The sun had just slipped below the horizon when I made this photograph. El Morro Castle stood watch over the Malecón as the last light softened across the water and the Caribbean broke against the rocks below. I was there on a sailing trip with a group of friends, and that evening carried the rare, unmistakable feeling of being exactly where you’re supposed to be.
Havana has a way of doing that — slowing time just enough for you to notice it passing.
This image stayed with me long after I came home.
After my second trip to Cuba, I hosted a photography show titled 48 Hours in Habana at the Beach House Gallery in Dunedin, curated by my friend Amy. It was one of those nights every photographer quietly hopes for — walls full of stories, people leaning in close to the prints, conversations that lingered well past the last pour. Sharing not just the photographs, but the human moments behind them, made the work feel alive in a way it couldn’t on a screen.
What happened next still humbles me.
I entered this photograph into the Florida Museum of Photography Awards, and it went on to win the People’s Choice Award. That alone felt surreal. But the moment I’ll never forget came not long after — I was standing at Curtis Hixon Park, photographing across the river toward the University of Tampa, when I looked up and saw this image projected on the side of a building.
I just stood there. Tears rolling down my face. Wishing my parents could have seen it.
They were the ones who first put a camera in my hands and told me to keep going. To see what became of that encouragement — cast thirty feet tall against a building in the city where I live and work — was more than I had words for.
This photograph isn’t really about Havana. It isn’t about a castle or a sunset, though both are beautiful.
It’s about gratitude. It’s about what happens when someone believes in you early, and you’re stubborn enough — or lucky enough — to keep following the thing that lights you up, even when it starts as nothing more than curiosity and a Saturday afternoon with a camera.
The creative instinct that led me here, to this wall, to that projected image and those tears, is the same one I bring to every client relationship and every home I represent in Tampa Bay. The eye for light. The patience to wait for the right moment. The belief that a place isn’t just a place — it’s a story waiting to be told to the right person.
Follow what you love. You rarely know where it’s taking you.
#ElMorro #HavanaCuba #PhotographyJourney #Grateful