As a lecturer and a photographer, AI keeps showing up in my world in different forms. In the classroom, in the studio, in the questions clients ask. The technology isn't the hard part. The harder question is what we risk outsourcing along the way.

I've stood in front of boardrooms and lecture halls more times than I can count. But nothing quite prepared me for spending a Saturday evening at the Botanic Gardens, telling my story to strangers sitting under trees. Some of the best rooms are the ones you didn't know existed.

During a viewing session, a client paused at one of his portraits and said something I wasn't expecting. It gave me goosebumps. After years of photographing people, this was the first time I watched someone find something in an image that had nothing to do with how they looked.

People see the photographs. Sometimes they see the studio. What they don't see are the conversations. The ones about pricing, direction, values, and everything in between. A reflection on what it means to have someone willing to sit with the hard questions alongside you.

Two coaching clients. Both at the edge of retirement. One felt she was running out of time. The other had more of it than he knew what to do with. Same word, completely different weight and underneath both, the same reckoning.

When Russell Wong visited the studio, the starstruck part passed quickly. What stayed was something I hadn't expected. The moment I realised I was no longer on the outside of a conversation looking in. I was in it.

A trip to Jeju. An exhibition title that followed me around the island. And a camera that kept finding its way to things that felt temporary… bare trees, a lone persimmon, waves breaking against rock. Sometimes the photographs know something before you do.

I've stood in front of conference rooms and portrait clients alike, and walked away picking apart everything I could have done better. The people in those rooms were having a completely different experience. This is about the gap between how we judge ourselves and how we're actually received.

Eighteen years in brand marketing. A title. A salary. A career that made sense to everyone except me. This is about the afternoon I finally stopped asking how much longer I could hold on, and started asking a different question.