Photography has been part of my life for a long time, but Locky B Photography is still very much at the beginning of its story.
I first picked up photography as a hobby back in 2013. At the time, there wasn't a business plan, a website, a print store or any real thought about where photography might eventually take me. I simply enjoyed taking photos.
Over the years that interest stuck around, sometimes more actively than others. But somewhere along the way, particularly through 2025, something started to change. I stopped looking at photography purely as something I enjoyed doing and started wondering what it could become if I genuinely committed to it.
In 2026, I decided to find out.
Taking Photography More Seriously
Taking photography seriously hasn't meant suddenly becoming a completely different photographer.
If anything, I've been trying to lean further into the reasons I enjoyed photography in the first place.
I'm not particularly interested in arriving somewhere, setting up a tripod and waiting hours for the perfect conditions. I enjoy exploring. I like walking around with a camera, following roads, noticing shapes in the landscape, looking through windows, finding unusual foregrounds and stopping when something catches my attention.
That curiosity has slowly become the foundation of how I photograph.
Curiosity Through My Lens eventually became the tagline for Locky B Photography because it describes the process better than anything else I could come up with.
A lot of my favourite photographs weren't meticulously planned. They came from stopping somewhere because I noticed something interesting, taking a different road, wandering a little further or simply looking at a familiar place differently.
Building More Than an Instagram Page
For a long time, Instagram was effectively the home of my photography.
It's still an important part of what I'm building, and I've been enjoying sharing my work there more consistently, but I wanted Locky B Photography to have somewhere of its own.
That led to creating lockybphotography.com
The website has gradually become a curated home for my landscape photography, with galleries from places including Taranaki, Queenstown, Glenorchy and Fiordland. Rather than uploading everything I photograph, I've been trying to become much more selective about what earns a place in the portfolio.
That process has actually changed the way I look at my own photography.
A photo can be good without necessarily belonging in a portfolio. It can mean something personally without needing to become a print. And sometimes an image I initially overlook becomes much stronger when I return to it months later with fresh eyes.
Learning to make those decisions has been a surprisingly big part of building Locky B Photography.
Putting Photography Into Print
Another step I wanted to take was seeing my photographs exist somewhere other than a screen.
That became the Locky B Photography print store.
I've started small and deliberately kept the collection curated. I don't want every photograph on the website to automatically become something for sale. The images in the print collection need to feel like photographs I would genuinely want to see hanging on a wall myself.
Seeing the first collection begin to come together has made the whole project feel much more real.
There's something different about preparing an image knowing that its final destination could be someone's wall rather than another Instagram post.
Entering the Next Stage
More recently, I've also started taking the first steps into photography competitions.
That's something I avoided for a long time.
Submitting a photograph to be judged alongside the work of other photographers is quite different from uploading an image to social media. There isn't an algorithm deciding whether somebody sees it, and there isn't the same instant feedback of likes and views.
It is simply the photograph.
That makes entering slightly intimidating, but also exciting.
At this point I'm not building Locky B Photography around awards or recognition. What interests me more is seeing how far I can push the work, getting my photography in front of new people and occasionally putting myself in situations that are a little outside my comfort zone.
Still at the Beginning
The strange thing about writing this is that Locky B Photography simultaneously feels like something I've been working towards for years and something that has only just started.
There's now a website, a growing portfolio, a print store, social media that is slowly reaching more people and the beginnings of competition entries and longer-term photography projects.
But there is still an enormous amount I want to photograph.
I want to continue exploring Taranaki and photographing the mountain I've become so familiar with from completely different perspectives. I want to keep travelling around New Zealand, building stronger collections from the places I visit rather than simply collecting individual photographs.
Most importantly, I want the photography itself to keep evolving naturally.
I'm still learning what I like.
I'm still discovering what makes an image feel like mine.
And I'm still figuring out exactly where Locky B Photography is going.
That's probably what makes this stage so interesting.
This blog will be somewhere I can share a little more of that process, including the stories behind photographs, places I've explored, lessons I've learned, experiments that worked, ones that didn't, and whatever else happens along the way.
For now, this is chapter one.