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Hey folks. It’s been a while since I’ve sat and typed anything out long form. I enjoy writing, but I often find it draining. I think I’ve said before that I find it far easier to record a podcast or publish a YouTube video. I just seem to have difficulty transmitting my thoughts coherently when it comes to writing. My ADHD brain moves faster than I can write or type. I get frustrated with my poor grammar and spelling, and ultimately, I put too much pressure on myself to be consistent.

Layer on a good helping of self-doubt and writer’s block, and I decided that I needed a good long break from writing so that I could evaluate how I can better approach folding it into my creative life. I’m not sure that I have the answer to that question fully yet, but I do think that part of finding the answer is to start writing again here on Substack. Maybe it will be a once-a-month thing, maybe I’ll start working on some kind of zine that also incorporates writing with my photography. Maybe it will just be the errant ramblings that this seems to be turning into?

I think a lot of folks often respond to commentary like this with, “Don’t waste your energy on something you don’t enjoy.” But I do enjoy the end product. I enjoy the dialogue that writing here on Substack creates. The community that it helps build. I enjoy how it helps me look at my photography differently and creates a space where I’m often forced to look at other parts of my life and objectively think about how they impact how I use a camera to document the world as I see it.

So, what made me start stabbing away at the keyboard today all of a sudden?

Firstly, this summer has been strange. For the past 5 or 6 years, our family summer routine has been fairly consistent. After the kids get out of school, we take a week’s vacation somewhere in the U.S. A national park normally. Then, toward the end of the summer, we often take the bigger trip of two weeks, sometimes overseas. This year was different. My eldest child, my daughter, is off to college in a few weeks. As a result, we took the big family trip at the beginning of the summer, knowing she would not be around in late August to do something then. I’ve always been one to suffer from the post-vacation blues, but this year it felt like most of the summer has been anticlimactic after two weeks in Hawaii. I’ve even not photographed as much. But, she’s doing something that I never had the courage to do, which is follow her dreams and enter a highly competitive career field where there are no guarantees. She found her calling early and is fearlessly diving in headfirst. If she can do that, I can overcome my self-imposed hurdles and write more often.

Secondly, I realized while we were packing that there are some things only writing can do. She was taking down posters from her bedroom, the ones she wants to put up in her dorm room. I noticed one I had not seen before. The liner notes from Noah Kahan’s Stick Season vinyl. A 24x24 image taken by Vermont photographer Patrick McCormack. The image places Kahan slightly off-center in front of the local town clerk’s office. I immediately thought of Walker Evans. A documentary photo that is more than just documentary. It evoked a deep sense of place and person. It’s something that only words can describe. And this is why I need to incorporate more writing into my creative life again.

Finally, I’ve got to confront the fact that creatively, I’ve become “comfortable,” and growth never comes from places of comfort. It comes from the uncomfortable moments in life. Times when you take risks, expose yourself, let your guard down. Times when you become vulnerable. And, to me, writing does all these things. It exposes a personal weakness, it requires a close examination of how I feel about certain aspects of who I am, where I’ve come from and where I’m going. It creates a certain level of fear. But if I’m honest, I know when I take just a little time to write down my thoughts, I often gain a sense of clarity that I don’t often find from photography alone, which is why it’s important that I start to do so again, even if it’s on an irregular and unscheduled basis.

Even if it’s just for the purpose of putting my thoughts out there so that I don’t sit alone with them. The irony being that as I come to the end of writing this, I already have some fresh ideas about what I might write about over the coming months. It goes to show that sometimes we just need to get out of our own way and get on with whatever it is we keep putting off.

Bellow are a selection of my favorite images from 2 weeks in Hawaii

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I’ve taken photos that many people would consider “good.” They’re sharp, well composed, balanced. The kind of images that, if you showed them during a camera club meeting, would get a quiet nod of approval. Nothing remarkable, but nothing wrong either. They do everything a photograph is supposed to do. And yet, I don’t think about them very often. They sit in my library, neatly edited, technically sound, and mostly forgotten.

