On a previous trip to Haiti I had lunched with the Minister of the Environment. Whilst talking to him enthusiastically about Macaya National Park – Haiti’s last stronghold of broadleaf forest and a haven of unique species – I noticed a glazed expression in his eyes. He had never set foot in Macaya.

How does one talk about protecting something to which people cannot relate? How can we expect anyone to be excited about protecting something they have not seen, touched, or breathed? Of course other priorities are more pressing because they loom larger in everyday life.

But not everyone in Haiti sees the world through the same lens. On a recent visit to a remote peak in Macaya, Blair Hedges from Pennsylvania State University told me he was surprised to find a patch of lush forest that nobody knew about. The landowner, he learned, had protected the forest, because he liked the clean, fresh water that it provided.

It dawned on me, as my plane lifted off the Port Au Prince runway, that perhaps we needed to try and guide others to look at Haiti through a different lens. I had travelled repeatedly to Haiti because of something unique and special about the country. How could I open other’s eyes to see and value those same things as unique and special? Telling them is not enough; in order to really appreciate and value nature people need to engage with it in a different way, to see it with fresh eyes.

Where better to start trying to change hearts and minds that with those young enough to hope?

I had always sensed the power of the photograph in Haiti. A photograph of a frog or an orchid conferred a sense of value on the subject. If it was interesting and important enough for someone to come all the way to Haiti to photograph, perhaps there is a value that has been overlooked.

But what if the photographs of the same things were not captured by outsiders such as myself but by Haitians themselves? What if we provided young Haitians with the means to document and tell stories about their natural and cultural worlds; what would they choose to include, emphasize and exclude in their stories? How would it change the way they engaged with and saw their world? And how would others – both Haitians and foreigners – react to those images and stories? These questions were buzzing around my head as I looked out my window and watched a sea of blue tents transition to dead, brown hillsides. I wondered if there may be a better way to tell Haiti’s story.

And so, last August, I joined a team of talented and diverse instructors from Panos Carribean and Frame of Mind and headed to Jacmel on Haiti’s southern coast to find out.

Armed with digital cameras and 20 promising Haitian youths selected by Panos Caribbean, we started with a crash course biodiversity, conservation and hands-on training in photography and visual storytelling before sending the kids out to capture and compile photo essays on themes of their choosing.

I was excited by the idea but truly blown away by the results. Through the unfiltered lens of the world seen by the kids I learned more about local perceptions to wildlife than I had in my previous half dozen trips to Haiti. Frogs, they believe, pee in your eye and make you blind. My fascination with frogs (krapo in Creole) was an endless source of amusement and I was quickly labeled “Dr Krapo”. Even though they gawped at me as if I were a performing circus animal, I felt strangely honored by the label. Beneath the joking was a growing curiosity.

Our expedition into Parc La Visite – holding some of Haiti’s last pine and broadleaf forest and a bone-jarring drive upwards from Jacmel– had to be cancelled at the last minute because of a hurricane. There was palpable disappointment from the kids, many of whom expressed that it has always been their dream to visit the Park. Faced with such a demonstration of disappointment we vowed to return to take them into the Park.

Six months later, we were true to our word. We spent several mist-shrouded days exploring the pine forest and communities living within and around Parc La Visite. Despite having visited the park before, I was seeing it through fresh eyes. Every five minutes one of the kids would run up and show me a photo of a flower or a seed or a bird. In spite of rough conditions and wet mattresses, the air buzzed with excitement at this newfound world. And then, as dark descended we donned headlamps and headed out in search of frogs. We listened to the calls and looked at photos of the frogs we were hearing. It would have been hard to believe, six months ago, that we would be running around the hillsides lifting logs in search of frogs together. Not that we actually found any – at this time of year they are easier to hear than to see – but in a sense it didn’t matter, and may even have added to their enigmatic appeal.

The final night of our trip we held a photo exhibit and book launch in Jacmel. We hung large prints of their photo stories, projected a short video of the trip put together by Jenny Nichols of Pongo Media, made presentations and exchanged gifts. The kids, dressed in their best outfits, led proud parents and friends round walls adorned with their images. It was a proud night for the kids, parents, and us.

And so, after some two years of plotting and planning with Deanna Del Vecchio and Neil Osborne Frame of Mind was born, with a mission to empower youth to connect with their natural and cultural worlds through photography and visual storytelling. Our Haiti workshops were a proof of concept; not only fostering a deeper relationship between the kids and their natural world, but also by opening the eyes of others to a new way of seeing; and perhaps none more so than mine.

With plans to return to Haiti, and to export Frame of Mind to other parts of the world, we hope we can build on this momentum to inspire youth to see their natural and cultural worlds in new ways, and open the eyes of their parents and peers to see value in things they have overlooked.

As my plane lifted off in Port Au Prince I felt invigorated. I was already excited about my next trip to Haiti.

