Your quizzes and assignment might have made above 30,000 feet by one faculty member, then graded by another from the far end of the earth. Our team make sure they stay wired everyday, even in the wild. If you want to know some of our core team members, who made what Light & Composition University is today, here is a list of them below.
President
Jim Perceval serves as the President of Light & Composition University, where he plays a central role in shaping the institution's vision, academic direction, and creative identity. Based on the tropical island of Ko Samui, Thailand — the very place where the idea of Light & Composition was first born — Jim remains deeply involved in the university's daily growth and development.
Although holding the presidential role, his involvement goes far beyond leadership. He actively contributes to course development, supports educational strategy, assists with social media outreach, helps oversee photography award initiatives, and provides copy editing and creative guidance across projects. His presence is woven into nearly every aspect of the university.
Originally from the United Kingdom, Jim also spent many years living in Western Canada — experiences that broadened his visual perspective and deepened his connection to nature. A passionate photographer for many years, he has built an extensive body of work in nature, wildlife, and landscape photography from locations around the world.
Dean
Department of Art and Photography
Nasrul Eam has established a distinguished career spanning nearly two decades as an author, photographer, cinematographer, editor, educator, and art director. He currently holds the positions of Dean of the Department of Art and Photography, Head of the Department of Language and Linguistics, and Head of the Department of Mass Communication & Advertising at Light & Composition University.
Nasrul began his professional journey in 2000 in advertising, initially with Grey Global Group, where he collaborated with renowned organisations such as Nokia, Coca-Cola, Bata, and Telecom Malaysia. In 2006, he joined Paper Rhyme under WPP — a leading British multinational holding company in communications, advertising, public relations, technology, and commerce — serving as Head of Interactive. Concurrently, he played a pivotal role in establishing advertising and event management firms including Spell Bound and Final Avenue. During his tenure in advertising agencies from 2000 to 2007, Nasrul produced four documentaries, created 35 animated commercials, and developed over one hundred high-end corporate websites.
An accomplished author, he has written more than 50 books covering diverse topics in art, photography, cinematography, advertising, language, linguistics, and science. His multifaceted career reflects a deep commitment to creativity, education, and advancing knowledge across various disciplines.
Program Advisor
Habib Chowdhury is the Program Advisor of Light & Composition University, helping to develop modules on optics, ethics in photography, aesthetics, and creative and technical writing. He lived and worked in Europe for several years and currently resides in Perth, Western Australia, where he obtained his PhD in Engineering. He brings substantial experience in university teaching and, alongside his academic work, practises as a freelance writer. He is a photography enthusiast who loves to explore different genres and philosophies of the visual arts.
Program Advisor
Muhammed Nafeezul Bari is the Program Advisor of Light & Composition University, helping students navigate the structure and requirements of the degree programme. He began taking photographs with his father's Minolta as a kindergarten student and, after purchasing a Canon V300 in 2004, his passion expanded across many areas of photography. He is now involved in digital marketing and continues to photograph whatever catches his eye, most often with his phone.
Art Marketing Specialist
Department of Art & Photography
Kirsten Bruning works with Light & Composition University as an Art Marketing Specialist, representing the university's fine art photography initiatives and curated collections. Her interest in photography began in childhood, when she was introduced to analogue photography by her father — a passion that developed into a lifelong appreciation for the expressive power of the medium. Over the years she pursued formal studies in photography, completing her diploma and continuing with advanced study in the field. Her photographic interests focus on the subtle beauty of nature and the emotional narratives found in everyday moments, where careful observation reveals the deeper character of a scene.
Since 2019, Kirsten has been representing the university's gallery and fine art photography collections to collectors, institutions, and art enthusiasts internationally. She lives near Cologne with her family and continues to draw inspiration from the natural environment around her.
Director of Student Financial Aid & Scholarship
Imran Hoque joined Light & Composition University as Director of Student Financial Aid & Scholarship in November 2010, reporting to Nasrul Eam. Alongside his work with the Light & Composition University Grant Committee, he oversees the university's financial administration, including financial planning and reporting, capital structures, cash management, and strategies for physical assets.
A McGill graduate in Accounting holding a Master's degree, Imran's keen interest in art, photography, and social media brought him naturally to Light & Composition. He lives in Montreal, Quebec, having first met Nasrul Eam during their school days, and enjoys spending time with friends and staying connected on social networks.
