Making Space for a More Visual Life
I recently bought a DJI Osmo Pocket 4P.
Part of the reason was pretty simple. I wanted something small enough to carry with me when I travel, but capable enough to shoot more intentionally than I normally would with my phone.
I have always taken photos, mostly on my Google Pixel 9, but I have never really had a proper home for them.
They end up on my phone, on hard drives, in camera rolls, or occasionally on social media.
Buying the Osmo got me thinking about that.
I have spent years using my website as a place for words. It holds technical articles, personal reflections, projects and ideas I am trying to understand more clearly.
But photography and video have mostly lived somewhere else.
I wanted to change that.
A Reason to Look More Closely
One thing I like about carrying a camera is that it gives you a reason to pay attention.
You start noticing things you might otherwise walk past.
How the light hits a building.
How a street changes at different times of the day.
People going about their lives.
Small details that probably would not make it into a list of places to visit, but somehow become the things you remember.
I still expect my Pixel to be one of the cameras I use most often. The best camera is usually the one you already have with you.
The Osmo gives me something slightly different.
Movement. A little more intention. Another way of capturing what a place felt like rather than only what it looked like.
More importantly, it made video feel accessible enough for me to actually practise it.
I do not need to suddenly become a filmmaker.
I can just start.
The Website That Shifted My Thinking
A big inspiration for this was Paul Stamatiou’s photography archive.
What I liked was not just the quality of the photography.
It was that he had actually given the work a home.
Trips were not buried somewhere in an Instagram feed. They had their own collections, pages, writing, location information and context.
His Grand Cayman journal especially made me think differently about what a travel journal on the web could be.
It was not simply a gallery with some text underneath it.
The photographs and the writing were part of the same story.
I realised I wanted something similar on my own site.
Not a copy of what he had built, but the same general idea that photography deserves more than an endless grid of images.
Building Journeys, Not Albums
The photography section on my site starts with collections.
Africa is the first one I have spent time structuring, with room for journals from Namibia, Zanzibar and Cape Town. Asia currently begins with the United Arab Emirates.
The nice thing is that there is no pressure for the archive to feel complete.
It can grow as I travel, take more photos and get better at the craft.
Each trip is written in MDX, which is the same content-first approach I already use elsewhere on the site.
That gives me enough flexibility to combine things like:
- Long-form writing
- Full-width photographs
- Images placed beside each other
- Small editorial grids
- Video
- Captions and camera information
The technical details are optional.
A photograph can include the camera, lens, location or date when that information adds something.
When it does not, it can just be a photograph.
Images also open into a lightbox with keyboard, button and swipe navigation. I wanted the experience to feel considered on a large screen while still working naturally on a phone.
There is also a separate photostream for images that do not belong to a specific journey.
Some photos are part of a larger story.
Others are just moments I wanted to keep.
Owning the Creative Space
I still enjoy social media, and I will probably continue sharing photographs there.
But I do not think social platforms are particularly good archives.
Everything eventually becomes another item in a feed.
You post something, people see it for a while, and then everyone moves on to the next thing.
A website can move at a different pace.
A trip does not have to become content while I am still on it.
I can come home, look through the photographs again, think about what I actually want to say, and build the journal afterwards.
I can mix photos from my Pixel with video from the Osmo.
I can come back months later and add an image I initially overlooked.
I can rewrite something after understanding the experience differently.
That is probably what I like most about having a space I own.
The work does not need to disappear simply because the feed has moved on.
Another Way of Remembering
I have always used writing to make sense of my experiences.
This feels like an extension of that.
Sometimes the thing I remember about a trip is a conversation or an idea that eventually becomes something I write about.
Other times it is much simpler.
A road.
A building.
The weather.
A particular view.
A random moment that would be difficult to explain properly with words.
Photography gives me another way to keep those things.
The Osmo might have been what pushed me to finally build this, but I think the more interesting part will be what happens after.
Taking more photos.
Shooting more video.
Paying closer attention when I travel.
And having somewhere of my own to keep all of it.
For now, there are only a few collections and quite a lot of empty space.
I like that.
The film’s soundtrack is “Cinematic Documentary” by Aleksey Chistilin, sourced from Pixabay under the Pixabay Content License.