My Photo Story
Photography is a vocation of mine that I have a love/ hate relationship with. It’s incredibly rewarding and challenging at the same time as it is critical and creatively brutal. It’s been a passion of mine that’s wained under the stress of creative self criticism, but looking back it’s often offered me more unique experiences than anything else in my life. For eleven years now photography has brought me motivation and inspiration, so I thought I’d talk about it with you.
I started first in 2010, my first year out of high school (secondary school equiv. if you’re in the UK), shooting with my dad’s Canon 500D and lenses when he wasn’t using them. It wasn’t long before I’d saved $1000 to buy my first camera, a Canon 1000D. It provided an escape for me from what ended up being a gap year from university. There were plenty days I was struck with boredom or frustration with myself and photography was the valve that relieved the pressure when it got too high. In my first year I relied on friends of mine to critique my work, as a result I didn’t advance as efficiently ad I’d have liked. By the end of my first year I’d taken tens of thousands of images, the best of which went onto a Tumblr page I can’t remember the details of anymore. The one thing I had from that first aimless year was confirmation that I had potential from the feedback of friends and family, and that was enough to spur on the obsession.
After a brief stint in Brisbane’s Nightlife scene as a local club photographer, I’d come out the other side with a renewed modesty and a realisation of the mountain I had yet to climb before I could claim to be a professional. The one upside from working nights was the contacts I’d developed. A couple would become mentors and now friends of mine living across the world. Looking at their work to this day still inspires me to strive higher than my current level, and even now I’m humbled by their efforts to inadvertently show how much I could still learn after eleven years.
My second and third year seeing life through the viewfinder was about dedicated creative development. I had an intuitive enough eye to see opportunities but not a practical and developed enough technical understanding to know how to capture the images I saw in my head. I had a lot to learn and I was at risk of burning out. At the time I was juggling working part time and studying full time, so I came up with a regime to help me sustain my development: 1 shoot a week. 52 shoots in a year is a good amount if each of them is an opportunity to develop your skillset. Over the course of two years I shot landscapes, portraits, the occasional wedding, friends birthday parties, family engagements. Anything I could to develop and experiment I took the opportunity to.
This is where I, and many other photographer’s I know find their niche. I had friends who preferred to shoot sports, some went into car photography with magazines, a couple went into street work exclusively and some ended up moving into videography. From a very early point I’d loved landscapes more than anything.
Landscapes offered me a call to adventure. Like Bilbo Baggins leaving Hobbiton, I often explored and expanded my range by travelling and finding new locations to shoot everything I could find: rainforests, waterfalls, cliff bases and rock formations by the sea, shipwrecks or dead trees in shallow water. Getting up early or not going to sleep at all, I often would come home tired after a shoot but otherwise teaming with excitement at what I had achieved. It’s this energy that I fed off for years in expanding my portfolio, in exploring my world and finding new locations or perspectives I’ve found my outlook on the world around me changed for the better as a result.
My Australian Practice opened in late 2012, where I looked to build a brand for myself. Building up the business proved overwhelmingly challenging at the time and is likely to persist as such for some time. In the interim my passion for the camera wained some, with increasingly fewer locations to shoot and limited access to travel opportunities being in such an isolated country, my reprise was in broadening my horizons. In 2015 I travelled through Europe in their winter for three months. 12 countries in eighty days is a great way to shock the senses into wanting to shoot. On that trip a fell for Europe much as I’d once fallen for photography; an opportunity to create images I’d never dreamed of presented itself and I wanted to experiment more.
Living in Australia had this as it’s most significant limiting factor. Moving to London in 2018 was the move that allowed me to experiment with my camera again. Travelling through the UK and Europe one country at a time is something I’m still not used to, and I hope that I never will be. But Landscapes aren’t my only focus anymore. Weddings and Ultimate frisbee are areas I very much intend to make a splash in. Working with clients right now I’m optimistic I’ll have content to offer soon enough.
As it remains, photography is a facet to my personality that’s altered how I view the world, It’s something I intend to make a part of the lives of those who choose to engage with my work, and it’s with the intention that I’m able to make that a positive experience. As such I’m posting content online with the intention of assisting my audience, however large or small, in improving their work. It’s not always obvious how to take an image, to this day I’m challenged by my camera so I hope to improve people where I can. Like I say, I have a love/ hate relationship with my camera, but I don’t see a divorce in our future anytime soon.
How did you get into photography?
