Most people would walk straight past it.
A yellow road sign, propped up against the bottom of a building. Diverted traffic, with a big black arrow pointing somewhere off to the right. Slightly battered, slightly scuffed, very much finished with whatever job it had been doing.
Discarded.
Nobody looked at it. Nobody slowed down. It was just a bit of street furniture that had been left behind, the kind of thing your eyes slide over without your brain ever really registering it.
And yet it made me smile.
I’m not entirely sure I can explain why.
Partly it’s the colour. That bright, unapologetic yellow sitting against the speckled red granite of the building behind it. It shouldn’t work, and somehow it really does. The two together look almost deliberate, as though somebody had chosen them.
Partly it’s the arrow. Pointing off with total confidence, telling everybody to go that way, while not a single person was paying it the slightest bit of attention.
I think we’ve all had days like that.
And partly it’s just that it’s there at all. Somebody put it down, meaning to come back for it. Or perhaps they meant to leave it. Either way, it’s become a little moment in the middle of a busy London pavement, and I was quite possibly the only person who noticed.
This photograph sums up how I approach photography for Unsplash.
If you don’t know Unsplash, it’s a website where photographers share their images and people can use them for all sorts of things. Websites, articles, presentations, book covers, adverts. I’ve been sharing my photographs there for a while now, and it’s become a really important part of how I think about what I photograph.
When I started, I assumed the photographs that would do well would be the big, obvious ones. Beautiful landscapes. Famous buildings. Sunsets.
And some of those do.
But very often it’s the small, ordinary, overlooked things that people actually need.
Think about it. If you’re writing an article about roadworks, or detours, or a change of direction in your life or your business, what do you need? You need a photograph that says diverted. Clearly, simply, without any fuss.
You need this.
Somebody, somewhere, is going to be writing about having to take a different route. Maybe a council writing about road closures. Maybe a blogger writing about how their plans changed. Maybe somebody writing about life not going quite the way they expected.
And this little sign will be sitting there waiting for them.
I love that.
I love the idea that something I spotted on a pavement, something everybody else walked past, might end up being exactly the photograph that someone was looking for.
So when I’m out with my camera, I’m not just looking for things that are beautiful. I’m looking for things that are useful. Things that say something. Things that could illustrate an idea.
Signs are brilliant for that.
Doors. Windows. Shadows. Puddles. A single chair outside a café. A lost glove on a railing. A bench that nobody is sitting on.
All the little everyday things that make up a place, but that we’re usually far too busy to notice.
I’ve talked before about seeing small, and this is very much part of the same thing. Photographing on film has made me slow down. When you only have thirty-six frames on a roll, you don’t just fire away at everything. You stop. You look. You ask yourself whether it’s worth one of your precious frames.
And very often, the answer is yes, it is.
Even if it’s a road sign.
Especially if it’s a road sign.
The other thing I’ve realised is that framing matters enormously. With a photograph like this, I wanted the sign clear and readable, with enough of the building around it to give it a sense of place. A bit of pavement. A bit of that lovely granite. Space around it, so that whoever uses it can crop it, or put text over it, or use it however they need to.
That’s something I think about a lot now.
Not just what I’m photographing, but how somebody else might use it.
It’s a slightly different way of looking at things. A bit less about me, and a bit more about the photograph having a life of its own once I’ve let it go.
I find that rather freeing.
I took the photograph and walked on. The sign, as far as I know, is still sitting there. Or maybe someone has finally come back for it. Or maybe it’s been put to work again, pointing another lot of traffic off in another direction.
I hope so.
I hope it’s still being ignored by everyone except the occasional woman with a film camera who thinks it’s the best thing she’s seen all day.
Because that’s the thing about the things we walk past.
They’re still there, whether we notice them or not.
And sometimes, if you do stop and look, they’ll make you smile.