The Carousel Bar at Hotel Monteleone – My 2025 picture of the year

Photography has been part of my life for half a century. At thirteen, living on Royal Air Force Base Akrotiri in Cyprus, I joined the base photography club and found myself under the guidance of an RAF press photographer. He taught me the basics — how to judge light with your eyes before trusting a meter, how to load film reels in the dark, how to dodge and burn to realize the image you had visualized. He handed me his standard-issue Rolleiflex 3.5 TLR, and that reversed ground-glass image forced me to hone my compositional skills. Something clicked. I learned to shoot, develop, and print, and I unknowingly began a five-decade photographic journey.

Over time, that journey evolved into an unhealthy pursuit of perfection that could be engineered through sharper lenses, bigger sensors, and an ever-expanding arsenal of formats. My shelves filled with the evidence: 35mm, 6×7, 6×17, 4×5, then as an early adopter of digital, though to the high-mega-pixel monsters of the present. I wasn’t just collecting tools; I was chasing a hypothesis — that the perfect image was a solvable problem.

Five decades in, that hypothesis was finally proved false in the most constructive way possible. Perfection, I realized, is neither the point nor the value. Life rarely offers perfectly still moments. It moves, shifts, blurs, and insists on being experienced rather than diagrammed. And the photograph that accompanies this piece — a crowded bar, bodies in motion, light folding unpredictably across surfaces — is what broke that long-held assumption apart.

I shot it on Tri-X 400 with a Fujifilm TX-1. Not out of nostalgia. Not as a reaction to digital excess. Simply because, after years of chasing clarity, I had started to notice something else happening. Younger photographers were embracing film with a kind of ease — the softer hues, the forgiving highlights, the unapologetic grain. They weren’t optimizing for flawlessness. They were privileging character. They were privileging truth of presence over truth of resolution. And that reminded me of something I had once understood intuitively.

That afternoon in the Carousel Bar at Hotel Monteleone, I handheld the camera and let the shutter drag just long enough for the moment to breathe. Someone walked into the frame and dissolved. Another turned mid-sentence and left only a trace of the gesture. The focus is far from clinical. The motion blur has a mind of its own. The tonality disobeys every histogram. Yet, when I saw the scan, it carried something I hadn’t encountered in years — an emotional accuracy that technical precision often erases.

Looking at that frame, I understood something I had lost: my early relationship with photography was grounded in presence, not perfection. Somewhere between the pixel-peeping and the perpetual upgrades, I had drifted away from the reason I picked up a camera in the first place. That one imperfect image pulled me back.

Photography was never my profession, but it has always been a constant companion — an instrument for seeing, for making sense, for staying grounded. And now, entering a sixth decade behind a camera, I find myself returning to the same principle I began with: imperfection is not a failure mode. It is a source of expression.

Film reinforces that truth. It forces a different posture — measure the light, trust your intuition, press the shutter, and accept what follows. It doesn’t offer the illusion of total control. Instead, it trains you to work with the world as it is, not as you wish it to be. That’s the lesson I didn’t realize I needed at this stage of my life: to be comfortable when the edges soften, when timing slips, when the moment refuses to stay still.

This single frame did more than trigger an epiphany. It reminded me of the foundational reason I fell in love with photography fifty years ago: because the world, in all its irreducible imperfection, is worth capturing exactly as it presents itself.

You can find me at murrayimages.com, on Instagram at instagram.com/murrayimages/ and on LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com/in/adamalthus

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