To find out more, please visit Frame of Mind’s website

Sunset over Tetapare in the Solomon Islands

Samburu village, Kenya

OK, so maybe not. If the only reaction a photo evokes is “this guy spends a lot on equipment!” then I have failed pretty miserably in any form of artistic expression. And while I get enough positive reinforcement from my photos to keep me going, I still get asked about gear far more often than I get asked about technique or creative vision. I have been trying to figure out why.

People love to have the biggest and the best. We like cars that can go three times faster than we will ever drive them, and we like cameras that produce images that can be blown up to the size of a house. Twenty five megapixels you say? Great, I’ll take it. And I will admit it, I am a sucker for that sugar rush of having a new toy to play with, and salivate at the sight of a new canon L series lens.

But photography is a blend of science and art. With more emphasis on the importance of gear than the importance of seeing, the art of photography gets drowned in a sea of megapixels. We all want quick fixes and immediate results. We want to improve our photography NOW, and the best way to do that is to get an expensive camera and lenses longer than your right arm, right?

I’m not so sure. For over two years I used an entry level DSLR and shot jpegs. Post-processing was something you did to cheese and RAW meant uncooked meat. Why would I want a “fast” lens when most of my subjects weren’t moving? A professional-grade camera and expensive lenses would have been wasted on me. The simplicity of a basic camera and one lens forced my creativity. I really had to think about composition and light. Without post-processing I had to get everything right when I clicked the shutter. I tried to figure out what worked well and what didn’t (mainly by doing the latter) and spent a lot of time studying the kind of images I wanted to be taking. When I looked at a scene I would ask myself “how would I paint this?”. It forced me to think about what was really important in the composition – what was the strongest way of seeing, as Edward Weston put it. It challenged me to think about how I wanted to represent the scene or the subject rather than simply lifting my camera to eye level and recording it as if to say “I’ve been here”. I thought more about mood and emotion, about composition and quality of light.

As my eye developed I started to feel the limitations of the camera and lens I was using and my curiosity led me to invest in a wide angle lens. A new world of creative opportunities was opened. I captured the image below when the combination of scene, light and moment coincided and it was the first image I had taken that I felt really captured the mood of the moment. That lens was stuck on my camera for the next six months. I went a bit bonkers with it.

And then came my first portfolio review with National Geographic Natural History Photo Editor Kathy Moran: “you might want to go easy on the wide angle”. I realized my obsession with the wide angle had closed my mind to other, potentially more powerful, interpretations. This challenged me to find new and different perspectives that did not rely on the “wide angle effect”. I invested in a zoom lens and learned the power of isolating and compressing elements of the landscape for more abstract images. I learned the art of simplicity.

So, what’s my point again? I guess my point is that, while equipment is of course important, while we all succumb to the allure of the nice new camera with gazillion megapixels, the most powerful images are those that resonate emotionally – and for now, at least, that is not something the camera will do for you. It will tell you the “right” exposure for a scene, but it won’t tell you the creatively correct exposure for your interpretation of the scene. It won’t tell you what lenses are right for your creative vision. Enjoy the journey of creative discovery, hone your art through carefully crafted compositions, experimentation and happy accidents, beware of the wide angle traps and challenge yourself to see the world in different ways. And please don’t ask me what kind of camera I use

Story Behind the Shot: Zebra in Ruaha National Park, Tanzania

I was in Ruaha National Park in Tanzania, a rugged Park of arid rolling hills dotted with bulbous baobab trees. It was early afternoon and the blazing sun was high in the sky. The light was harsh, but given that I only had 24 hours in the Park, I wanted to make the most of it and went on a game drive. My attention was grabbed by groups of Plain’s zebras – they looked as if they had been painted by hand – and I wanted to get a nice portrait shot to highlight this striking pattern. Getting close enough to the zebras to get the shot I wanted proved a challenge, however, as they definitely weren’t keen on sticking around. And then we came upon this one. As we neared it that stopped for a split second, looked directly at me, and then turned and ran off in a cloud of dust.

I only made one shot in that split second, and looked at my LCD screen to see if I had what I wanted, and it looked as if I had – although with the head filling the frame in such a tight crop I was lucky I hadn’t lopped any of it off. I was using a 400mm lens on my Canon 5D Mk II at f/5.6 and a speedy 1/3200 second exposure.

I didn’t think this was a great shot at the time – I was just happy I had managed to get a portrait of the zebra looking face on. But when I started playing with the image later in Lightroom, first converting it to black and white and then bumping up the contrast, I realized the harsh light actually lent itself well to a high key image. I effectively blew out the overexposed background and deepened the blacks of the zerba’s stripes. I selectively overexposed some areas of the background so as to remove any distractions that detracted from the shot. Nothing you couldn’t do in the darkroom. I ended up with an image I liked for its bold simplicity stripped of everything but the essential elements. I also liked the shadow of the zebra in the background as it provided a hint of depth.