How To Be Good At Photography

This may come across as arrogant, but when I got my hands on my first "professional" camera in 2010, I had never learnt photography in any structured way.

My teachers were YouTube and, more importantly, practice. I carried my camera with me everywhere. It became a running joke amongst my closest friends. But looking back, those endless hours — even just standing on my balcony, shooting the world go by — became the foundation of everything I have today.

And it wasn't the settings I was learning. Not really. I could have memorised the exposure triangle from a textbook in an afternoon. What the balcony taught me was how to see. Waiting for the light to shift. Noticing the way a stranger below carried themselves, the moment before a gesture became a photograph. Learning, slowly, that the picture I had in my head and the one the camera gave me were rarely the same thing — and that closing that gap was the whole job.

Maybe if I'd taken a more structured approach, I'd have better technical knowledge. I'd probably talk about my work with more of the right words. But would it carry my fingerprint? My storytelling? The trust I've built with brands and clients over the years?

I don't think you can shortcut that part. The technical side, you can be taught. The rest of it you have to earn, badly and slowly, one imperfect frame at a time. I got things wrong for years. I'm still getting things wrong. But every one of those mistakes is mine, and I think that's what people are actually responding to when they choose to work with me.

I don't carry the camera as much as I used to. But it's still one of the first things I reach for when I'm packing to travel.

So tell me — how did you learn your trade? And would you change any of it?