About

I didn't take the obvious path.

I didn't have a plan.

A man with light brown hair and a beard, wearing a black button-up shirt, is leaning against a beige wall with a green background behind him. He is smiling slightly and has his hands in his pockets.

Kevin Alstede-Henkel

The images worth keeping are the ones nobody planned.

Collage of three images: a black and white portrait of a man smiling, a man driving a car with sunglasses reflected in the side mirror, and a sunset over sand dunes.

After school I trained as a saddler — three years of precise, quiet craft work. Creative enough to keep me interested, technical enough to teach me patience. What I actually wanted was to draw comics. Someone told me that wasn't a real career, so I filed it away and got on with things.

For years I worked with people in care. Played American football. Spent twenty years in martial arts. Rode a Harley for a while. Photographed everything in between — holidays, travels, moments that felt worth keeping.

I never intended to turn it into a business. The first people who paid me did so without me asking. I just kept shooting, kept investing — including a year of private photography studies — and at some point the work had a direction of its own.

My first wedding almost broke me before it started. I knew exactly how much was at stake: a day that happens once, that people will look back on for the rest of their lives. The responsibility felt enormous.

And then the day itself happened. Real people, real moments, nothing staged. I drove home with a feeling I hadn't had before — that this was exactly the right thing to do.

That was the beginning. I haven't looked for another direction since.