The Art of Leaving Things Out: How to Find the Story in the Chaos
The Art of Leaving Things Out
If you’ve ever stood at the corner of Prinsengracht and Leidsestraat during rush hour, you know it’s just… a lot. Trams clattering, tourists wandering blindly into your frame, that weird, flickering Amsterdam light hitting the water. It’s an assault on the senses.
For a long time, I had this "collector" thing going on. I thought if I could just shove every bit of that chaos into the frame, I’d eventually find the "feeling" of the city in the edit.
It doesn’t work like that. Usually, the more you cram in, the more you lose the point.
I’ve realized over the years that good work—whether it’s a photo or a messy sketch—isn’t about having the best gear or the fanciest paper. It’s just knowing what to ignore. I’ve started calling it editing in real-time. It’s that split second where you stop being a passenger to the scene and actually decide what people need to see.
The tools are totally different, though. A camera is greedy. It wants everything. It doesn't care about the ugly plastic trash bins or the crane looming in the background. As a photographer, your job is basically just saying "no." You move your feet, you wait for a cyclist to pass, you tighten the frame until you’ve carved some kind of order out of the mess.
But a sketchbook? That’s the opposite. You start with nothing. You don’t "owe" the street a receipt for every piece of clutter on the sidewalk. If a lamppost is getting in the way of the story I’m trying to tell about the morning light, I just don't draw it. The page is mine; the city doesn't get a vote.
I learned this the hard way back in my photojournalism days: there is a massive gap between a "fact" and a "truth."
If I take a photo of you mid-sneeze, that’s a fact. It happened. But it’s not the "truth" of who you are. My kids do this all the time—they’ll pause a movie on the most awkward, mid-sentence frame possible and laugh at how weird the actors look. It’s a fact of the film, but it’s a total lie to the story.
That’s why I’ll spend twenty minutes leaning against a wall, waiting for one specific cloud to move or for a pedestrian to hit a patch of sun. I’m not looking for perfection. I’m just waiting for the visual facts to finally match the feeling of being there. Or maybe I’m waiting to understand the feeling of being there, or what the story of the location actually is.
I always look for the "bones" first—the lines. A strong diagonal or a solid archway gives your eyes a place to rest. Once that’s settled, I look for the light. I use contrast to say: Look here. This is the part that matters. Everything else can stay in the dark.
When you stop trying to swallow the whole city at once, the pressure just kind of vanishes. You don’t need to be everywhere. You just need to be here, looking at one small, interesting thing.
That’s really what we do in my private sessions. We aren't chasing the "postcard" version of Amsterdam. We’re just slowing down. It’s about learning to trust your gut and stripping away the noise until your vision is the only thing left on the page.
Next time things feel too loud, just put the camera down for a second. Stop sketching. Ask yourself: What’s the one thing I’d actually miss if I closed my eyes right now? Start there.
