There Are Lions Outside. I’m Thinking About Software.

I’m currently in South Africa leading a group of photographers. We’re out every day looking for the things wildlife photographers travel halfway around the world to see: lions with cubs, leopards with cubs, elephants, wild dogs and whatever else the bush decides to give us.

And I’m sitting in the game drive vehicle thinking about software.

Three days ago, I finally became fed up with a problem I’ve hated for years: memory cards.

When I travel, I offload everything to Samsung T9 SSDs. It should be a simple process, but it never feels completely safe. Did I already copy this card? Are all the files really on the SSD? Did I copy everything or only part of it? Can I format the card now, or do I need to check it one more time just to be sure?

Then you have Sony’s 0000–9999 file numbering limit. The camera eventually reaches 9999 and starts again. Add several cameras, several cards and a few days of heavy shooting, and suddenly you have different photographs with the same filenames. It becomes a mess surprisingly quickly.

I’ve dealt with it for years, like everyone else. Check the memory card, check the folder on the SSD, compare the number of files, look at the first and last image, then check it again because losing a full day of photographs would be a complete disaster.

Three days ago, sitting here in South Africa, I decided I’d had enough.

I’m going to build the offload tool I’ve always wanted.

Not a quick script and not some vibe-coded piece of slop thrown together in a weekend. I’m using the new tools available to build it, of course, but the ambition is serious. I want to build the best offload tool available for wildlife photographers using macOS. The first proper release will probably take me a month or more. That’s fine. It needs to be right.

It should know which cards have already been copied, where the files went and whether every single file arrived safely. It should deal with duplicate filenames, multiple cameras, multiple cards and the reality of travelling with temporary SSD storage.

Most importantly, it should remove that small feeling of doubt before formatting a card.

The problem is that since I started building it, it is all I can think about.

We can be driving through the bush looking for a leopard with cubs and my brain is somewhere else. How should the app recognise a card it has seen before? What happens when two cards contain files with the same name? How should the verification process work? How do I make something technically complicated feel completely obvious to a tired photographer at the end of a long day?

My fucking offload tool.

I go to sleep thinking about it. I wake up thinking about it. I see another small problem and immediately start thinking about how to solve it. One feature leads to another, and then that feature exposes something else that could be done better.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I’ve realised something about myself.

I love photography. I love wildlife photography. I love being out here, and I still get excited when we find something special.

But what I’ve always loved most is building things.

That is what I’ve done for most of my life. Companies, products, systems, websites and now software. I like finding something that does not work properly and figuring out how it should work instead. I like starting with an idea that exists only in my head and slowly turning it into something real.

I also have this slightly unhealthy need to make whatever I’m building as good as it can possibly be. It is never enough that it works. I want it to be better than the alternatives. I want to understand every detail and solve the parts everyone else has accepted as annoying but unavoidable.

Photography originally became a break from that side of me.

It was a distraction from building companies and solving problems. I could sit somewhere with a camera, watch an animal and wait. I did not have to optimise anything. I did not have to make decisions every five minutes.

It became a kind of meditation, and it still is.

But right now, the builder part of my brain has taken over again.

I think that is also why most of my photography currently feels like shit.

The photographs are not necessarily technically bad. They are sharp. The exposure is right. The light may be good and the animal may be doing something interesting.

But when I look at the files afterwards, many of them feel like tourist photographs.

Here is a lion. Here is a leopard. Here is an elephant.

They document what I saw and where I was. There is nothing wrong with documentary photography, but it is not enough for the work I want to make. I want there to be something more in the photograph. Some kind of idea, feeling or personal way of seeing the scene.

Too often, I look at a recent image and think that another photographer sitting in the same vehicle with similar equipment would have taken more or less the same photograph.

That is the part that bothers me.

It does not feel artistic. It feels like I pointed an expensive camera at an extraordinary animal and recorded what happened.

The encounter may have been special. The photograph often isn’t.

I don’t think I have suddenly become a worse photographer. Technically, I probably know more than I ever have. I can usually get the safe image without thinking much about it. I know the shutter speed, the autofocus settings, where I want the vehicle positioned and what background I’m trying to avoid.

But that may be exactly the problem.

I can do it without thinking.

At the moment, my creative attention is going into something else. I’m physically sitting in the vehicle with the camera in my hands, but mentally I’m designing screens, solving edge cases and thinking about the next feature.

It feels strange to admit that because photography has become a large part of my identity. I travel to photograph wildlife. I lead photography tours. I run photography businesses. I have a website with my name on it where I publish photographs and write about photography.

Surely photography should be the thing I cannot stop thinking about.

But right now, it isn’t.

Right now, the thing I cannot stop thinking about is building the best memory-card offload app for wildlife photographers.

Maybe this is temporary. Once the first version is finished, perhaps my brain will calm down and the photographs will start feeling interesting again. Maybe building photography tools will become another permanent part of what I do.

Or maybe this is simply what I have always been, and photography was the thing that allowed me to switch that part of myself off for a while.

I don’t really know yet.

What I do know is that I haven’t lost my creativity. I’m probably more creatively energised than I have been in a long time.

It just isn’t coming through the camera right now.

There are lions outside.

And I’m thinking about software.