When a Brand Grows with You

I used to think a brand was something you created around your business. A name, a logo, a way for people to recognise what you do. Over time, I have come to see it very differently. A brand can also become a reflection of who you are becoming, and when your life changes, sometimes your business has to grow with you.

My own brand has evolved several times, but looking back, the biggest changes were never really about photography, websites or marketing. They were about attitude, perspective and the decision to keep moving forward.

For much of my adult life, I was deeply immersed in family life, marriage, raising four boys and the responsibilities of living on the land. My days were full, and like many women, I became very capable at doing what needed to be done. I was always busy, always achieving something, always finding another role to fill, but somewhere within all of that it became easy to lose sight of what I wanted for myself.

When I eventually left the property, I found myself facing a future that looked very different from the one I had imagined. I could have looked at that period only through the lens of what had been lost, but somewhere I began to understand that I had a choice about how I approached what came next.

That choice has shaped almost everything since.

When I needed a name for a new photography Instagram account, I chose A Fortunate Lens. The name was not simply about feeling fortunate to have a camera or fortunate to travel. It came from a much deeper place. I felt fortunate to be alive. I felt fortunate to have another chapter ahead of me, and for the first time in a very long time, I had the opportunity to decide what I wanted that chapter to look like.

I was beginning to see the world through my own eyes.

Photography became one of the ways I explored that freedom. With a camera in my hand, I made my own decisions about where I went, what I stopped to notice, what I included in the frame and what I left outside it. I could follow light simply because it interested me. I could take a different road, wait beside a landscape, look closely at a tree or stand quietly somewhere until the world began to reveal itself differently.

Those decisions may seem small, but they were significant to me. They were part of learning to trust myself again.

The more I photographed, the more I realised that the camera was teaching me something far beyond how to make an image. It was teaching me how important perspective is.

A landscape changes when you change your position. An ordinary scene can become extraordinary when the light shifts. A detail that disappears from one angle can suddenly become the most important part of the photograph when you move closer. Sometimes you need to step back to understand what you are looking at, and sometimes you need to wait.

Life, I have discovered, is not so different.

I cannot control everything that happens around me, but I have much more influence over the attitude I bring to it than I once understood. I can spend my energy looking at what has gone wrong, or I can ask what is still possible. I can remain fixed on an old version of my life, or I can become curious about what the next one might hold. I can focus entirely on the cracks, or I can look for where the light is finding its way through.

That does not mean pretending difficult experiences were easy or positive. It means choosing not to allow them to become the only story.

Photography gradually became a much larger part of my life and, as my work developed, A Fortunate Lens evolved into Diane Armstrong Photography. There were exhibitions, awards, opportunities to travel, wonderful people to meet and experiences I could never have imagined when I first began. Putting my own name beside my photography felt important because I was beginning to own not only the work, but the way I saw.

Confidence did not arrive all at once. I still question myself. I still wonder whether I can capture what I feel when I stand in front of something extraordinary, and I still have moments when I compare my work to others. The difference now is that doubt no longer has the final say.

I have learnt to keep going.

That attitude has probably been one of the greatest changes in me.

I have become more willing to try something before I know exactly where it will lead, more comfortable stepping outside the familiar, and more open to opportunities that once might have frightened me. Photography gave me a way of practising that. Every time I travelled somewhere unfamiliar, shared my work, entered an award, exhibited an image or stood behind something I had created, I was stretching that part of myself a little further.

Over time, people began responding not only to my photographs but also to the stories behind them. I found myself writing about light, perspective, stillness, change, identity and the seasons we move through in life. The image might have been a bare tree in winter, an aerial landscape or light breaking through a difficult scene, but the story often became about something much more human.

That eventually led me to speaking.

Sharing my story at International Women’s Day was very different from standing behind a camera. Photography had allowed me to observe the world quietly, while speaking required me to stand in front of people and allow myself to be seen.

I spoke about the cracks that appear in our lives, about change and identity, and about the way light can enter through places we might once have wished were not there. I spoke about learning to see differently and about the courage it sometimes takes to choose a new direction when life no longer looks the way we expected it to.

What stayed with me most was what happened afterwards.

Women came and spoke to me about their own experiences. People told me that something I had said had made them reflect on their lives differently. Similar feedback began coming through podcast interviews and other conversations. Sometimes people connected with a particular story, sometimes with an idea about perspective or courage, and sometimes it was simply the recognition that another person had also lived through uncertainty and found a way forward.

Those responses made me realise that perhaps sharing my story could be useful beyond photography.

Not because I believe my way is the right way, and certainly not because I have everything worked out, but because stories can help us recognise something in ourselves. Sometimes we need to hear someone else say that they were afraid, uncertain or lost before they found the courage to move again.

That realisation has become an important part of the book I am now writing.

Writing the book has been another journey entirely. It has required me to revisit different seasons of my life; to look at experiences I thought I understood and sometimes see them from a completely different angle. Events that once seemed isolated are beginning to form patterns, and lessons that I could not recognise when I was living through them are much clearer with distance.

Photography keeps finding its way into the pages because the lessons of the lens have become so intertwined with the way I now understand life.

Perspective matters.

Where we place our focus matters.

What we magnify matters.

The stories we continue telling ourselves matter.

And our attitude toward what has happened can shape what becomes possible next.

My hope for the book is not simply to tell my story. I want it to encourage people to look at their own.

I want someone reading it to stop and ask whether they have become so busy living the life expected of them that they have forgotten to consider what they want. I want them to think about the beliefs they have carried for years and whether those beliefs still deserve a place in the frame. I want them to understand that a difficult season does not have to define the rest of their life and that starting again can happen at any age.

Most of all, I want the book to remind people that while we cannot always choose what happens to us, we can choose the attitude with which we meet it.

That idea has shaped my own life more than almost anything else.

I could never have predicted where photography would take me when I first created A Fortunate Lens. I certainly did not imagine exhibitions, speaking, podcast conversations or writing a book. None of those things appeared as part of a carefully planned path. They grew one decision at a time, often from simply being willing to say yes and see what happened next.

My brand is evolving again now, from Diane Armstrong Photography to simply Diane Armstrong.

Photographer. Speaker. Author.

It feels right because these parts of my work are no longer separate. Photography taught me to see. Life taught me that perspective can change. Speaking has allowed me to share those lessons, and writing is giving me the space to explore them more deeply.

A Fortunate Lens will always be part of that story because the philosophy behind it has never really changed. I still feel fortunate, but perhaps I understand the word differently now.

Being fortunate is not about having a life without difficulty. It is about recognising that even after difficult chapters, there can still be choices, opportunities, beauty, purpose and light ahead.

For me, the difference has often been attitude.

It has been the decision to remain curious rather than closed, to keep looking rather than assume I have seen the whole picture, and to believe that another chapter can hold something I have not yet imagined.

That is the story I now want to take into my photography, my speaking and my book.

If I can stand in front of a group, share some of what I have learnt and encourage even one person to look at their own life from a different angle, then speaking feels like a natural extension of what I have always tried to do with my camera.

I have never wanted simply to show people what I see.

I want to encourage them to look again.

At the landscape.

At themselves.

And at what might still be possible.