Some people can pinpoint the exact moment their life found its direction. For me it wasn't a single moment, it was a person. My grandfather.

Before I could walk properly or string a sentence together, I was sitting on the floor with him for hours, surrounded by the animal figures he would bring back from his travels. Wherever he went, he would find something and think of me. A colourful frog, a set of savannah creatures, even cowboys and farm animals. Over time we had boxes and boxes of them. We would spend entire afternoons watching wildlife documentaries together, and I remember that feeling, that particular combination of wonder and longing, like the world outside our window was somehow connected to the world on that screen, and I just needed to find the door.

He was the one who started all of this. He passed away during my early university years, before he got to see any of it. The jungles, the expeditions, the animals I've found in places we used to watch together on that screen. I think about him on every trip. This whole thing is his fault, and I'm forever grateful for it.

I grew up just outside Guatemala City, in a house surrounded by countryside. My free time was spent outside, turning over rocks, chasing frogs, looking for snakes in the garden. My earliest travel memory is from Tikal, around age three, walking with my family through the jungle while howler monkeys called somewhere above us in the canopy. That place would go on to become one of my favorite spots on Earth.

As a kid I was obsessed with dinosaurs first. I knew more about them at seven than I do now, honestly, and that obsession slowly spread to reptiles, amphibians, and everything else with scales or feathers or fur. It was then my uncle who opened up the world of reptiles and amphibians to me, and from that point on I was gone. I grew up dreaming about traveling to remote places, finding rare snakes and impossible frogs in jungles no one had heard of.

I always knew I wanted to build my life around animals. What I didn't know was how.

I tried veterinary work, enrolled in a course in Barcelona at eighteen, and quickly realized I loved animals but did not have the stomach for the clinical side of things. I moved back to Guatemala and started a biology degree, which I genuinely loved. But I've always been wired differently. I'm visual, I'm driven by passion, I struggle with sitting still and pushing through classes. The academic path wasn't mine.

And then I picked up a camera.

It changed everything almost immediately. Photography gave me a way to be fully present with wild animals, to search for them, to observe them, to spend days and weeks in the places I had dreamed about as a kid, and at the same time leave something behind. An image that someone else could feel. I found my calling, and I've never looked back.

Over the years I've been lucky enough to travel and work across Latin America, through the Himalayas, the jungles of Southeast Asia, the Mediterranean scrublands of Spain, the almost mythological forest of eastern Europe, and far beyond. I've photographed species I genuinely thought I would only ever see on television. Every one of those moments still lands the same way it did the first time.

But somewhere along the way I discovered something I hadn't expected: I don't just love finding these animals. I love sharing them with other people.

There is something that happens when someone sees their dream species in the wild for the first time. I've watched it happen dozens of times over nearly a decade of leading tours and expeditions, and it never gets old. That look. That silence just before the excitement. It reminds me of sitting on the floor with my grandfather, that same feeling of the world suddenly being bigger than you thought.

That's what I'm here for.

If you're someone who has spent years dreaming about jaguars on a river, or polar bears on a frozen coastline, or a snow leopard on a Himalayan ridge… I get it more than most. I was that person too. I still am.

Come find these animals with me.