Grace Taylorson Smith Pritchard, Photographer 

      I'm currently based in Chester, on the border with North Wales, but I spent my whole childhood in Snowdonia. Mine was a bit of an unconventional childhood. My parents got divorced, and my mum wanted a complete change in lifestyle. She was in the fashion industry and did a lot of work abroad, especially in China, and then, in order to spend more time with her children, she just did a major U-turn, decided to buy a huge plot of land in the middle of Snowdonia and set up a campsite looking for a fresh start. I would get kicked out the front door and told to come back when it was dark. I spent all day exploring. And that's really where my appreciation for the mountains came from. I barely left until University in Manchester.

      It was another U-turn in my life. I didn't know what I wanted to do at the time, I thought I'd do a law degree, encouraged by my family. By year 3, I knew it wasn’t for me at all. In the process, I lost my connection to nature, spending three years in such a big place, so, after graduation, I decided to move abroad. I moved to Thailand and that's when I properly reconnected with nature. Fortunately, throughout University, I'd been really into scuba diving. So, I decided that’s what I wanted to do. I moved to Thailand to dive; I trained to do it professionally. And that led to dive jobs in Australia, Indonesia and eventually the Azores, before coming back to the UK.

      I did a master's degree in Marine Environmental Management at the University of York, a sort of a logical extension of all the diving I’d been doing. I was amazed even to get on the course because I hadn’t done any science at all since my GCSEs at school. It was a big, big achievement for me.

And one thing led to another…?      

      Because I studied Marine Biology I got this opportunity to go and dive in Sri Lanka. That's sort of where my photographic journey began too. Being there gave me lots of material, but at the start of my photography journey, I really didn’t have a voice. What I was experiencing in the world of photography was the antithesis of who I am. It was all about content creation and influence. It gave me lots of beautiful things to photograph. I worked for a lot of hotels, tour companies, sailing charters and stuff like that. I found I didn't like photographing what was easy - what was just visually pleasing - anymore; it became monotonous to me.

You left Sri Lanka behind you at a certain point and returned to the UK, so as a photographer you switched from beaches and palm trees to rainy windswept UK. It’s the opposite of exotic.      

      When I began, my photography was more on the travel side of things, about content creation. A lot of what I was doing was me setting up a tripod, putting an intervalometer on the camera and shooting myself in these beautiful places. I got bored with that pretty fast. The real magic came with capturing other people; I didn't want to shoot myself anymore. That was a big learning step for me, finding how to deal with actually photographing other people.

      I think there’s a fine line between something that isn't planned at all, and something where you know what to expect. I shoot a lot of climbers, and there's a big danger element. You have to go through so much training on how to do these things safely. So, preparations are definitely key, especially with adventure and sports photography, even when you’re not actually shooting.But you can’t fully prepare for everything. 

What drives you?     

      I like to consider myself as an adventure and sports photographer. But to put that in a broader sense, what I am, essentially, is a lifelong learner, especially in relation to the natural world, and sort of how we, as humans, move through it physically, how we navigate it. How can we climb it? How can we dive through it? Experience it? That's what really pushes me. I like to think that my photography is me documenting my findings in this learning process. If you Google “lifelong learner” it's basically about the self-motivated pursuit of knowledge for personal or professional reasons. My photography is that; it's just documenting this pursuit of knowledge in the natural world.

      Yes and no. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with social media. You have to move with the times so go along with it. That makes sense. But there are certain things that I'm not willing to compromise on. I moved away from that influencer, content-creator stage of my life. What I’m aiming for is the pure editorial side of things. 

      I’m going to have to give you three because my photography spans the sky, the land and the ocean. I'm hoping to become a paragliding pilot soon. So, Chamonix is number one for that. It's the best place you can possibly go for paragliding, because you've got so many ridges that provide ridge lift. You can fly all day without having to land. For climbing, it would be the Dolomites in Italy. I've been dying to go and climb there, but even just for hiking or mountain biking. The Dolomites have it all. Finally, for diving, I'd have to say Mexico. I have a friend who works on a live-aboard in Guadalupe Island diving with the Great Whites. I spent a couple of weeks at the Gili Shark foundation founded by Steve Woods in Indonesia (Read about Steve Woods, aka Aeranaut01, here). I’m so into it now, I’m starting a PhD on shark ecology at Leeds University in a couple of weeks. And hopefully with that, I'll be able to go and do some research on his boat next year.

     There are two distinct moments that come to mind where I feel the passage of time slowing down. It happens sometimes when I’m climbing and almost always when I’m diving. Both activities require you to be fully present in the moment. In rock climbing, we have this concept of flow-state. It’s that sweet spot where our skills and the level of challenge presented to us are equal. To put it more simply, it’s those moments when you are just completely ‘In the Zone’. Climbing in flow is this almost meditative state of just being, where you are just solely focused on nailing the project at hand and everything seems to just fall into place. When I catch these moments climbing - I’m not sure if I’ve been on a route for 30 seconds or half an hour. With diving, it’s simply being in such an alien environment. Things work differently underwater, the most obvious being sound. There’s something quite magical about immersing yourself in a world for an hour where you can’t talk to one another. We could all benefit from that sometimes! But a part of me feels like time works differently underwater too. Encounters with wildlife, while fleeting, can feel like a lifetime. An hour-long dive can feel like the best 24 hours of your life. 

What is the best use of time for you?      

      Too many people think that they just don’t have enough time. I think the real question is, do you have anything in your life worth making time for…no matter what. I wish everyone could answer this question with a resounding YES. I’m currently juggling a full time PhD, A photography business and a digital marketing job amongst other things. All of these elements are incredibly time consuming, but they are all 100% necessary to my life and I wouldn’t have it any other way - so I make the time. The operative word there is ‘make’. I purposefully didn’t say ‘find’. Making time for things that mean a lot to you is an active pursuit, its effort and toil …‘find’ denotes something passive that just falls into your lap. Anything worth doing is going to require you to create time for it, but it will always be worth it. 

Is it sport itself or nature that attracts you to all these outdoor adrenaline sports? The two seem to collide very frequently in your life     

      It’s 100% nature. The reason that after University I went to Thailand, was completely to reconnect with nature. That's a part of my life that I'd completely lost, I went away. Party Grace disappeared, and I really found nature again, and that really instilled the sort of lifelong learner in me.

     I hope so. And I think, the breadth of what I shoot - I'd like to think - encourages that a bit more than maybe photographers who are very specific in what they shoot. I'm doing all of these different things, but that means I’m not an expert in all of them. I'm trying to photograph as many different disciplines as I can. But I only photograph what I actively do myself because I think that's the only way you can really tell the story properly.