About

Hello, my name is Dan. Welcome to my blog and portfolio. Before I delve into a little about myself, I thought I would share some information about this site and why I've created it.

This site serves as a space for me to document my journey as an amateur photographer and to share my work with people. There is no specific goal to achieve here; I simply want to share my work and experiences with the world.

Thank you very much if you've found your way here. Please take a moment to browse through my work, and if you'd like to send me a message, please do.

Now, a bit about me.

I am Dan Hustwayte, an amateur photographer from Gloucester, UK. I grew up in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, once considered the UK’s worst place to live. It's now in second place, thanks to Luton. Despite its reputation, Peterborough offered some exciting activities during my teenage years. Firstly, the canoe club introduced me to white-water kayaking, followed by the BMX track for dirt jumping, and finally, the climbing wall. This meant my adolescence revolved around extreme sports and, of course, an obsession with extreme TV and extreme sports films on DVD. This is where my journey with photography began.

Teenage Photography

At 13 and 14, my friends and I were obsessed with these films and wanted to create our own. As this was the early 2000s, GoPros didn’t exist, and digital filming was in its infancy. We were left carting around heavy camcorders on our bikes and using basic editing software to create short films for ourselves. With no YouTube, these films existed solely for us.

In addition to shooting videos, I also got interested in photography as a way to document these extreme sports. Around the age of 14, my parents bought me a camera for this purpose. It was a Fuji Finepix S5500, a bridge camera common in the mid-2000s. This first camera did not have interchangeable lenses, just a wide-ranging zoom, but it did allow me to play with things like aperture and shutter speed. With this camera, I began to capture many moments of my friends dirt jumping in and around Peterborough and at Woburn and Chicksands. As this was before social media, I wanted a way to share these photos with them, so I created my first very basic website, DirtyRiders. A classically teenage boy name that I’m pretty sure I thought would at least get some traffic, even if it was people looking for something very different.

The crowning achievement of my teenage extreme sports years was the creation of a 30-minute feature film documenting my canoe club's summer trip to the French Alps in 2006. It even had its premiere at our annual Christmas dinner, and I posted it to Google Video, where, surprisingly, it garnered around 5000 views. This is the last video project I ever did, and I'm not sure why.

Losing the Passion

After school, I headed off to Bangor Uni in North Wales to be closer to the mountains and continue my love of extreme sports. I took my camera with me and documented a lot, especially my trips with BUMS (Bangor Mountaineering Society). But after a while, this trailed off until I no longer took the camera with me on activities. I think this may have been partly due to the arrival of smartphones. Once everyone had a camera in their phone, there was no need for someone to be the nominated photographer.

I put the camera down until Christmas 2013 and a trip to New York. I’m not sure why, but I felt the need to take a camera with me and on a whim, I bought a Canon EOS M with two lenses as it seemed like a great deal and was recommended as a good beginner camera. I didn’t know what I was doing with this camera and didn’t end up taking a lot of pictures on this trip so the camera ended up in a drawer once I got home.

Finding a Passion in Adversity

Rolling around to spring 2020, the start of the pandemic, I had lost a job I had just started, and I was feeling pretty low. We had just moved to a new part of London, and as part of our daily exercise, we had taken to exploring our new neighbourhood. As I needed something to keep me occupied, I decided I would start to play with photography again and document our new area. I dusted off the old Canon EOS M from that New York trip and began to snap away at anything that caught my eye. I was hooked, and it became a very important part of our daily ritual during the lockdown.

This new ritual led to a collection of lots of pictures, and naturally, the need to make them look as good as possible. This led me to learn how to edit in Lightroom. I then wanted to share these pictures, Instagram being the obvious place, so I created a new account, The_Hanwell_Project, and my first-ever photo project was born. I was proud of this, and it sparked the joy of photography I had forgotten from my teenage years. You can see a selection of the Hanwell Project here.

In 2021 we moved out of London to the countryside to get more outdoors, and I began experimenting with landscape photography. This passion has continued to today, and I continue to experiment with different styles, including architecture, nature, and street photography. This site is to share this journey of experimentation. Please take a look around, and thank you again for visiting.