There are other photos I keep coming back to. Ones that, at first glance, don’t really work. Maybe the composition is sloppy, the exposure is off, or they’re slightly out of focus. Some people would say these are the kind of images I probably shouldn’t show, but many of them are deeply meaningful to me. For a lot of people, “getting better” means closing the gap between these two silos. The goal becomes making the meaningful photos good. Refining them. Improving timing, composition, and control so that when something important happens, it can be captured “properly.”

Somewhere along my journey, I started to realize that the photos I cared about most were often the ones that didn’t quite land. Not because they were bad, but because they carried something that didn’t depend on whether they were hitting all the factors we traditionally use to measure a photograph.

There’s a photo I took a few years ago in NYC on 42nd, near Bryant Park, that I still think about. At the time, it was a fleeting moment. I lifted the camera quickly and hoped my zone focusing was set correctly. It was rushed, and I was being pushed along by the flow of pedestrians. If anything, it looks like I almost missed it, which, in a way, I did. The moment I originally saw isn’t exactly what I ended up capturing. But I remember exactly where I was standing. I remember what caught my attention. I remember the split second where something shifted and I reacted without thinking.

The photo doesn’t fully show that moment, but what came after has its own weight. There’s a disconnect between what I experienced and what made it into the frame, and maybe that’s why it stays with me. Because it reminds me of something that can’t be fully captured.

Mass-market photography education often focuses on technical aspects and gear. YouTube is an incredible tool for learning, but much of what’s out there leans toward equipment choices and optimization rather than the mindset behind photography. Combine that with the perception of perfection created by social media, and we’ve created a generation of photographers who don’t realize how important it is to play, to experiment, to take “bad” images. We’ve become overly focused on control and getting things right. We take fewer risks in the name of consistency. We become less instinctual, less reactive. Everything needs to feel curated.

I don’t think this means that technical quality doesn’t matter. It does. It gives you a language, a way of organizing what you see. It helps you translate something internal into something visible. Without that, it’s hard to communicate anything clearly. But it’s not the thing that makes a photo stay with you. I’m guilty of falling into that trap myself, thinking about the aesthetic instead of the moment, losing spontaneity. It often shows up in my travel photography. And when I start to feel that creeping in, a day on the streets of NYC is usually enough to shake me out of it.

The more time I spend with my camera, the more I feel like those two ideas drift further apart. “Good,” in the technical sense, becomes easier to achieve. You learn your camera. You recognize light and color more intuitively. Your sense of timing improves. You make fewer technical mistakes. But meaningful doesn’t follow the same path. It’s less predictable, less controllable. It shows up when you least expect it. Or sometimes, you don’t even realize you’ve captured it until you get home and look through your images.

I’ve also realized that even when you do capture something meaningful, it rarely arrives in a clean, finished form. There’s usually something missing, or something extra that doesn’t quite belong in the frame. But to me, that’s often what makes an image feel alive, and it’s a big part of why I’m so drawn to street photography.

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I feel like I belong and don’t at the same time.

For much of my teens and twenties, I was a roamer. I moved from place to place, never very good at maintaining friendships, and never forming a strong attachment to where I was. Once I left somewhere, that was it. I rarely looked back. I don’t think that feeling is unique to me. Lots of people who live that way carry a quiet uncertainty about who they are and where they belong. It’s not always obvious when you’re younger. It’s certainly why I’m so drawn to the coast. At the time, it just feels like movement. Freedom, even. It’s only later that you start to question what that movement has cost you.

I first left the UK in 1998. I was away for three years, then returned to finish college before leaving again in the early 2000s. That time it was supposed to be permanent. I came to the United States to build a life and, over time, that is exactly what I did. I became a citizen 13 years ago. My life is here now. My family, my routines, my sense of home. When I was younger, I never really thought about how that decision might feel twenty years later. It was all forward motion. There was no real consideration for what it meant to leave one place behind in order to build something somewhere else. Lately, that has started to change.

Maybe it is just part of getting older, but over the past few years I have found myself thinking more about where I fit. Especially now, in a time where conversations about immigration and identity feel more charged than ever. It has made me more aware of how I am seen, and how I see myself. I exist in a kind of in between. I am a US citizen, but the moment I open my mouth it is clear I am not from here. There is always a question that follows. Where are you from? How long have you been here? It’s not meant in a negative way, but it is a reminder all the same.

