A page for people who want to tell better stories with a camera. Notes from the field, lessons from the cutting room, and the long, slow craft of figuring out who you are when the lens is pointed at the world.
Most creator content teaches you to copy. We teach you to notice, to see the frame nobody else is looking at, to commit to a voice that's actually yours, and to ship the work anyway. I'm all about having long conversations about getting better at the craft, written for people who care more about the story than the algorithm. Let's get to it.
You get about three seconds to earn someone's attention. Information moves so fast now that attention spans have collapsed, and if you're not telling your story clearly and quickly, people lose interest before you've made your point. This piece is about how to land what matters in the window you actually get, and why telling it fast isn't the same as telling it thin.
Read the story →
Get closerRobert Capa, paraphrased every day since
than that.
I'm a photographer and videographer based in Sri Lanka. I run the Jayawaves YouTube channel, and almost ten thousand of you have shown up there to learn how to shoot, edit, and tell stories with a camera, and somehow that's still the wildest thing about my week.
This page is the slower version of the channel. It's where I put the things that don't fit into a twelve-minute tutorial. The personal stuff, the half-formed ideas, the lessons I'm only now figuring out four years later. I write the way I'd want to be taught: short paragraphs, real examples, no upsells.
If any of this is useful to you, the best thing you can do is reply to the newsletter. I read every one.
Self · Studio
Gear · Workbench
StreetThings I've scribbled down between shoots. Half-formed, occasionally useful, sometimes wrong. The good ones make it into the next issue.
If you can't make the light interesting, the subject won't save you. Wait for the light. Then find what's standing in it.
Burst mode is a confession that you didn't see the shot. Commit to the moment. Shoot once. Move on.
If you can't say what the photo is about before you've taken it, the photo isn't about anything. The caption is the brief.
Capture is half. The other half is sitting with the footage long enough to find what you didn't know you'd shot.
Find a video you love. Map its beats. Now make something completely different that follows the same skeleton.
The polished 10% is what people quote back to you. The other 90% is what makes them feel like they know you.
The next issue lands on the first Sunday of every month. One long story, the notebook, a handful of links worth your time, and absolutely nothing else.