10 Years Later

2015 - Menai Bridge.

Amazingly 2025 marks 10 years since I finished university. As a kid in school, I’d always yearned of growing up and living an ‘adult’ life, pursuing my then dreams of being a scientist. Throughout that time, I could always give a clear answer to what I wanted to do in the future. And then it was over. A 17-year-long journey in education that started in 1998 had finished, and for the first time I didn’t know what I would do next, or even what I wanted to do. I remember wondering at the time where I would be in 2025, having already thought about how far I’d come from 2005. If you’d told me then that I would be in Japan pursuing a career as a photographer, I simply would have assumed you were talking about somebody else. But at that time, as one thing was ending, something else was beginning.

2025 - The view of Mt. Fuji from Mt. Takao.

2015 also marks my start with photography. I had an old Fuji bridge camera before, but this was the year I bought myself a ‘proper’ camera (a Nikon D3200) and went beyond just trying to take snapshots. One day, as the end of my Masters was drawing near, I came up with an interesting idea. Why not create a special image to commemorate my time at Bangor University? I had lived near to Menai Bridge in my first year and it stands as a symbol of the area, so I took my printed thesis down on the shores of the Menai and captured a photo on the rocks with the bridge in the background, I had to be quick as not long after the waves washed up to that very spot. It’s what I consider my first ‘good’ photo and looking back, it perfectly captures perhaps the most important inflection point in my life.

Now 10 years later I have spent longer as a professional photographer than an amateur. That in of itself is astonishing. It’s strange, perhaps by not achieving the things I expected to achieve and yet doing things I never even dreamt were possible, I feel like it has been the Schrödinger’s decade. As though I have lived a lot and not lived at the same time. Very curious.

Now a new year is upon us and the next decade awaits. Given the way of the world and my life so far, I really cannot say what life in 2035 will hold. But I certainly look forward to the journey. The road goes ever on.