About the.storylens.
A project 15 years in the making.
Where do I begin?
When I was a kid, my father had a Zenit SLR, a Soviet-era Canon clone that smelled of metal and old leather and which sounded like a small explosion when exposing. He used to carry it around with him wherever he went. He would always take photos of this and that, of my first steps, of parties, of life’s little moments. To him, I owe all the memories of my childhood, captured in beautiful black-and-white photos that last to this day.
It was only after high school that I got my own point-and-click camera, a Canon S5 IS, and started practising my hand at everything I found. Slowly but surely, I moved up the ladder until I got my first DSLR, a Canon 450D I’d bought from a friend. The rest is history. That was the true start of my experimentation with various lenses and lighting conditions, a long journey of learning that continues to this day.
With time, I realised that I love taking photos that convey emotion, that tell hidden stories and which sometimes leave you wondering about what was going on. Street photography was the perfect way to start, as it fit in perfectly with the type of stories I normally write, and soon discovered that those photos would actually fuel my inspiration.
What is the.storylens?
the.storylens is a concept where I marry the visual arts with the written word to figure out what lies beyond mere pixels. Be it broken-down buildings, a mopey passerby, a bee pollinating a daisy, a starry sky in the mountains or a singer clutching a microphone for dear life, all of these have hidden stories to be discovered, felt and told.
the.storylens is not about pixels; it’s not about perfect exposure, perfect sharpness and sometimes not even about the perfect framing; it’s about the right game of light, shadow, subject and colour to convey a feeling in a moment. It’s about telling stories through the lens, a vision of reality with an artistic touch.
the.philosophy
“It’s not about perfect exposure – it’s about the right game of light, shadow, subject and colour to convey a feeling in a moment.”
Pure, raw emotion has always inspired me and I found that, alongside the written word, photography is a perfect medium to trap it in a moment. With time, it became a second language and when I finally brought them together the.storylens took shape. It’s about the moments, the memories, the people.
the.storylens in numbers.
15+
100k+
500k+
∞
The photographer is never just a photographer.
business analyst • story writer • photographer • music addict
There has to be someone behind the camera as well, right?. Well, with one finger on the shutter button and an eye seeking absconded emotions, there is me, the.storyteller. A technical man, with an IT career spanning many years, but for whom art has always been second nature.
I learned that there’s a place for technology and technique and a place for expression, and right at the precipice where they meet, there’s me, caught between two worlds most people consider incompatible, but which have much more in common than meets the eye. There is a place for precision in ambiguity and for ambiguity in precision.
Over time, I have cultivated a passion for stories, visuals, emotions, words, music, and people in everything I’ve done in my life. This project is the culmination of all that I have learned and created throughout the years.