For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a passion for photography, for capturing a moment in time. With that simple press of a button, that single moment has been recorded for all eternity; never to be repeated, but always to be remembered.
My genre of choice has always been animal/wildlife photography, with a focus on animal portraiture. My goal is to capture an insight into the animal’s life, shed light on their personality, and let their soul shine through.
I’m one of those people who can sit in the same place for hours on end, just waiting for that perfect moment. The right positioning, the right reflection in the animal’s eye, the single split second where everything just seems to align.
As a result, each photo carries a great deal of weight for me, as it is tied to a moment in time where I was present, where, while looking through that lens, the entire world seems to disappear, and it is just the animal and I, the only two objects in existence.
As time went on, external pressures, such as my full-time job, health, and other commitments, reduced the amount of time I could spend behind the lens of the camera. Outings were reduced in frequency and duration, and I found myself with a backlog of images in need of cataloguing and editing.
In an effort to bring photography back to the forefront, I decided to create a YouTube channel, near the end of 2024, thinking that this would help give me the motivation I needed to get out with the camera again, and start taking more photos. Sadly, this had the opposite effect. After multiple videos, and numerous failed attempts where I had spent time planning, scripting, and recording, but had then been unsatisfied with the result, I burnt out. Working full-time, trying to balance family, hobbies, and responsibilities led to photography being pushed to the back burner. I stopped publishing YouTube videos, and essentially left the channel there, sitting, seen but silent. That is where my photography journey remained.
A health scare at the end of 2025 made me stop and think about my life and goals. Making me question everything I had taken for granted, and asking myself, what was truly important to me? I didn’t have the answer….
As a way of dealing with the stress in my professional life and with the health scare, I started gardening. Small at first, but it has been slowly growing with time.
I started, not with a full garden bed, but with a simple plan, I would grow myself some sunflowers, a flower that I had always loved, but never inclined to grow for myself.
I immediately made all these grand plans, but decided that simple and unhurried was the key; otherwise, it could easily become stressful and overwhelming.
Armed with a single packet of sunflower seeds, a germination tray that I printed on my 3D printer, and some seedling mix, I began.
As time went on, I noticed something. It was not my phone that came out to capture the progress; it was my camera. Each time, I’d carefully unpack and assemble it, take my photos, and import the contents of the card into Lightroom. I’d then edit these photos, while thousands of other photos sat on my drive, waiting to be sorted and edited.
Sunflowers can be quite fickle at times, and I found out the hard way that, despite my best intentions, I was not always doing well at bringing these flowers to life. This resulted in having to compost and start over several times. But just like with my photography, patience was eventually rewarded.
Sunday, the 8th of February, 2026. This was the date that changed everything for me, when my first sunflower started opening. It was at this moment, where all the hard work, all the uncertainty, was rewarded. The tending of the young plants, the erection of shade coverings during the brutal 40-degree days, the pain in my back from digging and turning over the garden beds before planting, it was all worth it for that moment.
However, my real epiphany came recently, home one night after work, and I wandered outside to check on the sunflowers, to make sure that the soil wasn’t drying out too much, and there it was. The moment I had been waiting for, multiple sunflowers had opened, and I could finally capture the shot that I had been after.
I stood there, camera continually rattling off, firing frame after frame, filling up that SD card. The entire world had disappeared; it was only the sunflowers and I. We were the only two inhabitants on this blue marble.
I stretched, as my back had cramped up due to standing, slightly hunched over, and as I walked inside the house, I realised, more than half an hour had passed, in the blink of an eye.
This, this was the feeling that had always made photography so special for me. As strange as this may sound, some people meditate to gain inner peace, I photograph. After so long, I had regained the inner peace that I thought I had lost.
It then dawned on me, the inner peace had never left, it had just been pushed into the background, drowned out by the continual deadlines to produce content, to photograph, to plan videos, it felt like a chore, rather than something special, something pure and unhurried.
The following day, I went outside, camera in hand, to attempt to recapture the same photograph, with better light. I succeeded in capturing the same photo; the technical details were the same: same f/stop, same ISO, same focal length. But as I looked at the new photo, it just didn’t have the same feel to it as the one captured the night before.
It was then I realised it wasn’t the technical details of the photo that had changed, it was me. The image from the night before carried more than settings and sharpness; it carried emotion. I wasn’t simply photographing sunflowers. I was photographing something I had grown with my own hands, something I had planted and cared for through a difficult season of my life. That photo was proof that I had endured.
As I sat there, at my PC, looking at the two photos side by side in Lightroom, I realised, this is why I love photography so much, you can take the same photo on numerous occasions, but what makes a photo special is “the moment”, a single, solitary moment in time that will never happen again, and I was present to witness it, to be part of it, to capture that fleeting moment that will live on, forever.