Hi, I’m Rochelle!

Most of the time, I’m not out there waiting for the perfect shot. I’m waiting for a story — and I’ve learned that a story can come from anywhere. Sometimes it’s a behaviour: something fleeting, unrepeatable, gone before you’ve registered it. Sometimes it’s the light. Sometimes it’s quieter than that — a bird in its habitat, just existing, and you in the right place at the right moment to witness it. What I’m really doing out there, whether I’m on a wetland at six in the morning or crouching in the fynbos waiting out the wind, is learning to read. The light, the animal, the environment, the moment.

I came to wildlife photography relatively recently. For a long time, I couldn’t work out why my images weren’t working. My settings were right. I was out at golden hour. I was getting down to eye level. I was doing everything the tutorials said. The images were still, somehow, just average.

What I was missing wasn’t technical — it was a way of seeing. An understanding of what makes an image feel like something, rather than simply being correctly exposed.

The shift, when it finally came, was less like learning and more like things suddenly making sense. Within a year of picking up a camera, I was a Pangolin Photo Challenge finalist. It still surprises me.

That fast track through the learning curve is probably the real reason I want to coach. I remember the exact feeling of doing everything right and still not quite getting there. I know what it’s like to be one question away from something clicking. And honestly — I just love teaching. There’s nothing quite like watching someone move from “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong” to “I see it.”

I’m based in Cape Town, which means birds are what I have around me — and they’re what I spend my weekends shooting, without fail. But photography has a way of expanding into everything else. It led me to birding, birding led to wanting to go further afield, and now my husband and I are on a mission to visit every national park in South Africa. We’re eight in. There are a few left.