Managing Focus on the Street
10 DEC, 2025Strolling the streets of Bucharest with a camera, I ask myself what keeps the drive alive. During the “dry spells” when nothing happens around, it's easy to get lost in an internal chain of thoughts about “why” and “what for”. Those thoughts could lead to several ways for me, ranging from giving myself several blocks to find an interesting trigger for my eye to the absurdity of the general contest of the photography genre.
Coming from a tennis background, the result always stood at the top of the priority list, but practicing photography pinpointed me to several other patterns that tied my interest together, whether it's a tennis court or street wandering. No matter how long you have been playing tennis, the level of focus slowly drains out of you during games, sets, or long rallies. The level of mental focus slowly draining away is sometimes barely noticeable, but it stacks up incrementally with uneven coefficients to hit you at the end with a massive drop in quality shots played. Street Photography is similar in that way. I believe there is a sweet spot when you can be truly focused on the environment, short stints of focusing on certain scenes like those tennis rallies, turn on/turn off. Your internal focus battery slowly goes down, depending on the scenes and topics you’d like to focus on during that day.
With my assumption of street photography being a much less demanding exercise, I believed that a full session of street photography during the day could be much longer than an average tennis match of one hour and thirty minutes. Moreover, I was more than confident that having a sports background in an individual sport of high focus would give me an advantage to shoot much longer sessions, be efficient, and come back home with pure gold photos. However, in the seeds of naivety, I found that being honest about your capacity today is much more beneficial to the end result of the session.
At the current moment, I can give myself an honest timeframe of 1-2 hours and then a similar break to recharge my focus. Despite watching some of the other photographers having sessions of full-day shooting and intense periods of non-stop walking, it seems to be more draining for me to keep the balance of joy and the end result. In that honest statement to myself, I found the main similarity for tennis focus, keep your full engagement in the moment, like during the rally, and turn off, recharge for the next point. Experience what the day and the world around you give you in a current moment.
Today’s Writing Soundtrack:
Bonobo - Cirrus
Hauschka - Hike
Midnight in Peckham - Chaos in The CBD
If this sparked any thoughts, I’d be glad to hear from you on Insta @rutnytskyi