My Journey to Self-Publishing

The Joy of Just Being: Beauty in the Ordinary is my first self-published book, a heartfelt project that merges my love of photography and literature. The book invites readers to interpret its narrative through their perspectives, celebrating the joy and grounding that come from being present and embracing life’s simple wonders.

Millions of photographs are taken every day across the world. Some are just snapshots. Others are more carefully crafted and have the capacity to deepen our vision and sharpen our sense of what life is truly about. The Joy of Just Being: Beauty in the Ordinary explores how photography can offer unique perspectives of the self, the world, and what matters most in life.

The images in this book were intended as a way to further develop my photography skills. These pictures depict a hobby that has grown and developed into an awareness that was bigger than anything I had ever expected it to be. All the photographs are authentic; none of the images have been manipulated or altered in any way. It saddens me to realize that with the rise of AI, people won’t be able to trust what they see anymore. I like to believe there will always be a need for real photography. We will always value a genuine photograph taken from a real human being who went out and stood in the elements and waited for the perfect moment when the real light was hitting our real planet in just the right way to create and capture a beautiful image.

In terms of subject matter, I am also trying to broaden my interests. I am constantly trying to teach myself to see the beauty in the ordinary, the ignored, or those little overlooked details of life that we encounter in our world every day because for me, it’s in those hints of ordinary life that we can find incredibly rich stories. It is the charm of the overlooked.

Being able to go out and create not only single images, but bodies of work that tell rich stories in the aggregate of those images might help us to find the beauty in the ordinary. The lesson I take from all this is to make sure that in my work it’s always about the meaning and the message first, because that means that no matter what technological advances come along, I always have the option to strip my work back to the real, the simple, an to distill it right back down to what photography has always been – which is telling true stories and writing with light.