Action Man, Hunter Man, or Fisherman?

Brighton POV Street Photography: 1 Frame or 25 Frames Per Second

I've been doing something a little different lately. Strapping a DJI Osmo Nano action camera to myself while I head out on a photo walk, and documenting the process. Not the photographs — the making of them. The route, the decisions, the near-misses, the moments just before the shutter fires.

The result is a new short-form video series: Faces of Brighton. Watching the footage back has made me think harder about something I've always taken for granted.

1FPS or or 25FPS?

The allure of photography is the single frame. That's the whole game. Out of everything that exists in time — the noise, the motion, the mess of the world moving at 25 or 30 frames per second — you choose one. One rectangle of light. One frozen sliver.

Video doesn't work like that. Video is continuity. It holds everything, which means it decides nothing.

But here's what I didn't expect: the POV footage is revealing in a way I hadn't anticipated. Watching myself walk the streets of Brighton with a camera, you see not just what I photographed but how I photograph. The rhythm of it. The decision-making. What I stop for. What I walk past. The brief pause before the raise. The moment I turn back.

It turns out that 25 frames per second is very good at showing you what 1 frame costs.

Hunter or Fisherman?

There's a question every street photographer should ask themselves, and most never do:

Are you a hunter or a fisherman?

The fisherman finds a spot. A good corner, a shaft of light, a doorway with the right background. He sets up, waits, and lets the scene come to him. An hour. Two hours. He works the same ground, patient and still, trusting that the frame will eventually walk into the net.

The hunter moves. He covers ground. He reads the street at pace, reacts, instincts sharp, always searching for the next thing rather than waiting for it. He might spend twenty minutes on one block or twenty seconds — it depends on what the street is offering.

Neither approach is wrong. Both produce great work. But they are fundamentally different temperaments, and the footage from these Brighton walks made mine undeniable.

I am a hunter.

Watch the videos and you'll see it. I walk a route. I keep moving. I don't linger unless something catches — and when it does, the stop is brief. The camera barely settles before I'm walking again. There's no fishing going on. I'm covering the ground.

The DJI Nano and What It Shows You

The DJI Osmo Nano is a small thing — genuinely pocketable, unobtrusive — and that matters when you're already carrying a camera and trying not to look like a television crew. It clips on, records, and largely stays out of the way.

What it gives back is a kind of honest testimony about your own process. There's no flattering edit here, no highlight reel — just the walk as it happened. The dead minutes between frames, the doubling back, the missed moments. The footage holds everything that the photographs discard, which is most of it.

I'm taking the Nano to New York later this year, and that's when the series will really be tested. Brighton is familiar ground — I know the streets, I know the light, I know roughly what I'm looking for. New York will be new. The hunter in a city that moves at a different speed entirely.

That will be worth documenting.

Faces of Brighton — Episodes 1 & 2

In the meantime, here are the first two episodes. Two walks. Two routes. One approach.

Episode 1 — Faces of Brighton

Episode 2 — Faces of Brighton

Watch them back to back if you can. You'll see the hunter at work — and you'll probably start asking yourself which one you are.

Until next time, keep snapping