I was adjusting my framing on a church in Buff Bay when curiosity got the better of me, and I googled the graves in the churchyard.

That's when I found out where the walls came from.

England. The stone crossed the Atlantic as ballast — dead weight carried by ships with nothing better to put in the hold. When they got here and loaded their actual cargo, the ballast was dumped on the dock. Somebody looked at that pile of discarded rock and built a church out of it.

The church I was standing in front of. The wall I had been carefully keeping out of my frame.

I had captured four frames at that point. took eleven more after.

And they were different photographs. I stopped shooting a pretty old building and started shooting two hundred years of somebody else's trade route, standing on an avenue in Buff Bay.

That was the moment the mission was born.

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I Built This on Somebody Else's Playbook

Here's the honest version of how First Photons started.

I wanted to build something financially sustainable around what I love, which is this island — the look of it, the light on it, the history underneath it. That was always the goal.

But when I sat down to work out how, I did what everybody does. I looked at what was working for other people, in other countries. And what works, visibly and reliably, is Lightroom education. Presets, tone curves, before-and-afters. There's an audience for it and a proven path.

So that's what I led with. Partly because it's where I had the most experience and had put in the most time — but mostly because photographers crave Lightroom insight, and I wanted into that market.

Three months in, I know which of these issues mattered.

The fort at Titchfield brought more readers than everything else combined. The Blue Mountains piece — the Maroons, the World Heritage listing, who gets to guide you through a place — got replies from people who have never held a camera. The ballast church is the best thing I've written this year.

The tone curve issue was useful, and nobody argued with it.

So I'm adjusting course.

First Photons leads with heritage now. The places, the history underneath them, and the photographs that come out of knowing the difference.

And if you came for the photography — stay. You're not losing anything.

I mean that practically, not as reassurance.

Here's what writing this for three months has taught me: knowing what you're standing on makes you a better photographer. At Buff Bay, once I knew the stone had crossed an ocean as dead weight, I stopped shooting the view past the wall and started shooting the wall in the view. At Titchfield, I stopped framing out the cannons. Same locations, same gear, completely different pictures — and the only thing that changed was a few minutes of reading.

The practice stays intact, and the principles don't move: light-forward shooting, clear planning, composition, post-processing. All of it exactly as before.

This isn't a detour from landscape photography. It's the part most landscape photography is missing.

Concretely, here's what stays:

In The Edit runs in every issue — shorter than it used to be, but every time. One decision, one frame, the actual numbers. There's one below so you can see the new size.

Photo tours are coming. Portland's most coveted landscapes and heritage sites at first light. More on that in the new year.

The landscape work isn't going anywhere. It's the reason any of this exists. What's changing is that now I will include the cultural and heritage significance of what is in the frame.

I spent three months teaching a skill a hundred other people are teaching. The only thing I have that none of them has is this island, and I'd be an idiot to keep leading with the other thing.

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The Calendar — and you pick what's in it

Which brings me to what I'm making.

A 2027 calendar. Twelve months of Jamaican heritage, with Titchfield and Fort George at the centre.

There are two ways to get one.

The signed first edition — twenty-five copies.

I print these myself, sign and hand-number each one, and post them personally. No. 1 through No. 25.

Each one also gets:

A handwritten dedication. Tell me who it's for, and I'll write it in. If it's a gift, it arrives already meant for somebody.

Your name printed inside the calendar. There's a first-edition page at the back listing all twenty-five original owners. Once the file goes to print, that list is closed forever — there is no way to be added to it later.

A field-notes sheet. Twelve short pieces, one per month: a little insight on the light and conditions where the image was taken and something i discovered about the location. The history that didn't fit on the page.

The First Photons seal, embossed into the inside cover.

When the twenty-five are gone, they're gone. There is no second signed run, because a 2027 calendar only gets one year to exist.

US$65, shipped anywhere.

The standard edition.

The same twelve months, printed to order and shipped direct to you. No cap on these — but the order window still closes.

US$40, shipped anywhere.

Pre-orders close November 20, 2026 — or when the twenty-five are gone, whichever happens first.

And a word to the people who have been here since the beginning: there are currently fewer of you than there are signed copies. Make of that what you will.

Reserve a copy

Now here's the part I want your help with.

Four of the twelve months are still open, and I'd rather you chose them than I did.

A church. A fort. A ruin. A bridge. A great house. A stretch of coast with a story on it. A building you've driven past your whole life and wondered about. Somewhere that's never been photographed properly — Somewhere close to home.

Reply to this email with the place and why it matters. I'll go and photograph it. If it's as good as you think, it goes in the calendar, with your name on the credit if you want it there.

Requests close October 27, 2026 and after that the twelve are locked..

