Hi, I am Brayden Stanford.
Growing up on the South Coast of NSW, I spent the majority of my time outside exploring the mountains and oceans around my hometown. All this time made me grow a true love for nature and animals which will stick with me for the rest of my life.
After graduating high school I did what me and most my friends believed was the thing you had to do, move out of home and get a uni degree. After just one term of university I realised it wasn't what I really wanted to do, I was only there because it's what everyone around me was saying I should do. After dropping out of uni I spent the next few years working as much as I could trying to build careers in industries I never really had any passion for.
Around my 20th birthday I had reached a point in my life like many others have, I didn't know what I was really doing on this earth. This is when I decided to write a bucket list, this may not have been the answer to what I was looking for but it was an opportunity to try new things and get out of my comfort zone. One of the first things I had on the list was to learn photography, I'd already had a strong passion for adventuring and would spend most weekends visiting new places and just taking photos on my phone, so bringing a camera along sounded like it would be a good idea.
After buying my first camera and watching a few youtube videos I had become obsessed, my bucket list had been completely forgotten about and I would spend every night watching youtube learning new things about photography then any free time I'd be going out taking photos of whatever I could.
When I first started out I mainly focused on taking photos of landscapes and travelling to new places, which pushed me to booking my first trip overseas to South Africa and Egypt all by myself. Experiencing new and different cultures is such an amazing experience and I can't wait to travel again once Covid becomes just a part of history.
Around the time Covid started I felt myself slipping back into a rut and not really knowing what I was doing with my life, this was when I decided to quit my job and pursue photography full-time. I had done a few paid gigs before but I still haven't really found a consistent stream of income from my photography. Growing up in a lower-class, single parent family I've never really had money and no matter how hard I worked it never really made me as happy as I am taking photos. It was a massive decision to quit my job and start pursing something I was so passionate about but still had very little experience, but my only regret is not doing it sooner.
Photography has let me experienced so much in my life, from meeting new people, seeing new places to pushing me out of my shy little shell. I still have so much to learn and improve but that's what excites me the most, I honestly can't wait to see what the future holds for me.
We live in such a beautiful world, and there's so much of it left for me to capture.
