12/05/2026
One day, you are holding a child who reaches instinctively for your hand, and before you realise it, you are standing beside a grown man finding his own way in the world.
My eldest turned 21 on the 1st of May, and the milestone feels both beautiful and bittersweet. Looking back through the thousands of photographs I’ve taken over the years, I see more than birthdays and milestones - I see fleeting moments that once felt ordinary, yet were quietly becoming memories.
As parents, we spend so much of our lives protecting, guiding, teaching. We hope we are raising kind people; people who will care deeply, move through the world with compassion, and discover who they are meant to become. And then, slowly, our role changes. We loosen our grip, not because we want to, but because love asks us to let them grow beyond us.
There are moments I wish I could turn back time - to the days when I knew where they were at every moment, when their world felt small enough for me to keep safe. But childhood is never something we are meant to keep; it is something we are privileged to witness.
Time moves quietly and all at once. In a world that rushes endlessly forward, we often joke about wishing the hard years away - the sleepless nights, the chaos, the exhaustion of early parenthood. Yet those very days become the ones we ache for later. The truth is: the ordinary moments are the extraordinary ones, though we rarely realise it while we are living them.
Photography has taught me this more than anything else. A photograph is not simply an image; it is evidence that a moment once existed. A small act of holding onto time. Looking back at photographs of my boys now, I feel immense gratitude - for the memories, for the forgotten moments rediscovered, and for the privilege of having watched them grow.
Perhaps that is the real gift of photographs: they remind us that while time never stops moving, love leaves traces behind.