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In The Edit — Masking, and Why Global Sliders Aren't Enough

Every slider in the Basic panel asks the same question: how should this photograph look?

That's the wrong question, and it's the reason most edits plateau.

A photograph isn't one object. It's a set of regions that your viewer's eye moves between, in an order you either control or don't. Global adjustments treat all of those regions as the same thing. Masking is how you stop editing a file and start directing attention.

Here's the system I've arrived at, which is three jobs, not a list of tricks.

Job one: separate

When two parts of a frame won't come apart, masking is the only tool that can take them in opposite directions.

The clearest example is the one I keep running into here — a flat sky sitting on top of a building. Lightroom will select the sky for you, and if you just darken that selection you get a heavier sky that is still, fundamentally, the same nothing one stop down.

So instead: take the sky mask and intersect it with a linear gradient running down from the top of the frame.

Intersection means only the overlap is affected. The sky darkens hardest at the very top and fades out as it approaches the roofline — which manufactures the tonal falloff a real sky would have. And because the mask is still a sky mask, none of that darkening touches the building. A plain gradient would have dragged the top of the tower down with it.

That one move — mask, then intersect with a second mask — is the single most useful thing I know in Lightroom. Most people never go past the first selection.

Job two: emphasise

This is the inverse of what most people do.

I soften globally — negative dehaze, reduced clarity — so the whole frame sits back. Then I mask clarity and sharpness back onto specific areas only. The subject. The texture I want read. Wherever the eye should land.

Because everything around those areas is still soft, I need far less sharpening than I otherwise would. Contrast is relative: a moderately sharp subject inside a soft frame reads harder than a heavily sharpened subject inside a sharp frame, and it doesn't carry the crunchy, over-processed look that gives the game away.

Sharpness stops being a quality setting and becomes a pointing device.

Job three: contain

Around the border of nearly every frame I make: darken slightly, drop contrast slightly, soften slightly.

Not a vignette in the crude sense — no dark ring. I'm imitating what a lens and your eyes do anyway; we selectively focus on specific elements of our surroundings in any given situation.

And note that I remove the lens's own vignetting first, with Lens Corrections at 100, before adding my own. The lens's vignette is an accident of physics: it falls where the glass decides, it shifts with aperture, it's different on every lens I own. Mine falls where I choose, at the strength I choose, identically on every photograph I make.

Remove the accident. Add the intention.

The discipline

Two rules I hold myself to.

A mask you can see is a mask that failed. If a viewer can find the edge of your selection, the adjustment is too strong, the feathering is too tight, or both. Check at 100% along the boundary, not zoomed out where everything looks fine.

Global first, local second. Local decisions depend on the base — you cannot sensibly decide how much to lift a subject until you know how dark everything around it ended up. Build the condition, then build the emphasis.

The principle underneath all three

Global sliders answer how this should look. Masks answer where they should look.

The second question is the one that separates a processed file from a photograph.

One Frame

A Location Note

Port Antonio from across the harbour — first hour.

This is a long-lens frame, and that’s the whole trick. Shot wide, this view is a thin strip of town under a lot of sky, and it's boring and mundane. At 400 mm, the layers compress into each other, and you get what you actually came for: four or five distinct planes of mountain, each one a shade paler than the one in front of it.

Stand across the water, not in the town. This is shot from Folly Oval. You need the distance for the compression to work, and you need the harbour in the bottom of the frame for context.

Go in the first hour. Two things have to happen at once, and they only overlap early: warm light has to be reaching the near treeline while the far ridges are still holding moisture. An hour later the haze burns off, the planes collapse into one green mass, and the photograph is gone.

The haze is the picture. This runs against every instinct a photographer is trained into. Portland takes up to 150 inches of rain a year, the air is heavy nearly every morning, and that moisture is exactly what separates one ridge from the next. Don’t wait for a clear day here. A clear day gives you a flat wall of trees.

Watch for the flame tree. There’s one in colour on the hillside in this frame, and it does more work than its size suggests — one point of red against all that green is what stops the eye.

Reply with one Jamaican heritage site you want to see photographed properly — and tell me why it matters to you. The calendar isn't finished and I'd rather you filled it than me.

There are nine of us reading this. If one person came to mind while you were reading, forward it to them. At this size, that isn't a formality — it's the entire growth strategy, and I notice every single one.

The 2027 heritage calendar — 25 signed and numbered copies, then print to order. Pre-orders close Nov 20, 2026.

Reserve a copy

Instagram — the frames that don't make the newsletter

YouTube — the longer version, with the mistakes left in

The Photon v1 base prep — my full RAW starting point, free, no email gate.

download preset

First Photons — Jamaica. See you at first light.