When people ask if I can take their passport photo, I often hesitate. Not because it's difficult, but because passport photos and portraits serve two very different purposes. One is about recognition. The other is about representation.

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.

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.

Meeting Singapore portrait photographer Russell Wong led to an unexpected realisation: confidence doesn't come from being accepted by others, but from recognising you've already become the photographer you set out to be.

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.