And when I go back to England, the place that should feel like home, I have started to notice that it does not feel quite the same either. The familiar has become unfamiliar. Places I once knew without thinking now feel new again. I find myself looking at them more carefully, almost as if I am seeing them for the first time. It is a strange experience. To feel like a visitor in a place that once defined you.

People often ask me if I miss the UK. It’s a simple question, but it never has a simple answer. It usually carries an assumption that somewhere else must be better than where you are. That the grass is greener somewhere else. For me, the answer has always been more grounded than that. I miss my family. That has become more pronounced as they have gotten older. There is a distance there that no amount of phone calls or visits can really close. And there is a part of me that feels guilt for not being closer as time has moved on. And I miss the English countryside. The South Coast in particular.

There is something uniquely English about the idea of public access. A quiet, shared understanding that people can walk across farmland and private land through a network of footpaths and bridleways that have existed for generations. It is a system built on trust and respect, and it allows you to move through the landscape in a way that feels deeply connected. It is something that many Americans struggle to understand. The idea that landowners would allow that kind of access feels foreign here. But to me, what feels strange now is the opposite. That in the United States, we often charge people to access places like beaches, sometimes at a scale that feels hard to justify.

Last week, I found myself back on the South Coast, in Dorset. Walking along the Jurassic Coast. It is a place I have known for most of my life. A place that has shaped my understanding of landscape and space without me ever really thinking about it. But this time felt different. As I went through the images I made on that trip, I started to notice a shift in how I was seeing. Time and distance had changed something.

The ordinary felt more interesting. The small details stood out. Things I would have walked straight past as a kid were now the things that held my attention. A worn path cutting through a field. The way light moved across the cliffs. The quiet moments between people. I was no longer seeing the place as someone who belonged there. I was seeing it as an outsider. And for the first time, I started to wonder if that might not be a bad thing.

There is a certain clarity that comes from distance. When something is no longer completely familiar, you are forced to pay attention again. You notice things you once overlooked. You slow down. You observe. That sense of being in between, of not fully belonging to one place or another, might actually be what allows me to see more clearly. Not as someone rooted in a single place, but as someone constantly reinterpreting it. Maybe that is what photography has been for me all along. A way of making sense of where I am by paying closer attention to what is in front of me. A way of reconnecting to places that feel both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

I used to think that not fully belonging anywhere was something to fix. Something that would eventually resolve itself if I just stayed still long enough. Now I am not so sure. Maybe it is not a flaw. Maybe it is the thing that shapes how I see.

Here are some of the photos from this trip:

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When I quietly started a YouTube channel a year ago, it was more out of creative necessity than part of some plan to create a following or build a community. I’ve shared on Substack before how important creativity has become in managing my mental health, and along with image making, I’ve wanted to improve my writing and communication skills. The problem is, I often find writing difficult. The way my ADHD manifests seems to create scenarios where I agonize over small details or lose sight of the core idea I was trying to express. It almost feels like writing is too slow for how my brain works. As a result, I turned to audio recordings, and from there, talking to a camera felt like a natural progression.

I had no clear sense of direction for the channel or what its anchor would be. Starting it just felt like an extension, a place to share ideas and maybe build something alongside what I was already doing here on Substack. My hope was to create photography-based videos that spent little to no time talking about gear or technique and instead focused on the process. More specifically, how I’ve used photography as a way to practice mindfulness. I wanted it to be about meaning rather than growth. I wanted it to be personal.

When you start something like YouTube, it’s hard not to get pulled into the numbers. Views, subscribers, click-through rates. It all sits right there in front of you, updating in real time, asking for your attention. While I did look at those numbers, I quickly realized that what mattered most to me was whether each video “felt” better than the last. Not from a metrics standpoint, but from a personal growth perspective. Was my lighting better? Was my audio better? Did I plan and script more clearly? Did my post-production process improve?

