Coming From St Helena Island
Quizzical eyebrows and a hesitant look is an occasional reaction from people when we refer to ourselves as ‘Saints.’ Let’s clear that up first, in case you’re wondering. People born on the Island of St Helena are called St Helenians, or ‘Saints’ for short.
“What The Saints Did Next” is simply the name of our blog; our online photographers’ profile that allows the two of us to share our passion, and somewhat random, ‘Adventures in Photography.’
Married, no kids and with an ongoing ambition to travel and see as much of the world as we can; that’s us, Darrin and Sharon Henry. Photography is obviously an important part of our business activities, but primarily it’s still very much a hobby.
Photographing Everything
Over the years we’ve photographed nearly everything you can think of: weddings, christenings and birthday parties. Family portraits, modelling portfolios and actors’ headshots.
In a previous life, working in London, we’ve shot a clothing line for a designer at London Fashion Week, a catalogue for a fancy dress company and a promo poster for an amateur theatre group. Other interesting capers that stand out; we’ve been commissioned to photograph interiors of luxury flats, roller coasters in theme parks and even dead bodies in the morgue. Our cameras have given us special access below decks on a Royal Navy warship, window seats on a French helicopter and a caged encounter with great whites in South Africa.
Photography has certainly been far from dull.
From 2011 to 2014 we were completely immersed in editorial photography, while working for The Sentinel newspaper on St Helena, and in some ways an inspiration for what came next.
WTSDN – Pictures & A Thousand Words
In 2014 we embarked on this amazing journey which we’ve called, What The Saints Did Next, pushing ourselves into a new direction; a new kind of photographic challenge, producing interesting content for our followers.
Producing photo-stories on blog is a much more relaxed and fun form of journalism.
Whether it’s a street parade, a modelling shoot or travel adventure, everyone loves these types of pictures. However, we’re also acutely aware of the power of the camera to raise awareness of important issues, to capture vital visuals of historic moments and to start conversations in a way that only photographs can do.
WTSDN on YouTube
Video cameras were a part of our home studio long before WTSDN came along; back when VHS tapes still handled the storage, a shoulder-mounted camcorder was the business and Windows was just a source of natural light.
In recent years, however, after concentrating mostly on stills photography, we’re now beginning to shoot more video projects once again and it’s an area we anticipate developing some exciting new content as we head into 2022.
The WTSDN YouTube Channel includes a selection of short video edits, including behind-the-scenes on our photo shoots and also events and life on St Helena.
The Photo-A-Day Challenge, Project 365
Our most epic WTSDN adventure could almost be labelled under ‘camera OCD.’
On 31 December, 2018, we completed our third successive, year-long, photo-a-day challenge.
The challenge is basically capturing one new photograph every single day of the year. We started this on 1 January, 2016 and continued to shoot a daily picture every day afterwards without fail, for 1,096 days.
We decided to finish after three years, however, the entire project is still available to view, sorted in years and months.
Breeze E-Magazine
We’ve also produced ‘Breeze,’ an e-magazine for What The Saints Did Next subscribers. There have been five issues from January 2015 to 2019. Other projects taken priority lately, however, we plan to restart and publish a new ‘Breeze’ issue in January 2022.
Taking To The Sky
At the end of 2020 we bought our first drone and so entered a completely new realm of photography.
It’s actually been quite mind-blowing as we slowly began to realise the creative possibilities now at our fingertips. Landscape photography will never be the same again.
The Journey Continues
So that’s a little about who we are. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the photography and stories enough to become a follower.
Thanks for visiting our blog.
Cheers
Darrin & Sharon Henry