Creator journal / 19 days until the next adventure
What should I
photograph next?
I’m leaving for Finland, Sweden and Ireland with cameras, a drone and an open question: how do I find the image other people would not take?
The short answer: I want to photograph the overlooked patterns, people, weather and ordinary moments that make Finland, Sweden and Ireland feel lived in—not simply recognizable. I’m asking viewers to help build that shot list.
I turned 42 today. In 19 days, I leave for Finland, Sweden and Ireland, and I have been thinking less about how many photographs I can bring home and more about whether I can make something that actually feels like mine.
I am a creator, not only a photographer. I work with still images, video, drone footage, digital art and whatever form helps a story make sense. The challenge is that having more tools does not automatically give you a style. Sometimes it only gives you more ways to make the same image everyone else has already made.
The photograph beside the obvious photograph
Every major destination has a visual script. Stand here. Point the camera there. Wait for the clean light. Those images can be beautiful, and I will probably make some of them. But I am always looking for the photograph beside that photograph: the strange reflection, the worn doorway, the person waiting just outside the crowd, or the pattern that only becomes visible from a drone.
I do not want different simply for the sake of being clever. I want to notice something honestly, from an angle shaped by my own curiosity. Maybe style is not a preset or a color grade. Maybe it is the pattern of what a person cannot stop noticing.
What I’m looking for in Finland, Sweden and Ireland
In Finland, I want to explore the tension between quiet design and lived texture: public spaces, waterfront edges, late-summer light, saunas, transit and the human details that interrupt all that order.
In Sweden, I want to look beyond polished Stockholm. I’m interested in the seams between old and new, the geometry of the city from above and the ordinary routines happening inside beautiful architecture.
Ireland is different because I already feel emotionally connected to it. The challenge there is not finding beauty. It is resisting the version of Ireland I already expect to see. I want weather, humor, work, distance and the small evidence that people have built lives inside landscapes visitors tend to romanticize.
The experiment
For the next 19 days, I’m building the trip in public. I’ll share the planning, equipment decisions, fears, visual references and assignments I receive. During the trip, I’ll show what I tried, what failed, what surprised me and which ideas began to look like a style.
This is not a declaration that I have figured it all out. It is an invitation to watch a 42-year-old creator deliberately search for the next version of his work.
What happens tomorrow?
Tomorrow begins with Finland: what I expect to find, what I may be misunderstanding and the first ideas going onto the shot list. The suggestions that change the plan will be credited in future field notes whenever possible.