THE MECHANICS OF LOOKING WITHIN
If you have read any of my previous journals, you will know that self-reflection is a theme I return to in a number of them. It has been the quiet engine behind many of the decisions I have made regarding my photography, including the narrowing my focus to architecture as well as totally redesigning my website. What I have rarely done, however, is to pause and examine how it actually works, and how turning the lens inward shapes the way I see the world around me.
The words introspection and reflection are often used interchangeably, but I have come to see them as two distinct processes. Introspection is the act of looking inward, examining your own thoughts, feelings and mental states. Its question is, “What is going on inside me, and why?” Reflection, on the other hand, is the act of looking back at an experience, holding it up to the light to determine what it has taught you. Its question is, “What happened, and what will I do differently next time?” The former is concerned with the person, whilst the latter is about the experience.
On their own, each has its limitations. Introspection without reflection can easily become rumination, an endless loop of going over the same feelings without moving forward. Reflection without introspection risks becoming little more than a list of events and lessons that never quite change the person learning them. When the two work together, they become two sides of the same coin and a powerful tool for growth.
I first became familiar with both during my former professional life in the fire and rescue service, although at the time I rarely thought of them as separate processes. I have been retired from that world for over seven years now, but I find myself continuing to use them, albeit in a completely different context.
Photography has become much more than simply capturing images. It has given me the opportunity to explore aspects of myself that might otherwise have remained hidden. And whilst I spend much of my time looking at architecture and its relationship with light and shadow, there are occasions when I find myself looking inward as well.
MOVING BETWEEN TWO STATES
A good proportion of my career switched between two rhythms: the steady pace of regular time and the adrenaline-fuelled urgency of an emergency call. In my earlier years it was the station bells (the turnout system) that generally announced the movement between these two states; for my last twelve years as a senior officer, it was the pager that heralded the change.
Regular time allowed you to think before you acted. An emergency call demanded the opposite: acting on what you were learning in real time and integrating that new information with prior knowledge and experience as the incident unfolded.
In that second state, there was little room for introspection. Your attention was entirely outward, on the incident, the people involved and the crews around you. The looking inward came afterwards. At station level, it started for me on the return to home station and often continued around the mess table. As a senior officer, it was a conversation with trusted confidantes back at the workplace, or sometimes it was with my family. And there were times when I was simply alone with my own thoughts, processing what I had encountered.
That private processing was introspection in its purest form. It was less about what had happened and more about how I had responded to it: what I had felt, what decisions I was at ease with and which sat uneasily with me, or why certain incidents stayed with me longer than others. It was not always comfortable, but it gave me an understanding of myself under pressure that no procedure could provide. Over time, it also deepened my awareness of human vulnerability and the spaces we inhabit, alongside a perspective shaped by the speed with which everything can change.
MEASURED HINDSIGHT
If introspection was personal, the hot debrief was its structured, collective counterpart and the point where reflection took over. Whether on the incident ground, back at the station or in the office, it was normally the first conversation to take place while events were still fresh in the mind. The format was simple: what went well, what did not go to plan, and what could have been done differently? More significant incidents were followed by a structured debrief, which asked the same questions with the benefit of time, data and perspective. As I progressed from firefighter to incident commander, the focus widened from my own actions and those of my crew to the decisions I had made under pressure. The objective was never to dwell upon the past, but to improve what came next.
My MBA studies at Glasgow Caledonian University later gave me the language for what I had been doing instinctively for years. Donald Schön distinguished between reflection-in-action, the thinking we do in the middle of a task, and reflection-on-action, the thinking we do once it is complete. I realised the incident ground had taught me reflection-in-action long before any textbook did. Reflective cycles, such as those developed by David Kolb and Graham Gibbs, take you from describing an experience to deciding what you will do differently next time. Gibbs’s cycle in particular includes a stage dedicated to examining your feelings about the experience, which is introspection by another name. Even the academic models recognise that reflection is incomplete without it.
There was, however, an uncomfortable side to this, and it is where the two processes met most clearly. Reflection in a professional setting was often about accountability: owning your decisions, including the poor ones, and being prepared to have them examined by others. It took a certain honesty to stand in front of colleagues and say, “I got that wrong.” But that honesty began with introspection: being honest with myself about why I had made a decision before reflecting openly with others on what it had led to. Over time I learned that this honesty was not a weakness to be hidden, but the foundation of trust and learning.
TWO HALVES OF THE WHOLE
What I eventually came to understand was that introspection and reflection gave me different things. Introspection gave me self-awareness: an understanding of how I thought, felt and reacted under pressure. Reflection gave me improvement: a structured way of turning experience into better practice next time.
Used together, they gave me something more valuable than either could alone: the ability to learn from difficult experiences without being consumed by them and to change not only what I did, but how I approached it. Both have travelled with me into my photography. What I had not anticipated was how differently they would play out once the urgency was removed.
MIND SHIFT
When I retired and turned my full attention to photography, I assumed it would be a clean break from my former life, a move away from the urgency of emergency response towards something quieter and more considered. But the longer I stand behind a tripod, the more I realise that the two worlds speak the same underlying language, just at a very different pace.
