It’s 5:57am.
That’s sunrise now.
When I started Before We Wake back in June, I had enough first light to work with comfortably inside my self-imposed 5am–6am shooting window. This morning I checked the weather app and realised the obvious — I think the shooting part of this project is over.
Not because I’ve run out of things to photograph. I could probably keep wandering around these villages for another six months and still find something I hadn’t noticed before. The project was never governed by how many photographs I took or how many weeks I spent doing it. I said that in the original blog back in July.
It was governed by available light.
Well, the light has pretty much gone.
From June through to the middle of August I’ve probably shot just under a thousand images. Some mornings were productive, others considerably less so. There were days when I came home thinking I’d found something worthwhile and days when I wondered why the hell I’d bothered getting out of bed.
That was always part of it.
I never went out looking for individual award-winning photographs. Before We Wake was always intended to work as a collective body of images — ordinary places photographed during that quiet hour before most people begin their day.
Looking back through them now, I think that's probably the thing I've enjoyed most about the project. Individually, many of the photographs are simply observations. An empty road. A closed shop. A milk bottle on a doorstep. An empty playground. Tables and chairs waiting outside a pub. A railway station before the commuters arrive.
Nothing particularly dramatic.
But put them together and they begin to describe something that none of them could really describe on their own — what these places look and feel like before most of us wake up.
And now comes the harder part.
Choosing them.
I’ve started properly working through the photographs, editing and printing small proofs rather than judging everything from a screen. Already some images I liked when I first took them don’t seem quite as important anymore. Others I probably overlooked at the time suddenly make more sense when they’re sitting beside another photograph.
That’s something I’ve always believed about photography projects. A photograph doesn’t necessarily have to shout on its own. Sometimes its job is simply to sit quietly beside another one and help tell the story.
There are plenty that won't make it at all. That's inevitable when you've taken somewhere around a thousand photographs. If I know an image isn't going anywhere near the finished project, there's little point wasting ink and paper printing the bloody thing.
Once I’ve got the photographs I’m seriously considering printing, I can start spreading them out, moving them around, removing duplicates and looking for the natural rhythm between them.
Empty streets beside closed shops. Railway stations beside bus stops. Wider scenes followed by smaller details. Signs of people without people actually being there.
Hopefully somewhere amongst all those little prints the finished version of Before We Wake will start revealing itself.
I've also spent some time looking at how the finished project will actually exist away from a screen. I looked at various photobook companies and different printing options before eventually settling on Mixam for the finished book.
That decision makes the next stage feel slightly different. I'm no longer just thinking about whether I like an individual photograph. I'm starting to think about how the photographs will actually work on a printed page — sequencing, image size, which photographs need space around them and which might work better alongside another.
There’s still plenty to work out, but for the first time Before We Wake is beginning to feel less like a folder full of photographs and more like an actual book.
The square format has stayed. The Olympus Stylus 1s has stayed. Black and white JPEG has stayed. And most importantly, the 5am–6am rule stayed right until the end.
I could change that rule now. Start at 5:30 and carry on until 6:30. Chase the sunrise further into the year.
But then it wouldn’t be the same project.
The whole point was to photograph that particular hour exactly as it existed through the summer. As the weeks passed, I watched the available light slowly disappear. Eventually the planet was always going to catch up with me.
It has.
So after a couple of months of 4:10am alarms, stupidly early walks, plenty of coffee and just under a thousand photographs, I think I can finally say the shooting part of Before We Wake is finished.
The alarm can stay switched off for a while.
Now I just have to turn the whole bloody lot into a book.
That might prove harder than getting up at 4:10am.
At least there was coffee for that.