I told her I had a few things left on my bucket list. She told me my life was a bucket list. I pulled my pen from my pocket, scribbled that down in my dog-eared little notebook. It seemed clever at the time. Like that one time when a friend told me she thought of me as Indiana Jones with …
Fill Your Canvas
My mother and I on safari this January. Photographs by Cynthia Haynes. On Friday I re-posted Life is Short. The comments and the emails I’ve had since that original post have lit me on fire in a way I can’t describe, reminding me how deeply we can live when we get intentional about it. It also reminds me of the …
Life Is Short – A Re-Post
Several years ago this post (below) was deeply significant to me. It was an act of nailing my colours to the mast, and not long after I posted it, I began a trip that would change my life forever – selling most of what I owned, putting the rest into a tired Land Rover Defender, and setting off to live …
Diving in Zanzibar
After two weeks in Zanzibar at the end of what’ll be almost 6 weeks in East Africa, we’re packing up to head home. From beginning to end it’s been the trip of dreams. My time in Lalibela, Ethiopia, was like traveling back in time. Safari with Cynthia and my mother was a trip of a lifetime and it’ll take me …
2013 Retrospective
Kenya, January 2013. It’s the nature of time to go too quickly. Maybe that’s one of the reasons photography works so well for me: in making time one of our raw materials we pay more attention to it, honouring it down to thousandths of a second, more present, more perceptive. I wish paying more attention slowed it down somewhat, and …
Hokkaido Landscapes with Martin Bailey
I fell in love with Hokkaido, Japan, last year. I joined Martin Bailey as a guest on his Winter Wonderland tour, and spent almost two weeks photographing monkeys, cranes, eagles, and beautiful landscapes. I wanted more of the landscapes and Martin and I talked long and hard about the possibilities. So the second he started getting serious about running a …
Christmas Presence.
In the coming days, if you’ve not done so already you’ll see all kinds of articles about making better holiday photographs. They’ll be filled with advice from the banal and obvious, to the dubiously helpful. Mostly they’ll be written to drag people to their blogs, and increase traffic, when those same people should just shut the laptop and be with …
Space for Wonder
The other day a friend and I threw our cameras into the Jeep and drove deep into British Columbia’s Squamish River and Elaho River valleys. Temperatures were unusually low for around here and there was an invigorating chill in the air. So busy from the launch of the new Craft & Vision website, I’d forgotten to come up for air, …
Follow Your Passion?
As trendy as it has been recently for people to write about doing things fueled by our passion, it looks like we’ve now swung the other way, fatigued, I suspect, by all this talk of passion, which like any hot-burning fire, takes constant fuel to feed it. No wonder we’re tiring of the word “passion”. But it would be a …
Awake Enough.
I was talking to a photographer recently who said something I’ve heard, in so many different words, from so many of us, including myself. She’s taking a trip, going somewhere epic, somewhere she’s obviously been dreaming about, a place that’s already well lodged into her heart and imagination even though she’s never been there. She said she was worried it …