I also realized that I’m more comfortable being in front of the camera than I expected. That sounds obvious for a photographer, but talking to a camera is a different kind of exposure. There’s a deeper level of vulnerability that comes from putting yourself out on YouTube. It’s just you, trying to say something clearly enough that it lands. I think one of the main reasons people either give up too early or burn out is that they fail to approach the process authentically. There’s an unspoken pressure to do what has worked for others, to be more energetic, more structured, more like what a YouTube video is “supposed” to be. When I started this channel, I kept something in mind that a mentor once told me while preparing for a job interview. Don’t be anything other than yourself, because if you land the job by being something else, you’ll have to live up to something that isn’t you.

I don’t actually want to be a content creator. I don’t mean that in a negative way. I understand what the term represents. Consistency, output, building an audience. An d there are some incredibly talented folk out on YouTube doing these things. But somewhere along the way, I realized that if I started identifying too closely with that label, it would begin shaping how I approach my work. I’d rather see myself as a photographer who uses YouTube, not a YouTuber who uses photography. I don’t want to wake up thinking about what I need to post. I want to think about what I’m noticing, what I’m questioning, what I’m trying to understand. I’d like to believe the videos are a result of that, not the reason for it. For me it’s a small but important distinction.

I also had to rethink what consistency means. For many people, including myself, consistency is tied to a schedule. “Post every week to maintain structure and visibility”. That kind of approach can make sense, especially if growth is the goal. But over time, I’ve realized that for me, consistency is more about returning to the same ideas, the same questions, the same way of seeing. I keep circling back to themes like attention, presence, and the tension between creativity and productivity. Creating these videos has actually helped me better understand my own relationship with photography.

The biggest shift, though, is that the work has become a mirror. When you talk about something long enough, patterns start to emerge. Not just in what you say, but in what you return to, what you avoid, and what you struggle to articulate. I’ve started to notice that much of what I’m making isn’t really about photography. It’s about how I relate to time, to attention, and to the pressure to always be moving forward. The camera just happens to be the tool I use to explore those ideas. That’s probably the part I didn’t expect. I thought the channel would be a place to share what I know, but it’s actually becoming a place that shows me what I keep coming back to, whether I intend to or not. And that, more than anything, seems to be what is starting to resonate with my small but growing audience.

There’s something about putting your work out into the world that makes it harder to ignore those patterns. You see them reflected back through your own words, your own images, your own repetition.

Here are some recent images taken in NYC:

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In 1869, Mark Twain wrote: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

I think it’s important to establish right here that I firmly believe that “travel” dosnt’t have necessarily have to mean trekking of to far flung corners of the globe. Ive written before that photographing the familiar is often more important. Sometimes, just going to the next town or state is enough to give us an experience that falls outside of our normal comfort zone. A lot of times when people read this quote from Twain, they think that because things like weeks long adventures to the Amazon or backpacking through Europe aren’t accessible to them, they don’t have the opportunity to experience “different”. I’d urge every photographer to put that notion out of there head.

Twain’s thoughts are an interesting way to frame travel. Not as leisure. Not as entertainment. But as something almost destructive. The word “fatal” suggests that travel doesn’t just expand your perspective. It helps break down something that already existed. When we travel, we inevitably come face to face with the limits of our own assumptions. Long before we ever step foot in a place, we already carry a version of it in our minds. We absorb these ideas gradually through news headlines, films, books, and casual conversations. Entire places become simplified narratives portrayed by social media and travel influencers. Countries shrink into a few recognizable images. Cultures get reduced to stereotypes.

We don’t necessarily do this consciously. It’s simply how people deal with complexity. The world is too large to hold fully in our heads, so we compress it into stories that feel manageable. But those stories are rarely complete, and very often they’re wrong. Travel begins to challenge those narratives in quiet ways, through small details that slowly chip away at the version of the world we subconsciously create. You arrive somewhere new and things don’t quite match what you expected. The rhythm of daily life feels different. The pace of the streets. The way people interact. The sounds that fill the air in the morning. None of this feels dramatic in the moment, but together these small observations begin to reframe the tidy picture you once had in your mind.

