A Single Frame Can Hold a Lifetime
(And How Art, Travel, and Light Shaped Me)
I haven’t written a blog for a while and this one feels a bit more like writing into a diary than a typical web post. But sometimes the things that pull you forward aren’t tidy thoughts… they’re honest ones.
I’m 38 now, and I’ve been influenced by visual storytelling for years in ways I barely realised until I looked back. Some influences were deep and long-standing. Others are new like the Japanese woodblock prints that hypnotised me and my wife on our honeymoon in Japan.
These prints, especially the dramatic compositions of Kuniyoshi and Hiroshige taught me something vital: one single frame can be a whole world. Like cinema before cinema existed, one snapshot could breathe. It wasn’t about movement, it was about presence.
That idea echoes through everything I shoot now.
My fascination with light began long before that trip. I remember travelling around Italy nearly a decade ago and making it a personal mission to find as much Caravaggio as I could. I walked into weird little churches and grand galleries just to stand in front of that contrast, darkness so deep it felt physical, and light that seemed to shape whatever it touched. Light wasn’t just illumination. It could be drama, theology, psychology.
Travelling with my camera has become something of a hobby, buying prints and paintings on the road, collecting stories in frames. And my wife? She’s become a fantastic co-conspirator on that journey.
I’ve always loved photography as an art form: the raw honesty of Robert Frank, the intuitive decisiveness of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Both showed me that truth, the real stuff, rarely waits for perfection. It waits for presence.
Looking back, I realise how much of my education informed my visual sense too. At college I took graphic design and life drawing for granted. I didn’t appreciate them then, but now I see how much they taught me about form and structure, even when I’m not consciously thinking about them.
Some of my favourite creative memories are messy ones: a ridiculous A3 “modern art” book I made as a teenager, filled with silly things like folded paper bags turning sad faces into happy ones, pizza boxes turned into robots, and miscellaneous magazine offcuts. My wife still thinks it’s both hilarious and mildly disturbing. I sometimes joke that I must be on the spectrum in some way, but I can’t bring myself to throw that book away. Art, even weird art, sticks with you.
All of these influences quietly feed how I see the frame: composition, colour, space, light, shadow, movement. Some choices I make consciously; others happen somewhere beneath the surface because of what I’ve absorbed over time.
That’s why I’d love for you to visit the photography section on my website and take a moment with some of the images there.
If even one person, one single human being feels seen or inspired by something I’ve captured, then that’s more than I ever expected. It’s the closest thing to paying forward the inspiration I’ve received from the masters who came before.
I’ve had moments where I felt like rock bottom was the only ground left. Moments where creativity itself felt pointless. But time and again I saw how meaningful it can be, how seeing someone’s work, even for a fleeting second, can make them feel visible in a world that often ignores you.
From apprentice to maker, to someone who now guides others, that arc feels incredible, even if it also makes me feel old.
Seeing people’s reactions to their own images, or to something that moved them, that’s the thing that keeps me going. It’s why we make art at all.
