Last month I had the opportunity to teach a workshop at the Xposure International Photography Festival held in Sharjah, UAE. I wanted to do a brief, informal recap on what an incredible teaching platform that is. Obviously I was thrilled to be part of it, and the fact that my class on photographing your kids was sold out was fabulous, but what really impressed me was that the organisers were open to listening, to acting, and to facilitating things from small to big. When I say big I mean REALLY big. Fellow instructors and presenters included Don McCullin for goodness sake – can you imagine how intimidated I felt seeing my name on the same page as his. The lineup included National Geographic stars Cristina Mittermeir and Paul Nicklen, Pulitzer Prize winner Mohammed Muheisen as well as a plethora of other internationally famous names, and me, a lifestyle photographer and passionate educator just doing my thing in my own corner of the world. If you have any interest at all in photography, and in making the world a better place by using your photography then you missed a truly inspirational event.

Look it up next year – it is sure to be just as enlightening and motivating.

And because I was working I didn’t do much in the way of photographing, mostly adding to my instagram stories as I went through the few days I was there – so I’m sharing them in my recap here. My daughter Indy also come up and left on a high, not least because Paul Nicklen is her absolute hero photographer. And at age 9 she won her first photography prize for a photo of some monks walking down the street when we were in Tibet earlier this year – to see her face when she saw her picture mounted huge in the winners exhibition was worth everything to me too – one of my most proud Mama moments. 

A huge thank you to all the students who came to my class and to Xposure for believing in me and for a wonderful weekend of inspiration, Kirsty x