Seeing Amsterdam Clearly: A Field Note on Sketching, Photography, and the Creative Gap

Most location sketches end in the trash. It’s not the quality of materials. Most street photos never leave the SD card, it’s not the camera or lens. We usually blame it on the image 'not doing the place justice,' but that’s a polite way of avoiding the truth: we failed to make a choice. We tried to record everything, so we captured nothing. In my workshops, I’ll help you work with intention to close

The Gap Between Vision and Execution:

The disconnect between your vision and your art isn't a lack of talent; it’s a result of trying to record everything at once. A city doesn't stand still, and even in expert hands a page, photo, or negative can’t hold everything.

I’ve spent years documenting places on foot, learning—often the hard way—how to find the stories that reveal a place’s soul. New cities exaggerate the problem, and cities like Amsterdam amplify it. The city lives somewhere between postcard and documentary—dense, loud, layered. Dam Square churns with motion of every kind, in every direction at once. It’s subject‑rich to the point of overload.

You arrive ready. You open your sketchbook or raise your camera to your eye. And then something happens.

Why Effort Isn’t Enough:

Sometimes you rush in, snapping and sketching, only to realize later that the results feel flat. The place had energy; your creations don’t. Or maybe nothing happens at all. You hesitate, unsure where to begin or what to document first. So you try to get everything into the frame, or everything onto the page. You end up capturing the chaos, but none of the sense.

The problem isn’t effort. It’s selection.

You know—or think you know—what good art looks like. You see the masterpiece in your mind’s eye: the exact angle of the Koninklijk Paleis, hurried commuters blurring into streaks of color, a grizzled local nursing a coffee in a brown café. But when everything feels important, nothing stands out. In the effort to provide context, you lose sight of what caught your attention. You try to capture every feather on every pigeon, when what drew your eye were the bicycles and trams. Your sketch fills with indecision; your photograph records all the information, but none of the experience.

Dam Square is a sensory overload. Between the tram lines, the tourist surge, and the constant movement of pigeons, there is too much data for a single frame. When everything competes for your attention, the result isn't a story—it's noise.

I once tried anyway. When I tried to sketch all of Dam Square—the grit, the tourists, the pigeons—I ended up with a cluttered page with what appeared to be a confused caterpillar, not a tram, lost among a mass of competing detail.

But this struggle—this gap—isn’t a sign of failure. It’s a reminder to step back and consider what is actually important. We aren’t just drawing a bowl of fruit; we are trying to distill the essence of a place—the hum of its existence, the quiet conversation between its people and its ancient stones.

The trick—and it’s a hard‑won truth I have to remind myself of regularly—is to do two things. These are the ideas I return to every time I guide someone through the city, whether they arrive with a brand‑new sketchbook or years of experience behind the lens.

First: keep showing up.

Keep sketching. Keep clicking. Those early attempts—the smudged pages, the blurry shots—are not failures. They are calibration and practice: the foundation on which your mastery is built. Each wobbly line and out‑of‑focus image or missed moment is a lesson learned, a subtle adjustment made, practice built. You are training your eye, your hand, and your instincts to work in concert.

You won’t capture Dam Square in one sitting. But repetition sharpens judgment, and over time the distance between what you see and what you can express begins to narrow. That alignment—not perfect rendition—is the real goal.

Second: find the element that represents the whole.

Most unsuccessful sketches and photographs try to include everything. Even when they’re technically perfect—every line crisp, each color carefully layered, the photograph properly focused and exposed—the result is often visual noise. Instead, look for the one element that carries the experience. Usually it’s what caught your eye first, what pulled you toward the scene.

Take the Vondelkerk. Two weeks ago, it was a silhouette we took for granted; today, it’s a skeleton. If you stand on the Vondelstraat now, the temptation is to try and document the entire tragedy—every charred rafter, every burnt-out window. Garish fencing surrounding fallen beauty. But a wide shot of a ruin is just a record of destruction. To tell a story, look closer. Find one sharp angle of scorched masonry contrasted against a surviving spire. That specific tension between 'what was' and 'what remains' says more than a panoramic of the rubble ever could. This is the difference between a tourist and an artist, between an image that “doesn’t do it justice” and one you hang on the wall: the willingness to ignore 90% of the scene to save the 10% that matters.

Sketching encourages this naturally, allowing you to leave unnecessary things off the page. As we discuss in my workshops, photography demands more intention—and more intervention. Move your feet. Change your angle. Use focus and exposure to reduce distractions. Bright, sharp areas pull attention—use that deliberately.

You don’t honor a place by recording all of it. You honor it by telling one of its stories well.

If I were guiding you, here’s something I’d encourage you to try

A simple exercise to see more clearly:

To practice selection without getting bogged down in detail, use your viewfinder—or a cardboard crop tool—to 'edit' the scene before you touch the page. If you are sketching, use 30-second thumbnail boxes. If you are photographing, use the zoom to exclude, not just include.

The wide shot: Identify your subject—perhaps a vendor arranging their stall. Take a photo or make a quick sketch from where you’re standing. Capture everything: the building, the path, the cyclists, the clouds.

The mid shot: Move closer. Fill about half the frame with your subject.

The close‑up: Move uncomfortably close. Fill the entire viewfinder with that one thing—the vendor’s hands, or the reflection in the water.

The detail: Move even closer until you lose the subject altogether. You’re capturing texture or color now. Then back up—or zoom out—slowly, until the subject becomes recognizable again. Perhaps it’s the vendor’s face as they look down. Take your final photo here.

Later, review the images on a large screen. If your experience is anything like mine, that first “safe” shot won’t be worth keeping. It promised beauty and delivered everything—yet nothing of depth. It’s destined to gather digital dust.

The second and third images usually tell a clearer story. With fewer distractions, they’re often the ones worth printing or painting. But that final image—that one may surprise you. It’s often the most you: the one most shaped by your personal way of seeing. It’s the image you’ll remember, the one that pushes you forward, and the one that teaches you exactly how you’ll do it better next time.

Learning to shed what the image doesn't need is the hardest part of the process. The methodology I teach in the field is built on a sequence of deliberate 'edits'—moving from the 'safe' wide shot to the uncomfortable, personal detail. We focus our intention to eliminate distraction before the shutter is pressed, before the pen adds it to the paper. Stop fighting the noise of the city and start distilling it. If you're tired of 'safe' shots and confused caterpillars, let's head into the field and refine your specific way of seeing.