Harry Styles recently released a song called Aperture, and if you know anything about photography, you’ll already feel the allure of that title. Aperture is the opening in a lens that controls how much light reaches the sensor. Open it wide, and everything floods in: brightness, softness, depth. Close it down, and you’re left with something sharper, more controlled, but darker.
Harry hasn't spelled out the metaphor in so many words, but the song alludes to something simple and difficult in equal measure: that you control how much light you let into your life, and closing yourself off to it has a cost. When you shut the door on the hard things, you shut out a lot of the good ones too. The same opening that lets in difficulty lets in everything else, and you don't get to be selective about what the light carries.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.
A few months ago, my photography felt like something I was quietly tending to. A practice I loved, but one that existed around the edges of my life - evenings after work, weekends, the odd booking here and there. Then, almost without warning, something shifted. The enquiries picked up, and I found myself saying yes a lot more - not recklessly, but openly - and the momentum Harry describes is exactly what followed.
I won’t pretend I saw it coming. But I think I had been preparing for it all this time without realising.
My full-time work as a radiation therapist is precise, and it asks a great deal of you - not just technically, but emotionally. You are with people in their most vulnerable state, and that can look like many things. Their hardest days. The cautious hope that treatment might work. And sometimes, the quiet relief when it does.
A friend said something to me recently that I’ve turned over in my mind since. He said: "both of your jobs require a level of selflessness."
I think he's right - and I think the selflessness lives in the attention. In the treatment room, a millimetre matters. You learn to slow down and look carefully, to not rush past the thing that's actually in front of you. To see the person, not just the task. Behind a camera, the same instinct takes over. You're not there to perform, you're there to witness - to pay close attention to the quality of light, the tilt of a chin, the split second before or after. To hold space for someone's joy, their ordinariness, their beauty, and document it faithfully.
What I didn’t anticipate was the administrative reality of running a photography business at any real volume. I have written more contracts, emails, and proposals in the last few months than in the entirety of my life before now. It’s been entirely new - and occasionally overwhelming - but also clarifying. There’s something grounding about formalising what you do. About putting terms on paper. About saying: this is my work, and this is what it’s worth.
I’m still learning. I’ve leaned on tools and people and, frankly, a lot of trial and error. But I’m learning to see it not as admin, but as part of the craft - the infrastructure that lets the actual work exist sustainably.
Balance is probably the wrong word for what I’m doing. It suggests two things in equilibrium, neatly weighted. What I have is more like a constant, conscious negotiation - between rest and output, between my patients and my clients, between the person who shows up for others all day and the person who needs to show up for herself too.
What’s made it possible is that the two sides of my life don’t actually compete. They reinforce each other. The empathy I practise in the treatment room makes me a better photographer. The creativity and autonomy of my photography keeps me whole in ways that sustain my clinical work. They are both, as my friend said, acts of service. And I think I needed to understand that before I could hold them both properly.
Aperture lets the light in.
I’ve spent a long time being quite careful about how wide I opened things up - careful about overcommitting, about hoping too loudly for the photography to become what it’s slowly becoming. But something has shifted. I’m less afraid of the brightness now. I’m finding that the more I open, the more I can see.
This isn’t a post about having it figured out. It’s a note from somewhere in the middle of a transition, written for the version of me who needed to mark it - and maybe for you, if you’re somewhere similar.
Open the aperture. See what comes in.
