The Safari book is coming along. Most of the heavy lifting isn’t out there in the bush anymore – it’s here, in front of a calibrated screen, choosing which images deserve a page from a curated collection. That might sound simple. It isn’t. Editing is its own form of travel. Time travel.

Some images have some kind of memory attached. I can remember where I stood, how the dust smelled, what the air felt like at 05:42 when the light tipped from blue into gold, the silence before something moved.

Others don’t even remember taking them. I recognize the place, but not the feeling. I know I was there. I can read the metadata. But the memory is thin, almost administrative.

That’s the strange tax of how technical photography can be. Especially if you’re like me, a full manual shooter.

Often, I am so locked into angle, shutter speed, aperture, focus area, depth of field – the micro-decisions that separate a mediocre frame from a usable one – that I’m not fully inhabiting the moment. I’m calculating, adjusting, anticipating. I’m thinking in fractions of seconds and millimeters.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a payoff worth paying. Without that discipline, the image wouldn’t exist. The new book wouldn’t exist.

But when I look at some of these hippos, for example, I feel the gap. The composition works. The exposure is right. The detail is there.

Yet sometimes I struggle to reconnect with the simple fact that I was standing in Botswana, watching prehistoric mass rise and submerge in delta water older than memory.

I know I was there. I just wasn’t as present as I would have liked to be. In the moment.