sidewalk.
From standing height, almost everything looks ordinary.
It started on a sidewalk, about four houses down from mine.
I try to walk at least three kilometres a day — partly to keep the blood moving, partly to get away from the computer and give my mind something other than work to chew on. On one of those walks I passed a small clump of flowers growing up through the pavement. Beautiful, I thought — I wonder what they look like up close — and I kept walking. A few steps later a different thought stopped me: why am I walking past this? Why don’t I just go and look?
So I turned around. I crouched down right there on the sidewalk and looked properly, and what had seemed so ordinary from standing height turned out to be intricate, strange and lovely up close. I spent the rest of that walk inspecting maybe twenty different flowers, feeling quietly fortunate to be able to see them, smell them, touch them.
Standard
Beautiful from afar
Macro · closer
Intricate, strange and lovely
The same flower, twice — from a step back, then up close and personal.
A night or two later I was on my bed scrolling YouTube when a clip of a jumping spider came up. I found the little thing oddly charming and, as one does, fell down the rabbit hole. You’ve probably got several species in your own garden, the person in the video said. That was all it took. I searched “how to find jumping spiders” and set my alarm.
The next morning I was out early, moving through the garden slowly, hunting for a spider I imagined to be about a centimetre across — not yet knowing most of them are far smaller than that. My neighbours must have wondered what on earth I was doing. Eventually I found one, only a few millimetres in size, moving exactly the way I’d seen the night before. I edged my phone closer, the macro mode kicked in, and there they were: those big, curious eyes, staring right back at me. I was thrilled — partly because I’d found my spider, and partly because my phone could get close enough to show me the details.
Jumping spider · Salticidae — those big, curious eyes
The moment it clicked
All we have to do is slow down and look closer.
I’d wanted to be a photographer for years, but I always hid behind the same excuse: I didn’t have the right gear, and one day I’d be able to afford it. Twelve years on, I still can’t — but I did finally learn that you don’t need the perfect equipment to begin. My wife told me that all along. (She was right. Sorry, Love.)
So this is Look Closer.
It’s a photography project about the beauty we walk past without seeing — the flowers in the pavement cracks, the insects a few millimetres long, the textures and colours hiding in plain sight. Each post moves between the ordinary view and the up-close reveal — sometimes I lead you in tight and then pull back to show where it was hiding, sometimes I start wide and move in — whichever draws more curiosity, right down to the palette of colours living inside a single frame.
Everything here is shot around Johannesburg, South Africa — most of it within a short walk of my own front door. I’m building this slowly: a growing collection of what I find, and, one day, a book to hold it all. If any of it makes you pause a little longer on your own walk, then it’s doing exactly what it set out to do.
Slow down.
Look closer.