A small guide to looking more closely

Most of what passes in front of us is never seen. It is recognized — a tree, a red car, a woman with a dog — and filed away before the eye has done any work. Recognition is efficient. It gets us across roads. But it is not looking, and the difference becomes obvious the moment you try to describe something you have walked past a hundred times: the color of your own front door, the shape of the shadow your kettle throws at four in the afternoon.

I edit photographs for a living, which mostly means asking other people why they pointed the camera where they did. The best answers are never technical. They come from someone who stayed a little longer than was necessary. What follows is not a theory of seeing. It is a set of small exercises I have used, and handed on, for staying longer.

Before you begin

You need very little. A chair or a step to sit on. A pencil — the cheaper the better, so you feel no obligation to make anything good with it. A small notebook, unlined if you can find one. A timer you can set and then forget, ideally not your phone, which will offer you something more interesting the moment you grow bored. You will grow bored. That is part of it.

Choose a place you already know. It is tempting to begin somewhere beautiful, but a view that announces itself does half the work for you. A kitchen table, a bus shelter, the corner of a courtyard where the bins are kept: these are better teachers, because they give nothing away for free.

Ten minutes, one chair

The first exercise is the one I return to most.

1. Sit down and set the timer for ten minutes. Do not move once you have chosen your spot. The point is to let the scene change around a fixed position, not to go hunting for a better angle.
2. For the first two minutes, simply name what is there, silently and quickly: window, railing, pot, gutter, wire. You are clearing the recognitions out of the way so the eye can get past them.
3. Then find the edges. Where does the wall stop and the sky begin? Is that line sharp or soft? Follow one edge slowly from end to end, as if tracing it with a fingertip.
4. Pick up the pencil and draw one thing — not the whole scene, one thing — without looking down at the page. The drawing will be poor. Ignore it. Drawing blind makes the eye travel at the speed of the hand, which is far slower than the speed of naming.
5. In the last minute, write one sentence about something you did not notice when you sat down. Keep it plain. “The drainpipe has been painted twice, green under the gray.” That sentence is the whole harvest.

Ten minutes feels long the first few times. Somewhere around the sixth there is usually a small restlessness, a sense that you have seen everything there is. Stay through it. What comes after is the good part: a pigeon shifting its weight on a ledge, a curtain that moves though the window is shut, the moment you realize the light has already changed since you sat down.

Color has a temperature

Of everything I try to teach, this changes people’s eyes fastest. Light is never simply light. It leans warm or cool, and so does everything it touches. Early morning and the hour before sunset run toward amber and rose. Midday under a clear sky is whiter and harder. Shade on a sunny day is surprisingly blue, because it is lit by the sky rather than the sun — look at the shadow side of a white wall in the afternoon and you will see it.

Once you notice this, you cannot stop. A white plate is not white. By the window it is faintly blue; under the lamp it is the color of weak tea. Snow at dusk goes violet. Faces beside a hedge take a little green into them. Painters have always known this. Photographers tend to learn it the hard way, by printing a portrait and wondering why their subject looks unwell.

Try this: choose one white or gray object at home and look at it three times on the same day — morning, midday, lamplight. Write down a color word for each. Not “white,” but something more exact. Bone. Milk. Pewter. Ash. Dishwater. You will feel foolish for about a day, and then you will start seeing it everywhere.

The three details

This is the exercise I give to anyone who says they do not have ten minutes. It takes about one. Wherever you are — a waiting room, a checkout line, a station platform — find three details you could not describe to someone who was not there.

• One detail of texture: the worn patch on a handrail, the grain of a tabletop, the nap of a coat brushed the wrong way.
• One detail of light: a reflection, a shadow, a color cast, the bright thread along the rim of a glass.
• One detail of evidence: something that tells you what happened here before you arrived. A chair pushed back at an angle. A ring where a cup stood. Chalk marks on the sidewalk, half washed away.

Say them to yourself, or write them down. Three is the right number: one is a fluke, two is a pair, three begins to describe a place. Evidence is the category people find hardest and enjoy most, because it turns looking into a quiet kind of detective work. Almost every surface has a history, if you are patient enough to read it.

Carrying it with you

None of this is meant to become another task. The aim is a slight change in how long your eye rests on things before it moves on. Half a second is enough. Over weeks, it adds up to a different world — not a more beautiful one, necessarily, but a more particular one.

I still do the ten-minute exercise most weeks, usually on the same step outside the building where I work. I have looked at that view perhaps two hundred times. Last Tuesday I noticed, for the first time, a small paper star taped to the inside of a window opposite, faded almost to nothing by the sun. It has probably been there for years. That is the trouble, and the pleasure, of looking closely. There is always something that was waiting.