When you observe a new place through the viewfinder, you’re forced to look beyond the unfamiliar language, architecture, and routines of everyday life. In a way, the camera reduces the distance between you and the place you’re visiting. You begin to notice moments that feel strangely familiar. Two friends laughing over coffee. Someone sitting quietly on a bench, lost in thought, smoking a cigarette. The surroundings may be completely different from what you know, but the emotions are identical. Travel reveals something that’s easy to forget when most of our understanding of the world comes through headlines or screens. Most people, everywhere, are simply trying to live their lives. They’re working, raising families, navigating relationships, and dealing with the same mixture of hope, stress, joy, and uncertainty that defines life anywhere. Cultures may differ. Traditions may vary. But the emotional fabric of human life is remarkably consistent.

Once you begin to notice that, it becomes much harder to hold onto rigid ideas about other people. Photography has always played a role in shrinking the emotional distance between people. A powerful image can introduce us to lives we might never encounter otherwise. A fisherman pulling nets from the water before sunrise. A crowded market buzzing with conversation. A quiet moment in a small town far from where we live. What makes these images powerful isn’t simply the location. It’s the humanity inside the frame. The expression on someone’s face. The gesture of a hand. The subtle interaction between two people that reveals something universal about being human. Good photographs remind us that every place in the world is filled with people whose lives are as rich and complicated as our own.

I grew up in England, lived in the Caribbean for three years, and have spent the last 20+ here in the US. People often ask me questions like, “What’s it like living in the US right now?”, “Do you feel like you belong here or there?”, and “Don’t you miss England?” Very rarely do these questions come from a bad place, but they’re often shaped by a certain level of naivety about the world that comes from not experiencing enough of it. There’s an old assumption that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. The reality is that regardless of location, humans face remarkably similar problems in their day-to-day lives.

I think when Twain wrote that travel is fatal to narrow-mindedness, he was describing a slow transformation. Travel forces contact with the unfamiliar, and that contact reshapes us. It exposes the limits of the stories we’ve inherited. It complicates the things we once believed without question. It replaces distance with experience. None of this happens instantly, and it doesn’t guarantee agreement or harmony. But, it does make it harder to reduce entire groups of people to simple categories. Once you’ve walked through their streets, observed their daily lives, and recognized their humanity, the stereotypes begin to lose their grip.

For photographers, this process becomes even more pronounced. Carrying a camera changes the way you move through a place. Instead of simply passing through, you begin observing. You start noticing the way light falls across buildings in the late afternoon. The choreography of people navigating a crowded street. Gestures, glances, and fleeting interactions that most people walk right past. A camera has a strange way of slowing you down. And the longer you observe, the harder it becomes to maintain preconceived notions about a place.

This may be the greatest gift for photographers who travel. Not the images themselves, but the shift in perception that happens along the way. Photography trains us to slow down, to observe carefully, and to notice the small details that reveal something deeper about the world. Travel simply increases those opportunities. Each new place offers another set of streets, another set of rhythms, another set of human stories unfolding quietly in front of us.

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I don’t think of myself as someone who loves the ocean in a typical sense. I’m not particularly fond of beach days. I’d rather be hiking in mountains or forest or meandering through unknown city streets with my camera than lounging at the water’s edge with an umbrella drink. But I do keep ending up there. At the water’s edge, looking out at the horizon, feeling that strange sense of vertigo you sometimes get watching a movie when the director drops in a dolly zoom shot.

I’ve never lived anywhere more than 20 miles from the coast for more that a few months. The coast has a way of pulling me back. Sometimes it’s deliberate, a planned trip with a camera or a vacation in a coastal place. Other times it’s almost accidental, like choosing a route that passes near water when a quicker, more direct inland option exists. I’ve come to realize the coast isn’t a destination so much as a condition and when I’m there, something in me is reset.

This pull predates photography entirely. I grew up sailing on the south coast of England. From a young age, boats, open water, and respect for both were normal, not romantic. The rituals were practical. Checking weather. Planning routes. Learning to feel the wind before fully understanding the science behind it. Knowing when to wait and when to move. Sailing wasn’t about escape. It was about responsibility, awareness, and attention. I learned quickly that the sea didn’t respond to confidence or hurry. Only the wind.

