I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have a camera. It has been a quiet, constant companion, slung over my shoulder, tucked into a pocket, or balanced precariously on a fence post while I stop—again—to capture something that’s caught my eye. I never go out with a fixed plan of what to photograph, but I always go out knowing that I will stop, and I will click.
I stop on walks. I stop while feeding the sheep. I stop on the way to work, pulling over because the sunrise has thrown gold across the fields in a way that feels too fleeting, too beautiful not to keep. I stop when I should be getting on with something—carrying logs, fixing a gate, tidying up—because the light has shifted, a shadow has fallen just so, or a bird has landed exactly where I hoped it might.
It’s never the big, dramatic landscapes that pull me in the most. It’s the details. The way the mist curls around the trees at dawn, the shimmer of frost on a spider’s web, the worn grain of a wooden table bathed in morning light. These moments, the ones you could so easily walk past, feel like tiny treasures. And I feel like photography is a way of holding onto them—of making sure they don’t just slip away unnoticed. One of my most recent favourites was taken of an icicle that had a perfectly formed heart in it’s centre. I took about 100 shots…
From Film to Digital: What We’ve Gained and What We’ve Lost
I think about how different photography feels now compared to when I first picked up a camera. Back then, you had to wait. There was anticipation, mystery. You’d take a roll of film to the shop, wait a week, and then flick through the prints, hoping they had captured what you’d seen in that moment. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they didn’t. But that was part of the magic—part of the patience and craft of it all.
Now, it’s instant. I press the shutter and the image is there, fully formed on the screen. I can take another if I don’t like it. I can edit, tweak, discard. In many ways, it’s a gift—no wasted film, no blurry shots ruining a roll, no waiting to find out if the light was right. But I wonder, sometimes, if we’ve lost something too. That feeling of anticipation, of collecting an envelope of prints and flicking through them in the car, eager to see which ones had turned out. That mix of disappointment and delight when a photo you’d forgotten about turned out to be your favourite.
Digital photography has changed the way I take pictures, but it hasn’t changed the reason I do it. If anything, it’s made me take more—because why not? No limits, no cost per shot. But there’s also a danger in that. It’s easy to take a hundred pictures and never print a single one. To let them sit on a hard drive, scrolled past and forgotten.
So I try to be intentional. I still print my favourites. I still put together albums, not just for me but for the moments I want to last beyond a screen. And I still take my camera everywhere, still stop more than I probably should, still notice the details that might otherwise be missed.
Because at the heart of it all, photography—whether film or digital—isn’t about capturing perfect pictures. It’s about capturing the way something felt in that moment. The cold bite of an autumn morning, the hush of snowfall, the first light spilling over the hills. It’s about slowing down enough to really see.
And if that means I take twice as long to get anywhere because I’ve stopped (again), then so be it. Some moments are worth pausing for