For thirty years, the bells and the pager had trained me to act quickly, whereas photography now allows me to wait, watch and choose my moment. Whereas introspection came after my operational responsibilities had concluded, when I am behind the camera, it can happen there and then. A building does not move, but it is far from static. It breathes through light, shadow, weather and human passage, and as I watch it change, I become aware of my own response to it: why one space feels calm and another oppressive, why I am drawn to a particular feature or why a composition that should work on paper leaves me feeling unsettled.
Where my previous career demanded that I understand structure at its point of breakdown, capturing architectural images allows me to honour structure at its point of harmony. Recognising this change in mindset, I realised architectural photography for me was never going to be simply about documenting buildings.
The camera has become a tool for personal calibration as I seek to create images shaped by what I feel, not only by what I see. Photography provided a release following a life-changing event in 2015 at a time when I was still answering the call of the pager, and even in retirement it continues to give me the space for reflection and quiet contemplation.
BEING PART OF THE PICTURE
It is perhaps fitting that much of the architecture I photograph is, quite literally, reflective. Many of the subjects I have captured are clad by glass, steel and polished stone. Each surface returns a fragment of its surroundings, distorting, softening or rearranging what we think we are seeing. Photography has a habit of doing the same thing to the person behind the camera. Every image I capture is, in some small way, a reflection of me. It carries my choices about where to stand, what to include and what to leave out, and what I felt in that moment. If I am honest, I can look at some of my images and remember exactly what kind of day I was having when I took them. That is introspection quietly leaving its mark on my work.
If introspection shapes how I respond to a building, reflection shapes what I do about it, and Schön’s two forms sit very comfortably within my photography. Reflection-in-action happens on location. The light is not where I expected it to be, a crane or scaffolding has appeared on the skyline, or a security guard is politely suggesting I move along, and much like an incident commander revising a plan, I adjust my position, my composition and sometimes my entire intention for the shoot.
Reflection-on-action happens later, most intensely during processing. A black and white edit can take anything from a few hours to more than twenty, and I will work on an image, step away from it and return to it with fresh eyes.
Each return is a small debrief, as I ask whether the image still conveys what I felt at the point of capture, or whether that feeling has changed. My work-in-progress folder holds a number of images at various stages of editing, as it is not uncommon for me to start an edit, park it because I’m suddenly “no longer feeling it”, and return to it some time later.
The difference between my former life and my photography lies in the stakes. On the fireground, a poor decision could have serious consequences; behind the camera, it might cost me an image; in front of the computer, it’s a delay in finishing the edit. Without that pressure, I have found I can reflect more slowly and look inward more honestly than I was ever able to in my professional life. Yet just as a hot debrief only ever told part of the story, a single image can only tell me so much. The fuller picture only emerges when I step back further still.
TAKING A WIDER VIEW
For my photography, that step back is my image archive. Every image I have ever captured sits on a storage device, catalogued by date and location, serving as a visual diary of the places I have been and the person I was when I was there. When my journey into architectural photography began in earnest in 2018, I was still mastering the technical fundamentals, possessed limited knowledge of processing and I certainly had not established a creative identity. Revisiting those early files can be a humbling experience, as the archive does not flatter you; it simply shows you the evidence.
Yet it is all too easy to judge past efforts harshly and write them off. True growth in photography isn’t only measured by the new images we capture, but by how our evolving vision allows us to see old work in an entirely new light. There are images I passed over at the time which, with the benefit of experience, now look far stronger than I gave them credit for. An image that felt underwhelming years ago may simply have been waiting for my technical abilities to catch up with its possibilities. The photograph hasn’t changed, but I have.
When I look back over years of work, rather than at individual images, something else begins to emerge: patterns in the subjects I keep returning to, the light I am drawn to and the compositions that I favour. Those patterns say as much about me as they do about the photographs, often revealing aspects about my character that aren’t immediately obvious.
I have come to realise that improvement is not about acquiring another piece of equipment or discovering a new technique. It is about pausing to examine what progress I have made since starting my journey. I don’t see my archive as a graveyard of early mistakes; I see it as a reservoir of untapped creative potential. Every time I revisit it, I see it a little differently, which tells me that I am not standing still.
CHARTING MY OWN COURSE
Reviewing my archive inevitably raises a more personal question: not just how far my work has come, but how I feel about it. This is where introspection takes over, and it demands a different kind of honesty. It is relatively easy to look back and identify what went well. It is less comfortable to examine the doubts that sit behind the work, particularly when they challenge my own assumptions about my abilities.
In my experience, doubt rarely announces where it has come from. Sometimes it is a fair verdict on the work, a sign that an image or a direction genuinely isn’t working. At other times it says more about my mood, tiredness or a disappointing day than it does about the photographs themselves. Left unexamined, the two can feel exactly the same.
This is where the two processes earn their place. Introspection helps me recognise when doubt is creeping in and why; reflection then allows me to test that doubt against the evidence of my own development. If the evidence supports it, the doubt becomes something useful to act on. If it doesn’t, I can set it aside. Together, they have become something of a personal compass, a way of finding my bearings when I find myself questioning my direction or feeling uncertain about what comes next.