Later, that familiarity deepened. I spent time sailing in the Caribbean, where the water looks forgiving but demands just as much respect. Days unfolded according to wind and tide. Those years shaped how I understand movement and stillness, even now. I went on to study navigation formally. It sounds abstract, but navigation is about humility, admitting you’re small within something vast and learning how to orient yourself anyway. Charts, bearings, calculations. Tools that help you manage the fact that certainty is fragile at sea. You plan carefully and accept that your plan will change. The irony is that while the ocean has no visible highways or signs, I was always more comfortable navigating it than on a road in a car. My wife will tell you I’m terrible with road names and land-based navigation. I could drive the same route for years and still get flustered by a detour. I never felt that way on the water.

Then, quietly, I stepped away. Life moved. Careers solidified. Boats became something I spoke about in the past tense. Without making a conscious decision, I stopped sailing altogether. I haven’t really set foot on a sailboat in close to 15 years. The skills didn’t disappear, but they went dormant, like a language you no longer speak but still understand when you hear it. What surprised me is that even after leaving sailing behind, the coast never left me.

When I started photographing seriously, I noticed where my attention drifted. Cities, forests, deserts. I enjoyed them. But again and again, the images that have stayed with me came from the edges of land. Beaches in Iceland, volcanic shores in the Canary Islands, rocky outcroppings in Maine and stretches of grey winter shoreline closer to home in New Jersey. Places where the land doesn’t fully assert itself and the sea never quite settles. I think the coast organizes my attention in a way few other places do. It slows my mind, which with ADHD often feels like it is racing endlessly. There’s a simplicity to it. An uninterrupted horizon gives your eye somewhere to rest. Fewer objects compete for attention. In a way, the weather becomes a collaborator. Clouds, wind, haze, rain. They are not problems. They are part of the subject.

At the coast, my eyes stop darting. On a recent walk along the frozen winter shores of Barnegat Bay, I realized this matters more to me than I used to admit. In most of life, we are trained to scan constantly, to assess, optimize, respond. Street photography, which I also love, rewards that behavior. Streets are full of energy and conflict. They require constant attention, even when your are trying to capture them in a more abstract way. But I’ve found that the coast doesn’t reward urgency. It doesn’t care about efficiency. It forces you to slow down because there is nowhere else for your attention to go. On a calm day standing at the water’s edge you might only see three miles to the horizon, but for some reason that 3 miles feels infinite.

Coastal photography has taught me that patience is not passive. Waiting can be a form of participation. Watching light shift along a shoreline. Watching waves repeat without repeating. There is something deeply familiar about the coast that I didn’t recognize at first. When I stand near the water, I feel oriented. Not geographically, but internally. Maybe that comes from years of learning to read it.

Even though I no longer sail, that way of paying attention, that internal orientation, never left. In a way photography has become another form of navigation. Another way of locating myself within uncertainty. I don’t photograph the coast to relive sailing. I don’t miss boats nostalgically. That chapter of my life closed naturally. But the coast remains a place where the values I learned still apply. Respect for conditions. Acceptance of limits. Awareness of time as fluid rather than fixed.

In a world that pushes constant output, the coast offers a kind of counterweight. It can’t be rushed. It doesn’t deliver something new every second. I’ve found that it often asks you to stay longer than feels comfortable but to leave before you want to. Many of my coastal photographs are quiet to the point of being overlooked. I think this comes from being captivated by “Cape Light” the photobook by Joel Meyerwotiz’s from his time using large format cameras on Cape Cod.

I don’t go to the coast to feel inspired. Chasing inspiration feels too close to chasing productivity. I go to clear my head. It’s somewhere I can reliably return to when I need to lift the weight that settles in the corners of my mind. It’s like pulling back heavy curtains in a long closed room and letting light flood in and as I’ve learned over the years on this creative journey, not everything meaningful announces itself loudly. Success is not always measurable. A day spent walking a shoreline, noticing light that never quite resolves still counts. It’s become part of my “process”. It leaves something behind in my mind that helps my work at a later date.