But looking inward is not only about confronting doubts or correcting mistakes. It can equally be about understanding what gives us satisfaction, what motivates us and what we want to preserve as we continue to develop. Sometimes, the most valuable outcome of introspection is not discovering something that needs to change but recognising something that should remain exactly as it is.
STAYING CURIOUS
Perhaps the clearest example of introspection and reflection working together is a decision I wrote about in an earlier journal, This Is Me: choosing to identify myself as an architectural photographer. I won’t retrace that discussion here, but I can now see how both processes played their part. Introspection made me aware of my own reluctance to take on another label after a career defined by rank and role. Reflection, through the evidence of my own body of work, showed me that the direction had already been set. Neither on its own would have got me there. Together, they turned a label I had resisted into a clarity of purpose.
Making that decision, however, was not the end of the process. I am conscious that a definition held too tightly can become its own limitation, so the questions I ask myself have changed. Introspection asks whether I am still curious, still enjoying the work and still being stretched by it. Reflection asks whether the images I am making are moving me forward or simply repeating what has worked before. When the answers start to drift, that is my signal to look again.
This is perhaps where my former professional life and photography meet most clearly. I no longer spend my time examining organisational performance or operational outcomes, but the habits behind that work have stayed with me: looking inward with honesty, looking back with purpose and asking what I might do differently next time. They have simply found a different setting in which to operate. The subject has changed, but the underlying process has not.
SHOWING LESS, SAYING MORE
When I launched my website back in 2022, I took the decision that I wasn’t going to restrict my gallery to a small number of images as I wanted it to be a record of my journey and not a monument to achievement. Recently, I developed and incorporated a custom-made filter that allows visitors to choose various options to view my work in a condensed format. Whilst this offers a better experience than the previous design, which used a set of separate galleries, the filtered gallery can still only present the journey as a whole. What it cannot do is pause on a single chapter and tell its story.
That was the gap I wanted to fill, so I pushed my website development further to create a virtual exhibition, a space where I can curate a collection of images and offer visitors a different way of seeing my work. For the first exhibition, I have chosen a selection of images from my various visits to London. I have many personal favourites from the capital, but to keep the page loading smoothly on visitors’ devices, I set a limit of twenty-four. Not every personal favourite made the final selection, not because they were weak, but because there simply wasn’t room for them all.
The limit brought introspection and reflection to the forefront when deciding what to include. When choosing images for a competition, you are thinking about categories and trying to anticipate what a judge might respond to; choosing images that represent you is something else entirely. Reflection brought the same structured approach as a debrief, asking why each image mattered and what it contributed to the whole. Introspection asked the harder question: was it there because it was strong, or because I was attached to the memory of taking it? Working together, they kept each other in check, guarding against both sentiment and snap judgement in the final selection.
Leaving images out of the exhibition was not the same as rejecting them. They remain in the archive, waiting to find their place in a future collection, as London is simply the beginning. I intend to curate further virtual exhibitions, each built around a different city, theme or aspect of my architectural work. Curating my London images gave me another reason to look inward and to look back at the work I have created.
THE QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN
One of the things I have come to appreciate in retirement is that personal development doesn’t end when a professional career does. If anything, I now have greater freedom to pursue it and photography has given me the means to keep learning, keep challenging myself and, perhaps most unexpectedly, keep discovering things I didn’t know were there.
I have no desire to reach a point where I consider my photography finished, and that is why I value introspection and reflection together. If reflection simply confirms what we already believe, and introspection only tells us what we want to hear, then perhaps we are not looking deeply enough.
We spend so much time looking outward through the camera, searching for subjects, compositions and moments of light. Yet every so often, it is worth turning that same curiosity inward and asking: What have I learned? What has changed? What remains important to me? And where do I want to go from here? I don’t expect to find definitive answers, but I have come to appreciate that the process of asking is valuable in its own right, and it brings me back to where this journal began.
OPEN ENDER
Whether on the fireground or behind the camera, introspection and reflection have been a constant thread running through my life. The settings could not be more different, one built on urgency and the other on stillness, yet the underlying process has remained remarkably similar. If I were to distil what I have learned from both, it would be this:
Introspection and reflection need each other. On its own, one drifts into rumination and the other becomes little more than a checklist.
Honesty is non-negotiable. Neither works unless you are prepared to face what did not go well, including your own doubts. It is also not a back-slapping exercise to say how well you have done.
Distance brings clarity. Time to reflect after the event can often let you see what was hidden in the moment.
The fire and rescue service taught me to look back in order to learn and improve, and whilst my photography shares that same intended outcome, it has also enabled me to look inward in order to gain a better understanding of myself.
I invite you to explore the first of my exhibitions, a curated collection of London architecture, at www.jimscottphotography.co.uk/exhibition, and to follow along as new exhibitions take shape in the months ahead. I have also added a how-to guide in the Resources section of my website, should you wish to create your own curated space.
If there is one thing I have learned from both my former professional life and my ongoing photography journey, it is that a debrief, however quiet, should never be regarded as the end of a process.
It is, more often than not, the beginning of the next one.