Development Director
Afnan Naser Chowdhury joined Light & Composition as Development Director in October 2010, reporting to Nasrul Eam. He ensures the Foundation serves the University across a full range of development functions, including prospect research. Prior to joining Light & Composition, he taught in Virginia and now resides in Raleigh, North Carolina. He met Nasrul Eam during his Bachelor's degree and was inspired to take up photography. He has had a keen interest in nature and painting since childhood.
Features Editor & Photographer
Light & Composition University Press
Aude-Emilie Dorion is a photographer and journalist from France who has spent over ten years covering hard news, with a recent specialisation in climate change, biodiversity, agriculture, energy, and other environment-related issues in the Pacific region, where she has been based since 2013. She is a former reporter for several newspapers and has joined the Internews Earth Journalism Network for the Pacific region, writing on climate and environmental issues across the Pacific islands. She also contributes to several regional magazines. A graduate of the National Multimedia Institute in Paris, she also teaches photography at university level.
Features Editor & Photographer
Martin Meyer joined Light & Composition in July 2011 as Features Editor & Photographer, reporting to Nasrul Eam. In this role he is responsible for writing and organising feature articles covering the latest photographic technologies and trends. Martin is a travel and wildlife photographer — a qualified DEAT/FGASA field guide and internationally accredited emergency responder with extensive experience leading 4WD safaris throughout South Africa. He has recently completed his Advanced Wilderness Medic qualification and is currently studying for his Advanced Mountain Walking Leader certification.
Executive Editor
Felice Birmingham joined Light & Composition in May 2010 as Contributing Editor, responsible for overseeing editorial projects and providing final editing for all publications produced by the Light & Composition University Press. A Wisconsin, USA native, she holds a BA in Fine Arts. Felice spends much of her time travelling, drawing, and practising photography, always seeking a sense of connection with the natural world and the people in it.
Contributing Photographer
Shahnaz Parvin was an award-winning photojournalist and a passionate Bangladeshi photographer who passed away at the age of 32 on 14 August 2016. One of the finest photographers of her generation, she consistently ranked among the world's top photographers and was a devoted documentary photographer who used her lens to represent Bangladesh with depth and honesty. With the highest number of Photo of the Month and Photo of the Day Awards, she joined Light & Composition as Contributing Photographer in March 2013 and remained one of the most prolific contributors from South Asia until 2015.
Contributing Photographer
Saniar Rahman Rahul was the first winner of the Photo of the Month Award at Light & Composition in June 2010. With a remarkable talent for wildlife photography, he joined as Contributing Photographer in September 2011. Rahul grew up in a family where photography was part of everyday life — his father was deeply passionate about the medium. In 2005, he joined G3, a specialist wing of Grey Worldwide, before moving to Paper Rhyme two years later. Alongside his work with Light & Composition, Saniar serves as Art Director at Grey Worldwide, one of the ten largest advertising agencies in the world.
Former Athlete & Peak-Moment Critic
Rosa Park-Chen brings a former athlete's understanding of peak moment to photography criticism: the precise physical knowledge of what a body at maximum effort looks like, and the ability to judge whether a photograph captured the right millisecond or the next one. She has contributed to Light & Composition since 2020.
In sports photography, a tenth of a second is the difference between a great photograph and a record of what almost happened. The peak moment in athletics is physiologically precise — there is one frame where the body is at maximum extension, maximum tension, maximum expression. One. The photograph either found it or it did not.
Documentary Photographer & Humanist Critic
Marcus Trent brings a photojournalist's intolerance for artifice and his deep conviction that every worthwhile photograph is ultimately about a human being — either because a human being is in it, or because a human being felt something extraordinary in the moment they pressed the shutter. He has been reviewing for Light & Composition since 2015.
Photography is a human act before it is an aesthetic one. The question I ask every image: did the person behind the camera feel something true? If they did, the camera finds a way to carry it.
Technical Director & EXIF Analyst
James Rokeby brings an engineer's understanding of optics to photography criticism, making him perhaps the most technically demanding reviewer in the field. He has contributed to Light & Composition since 2013. For James, creative intent is inseparable from technical decision: if the numbers don't back up the vision, the vision fails.
Every creative decision leaves a trace in the EXIF data. Aperture, shutter, ISO — these are not settings, they are arguments. Bad technical choices cannot be rescued by good subjects.
Wildlife Photographer & Conservation Ethics Critic
Victoria Ashby brings a wildlife photographer's ethics and field-earned patience to criticism. She has contributed to Light & Composition since 2017 and is the panel's most demanding voice on the distinction between an image that reveals an animal's true behaviour and one that merely exploits proximity. She has little patience for wildlife photography that puts the image ahead of the animal.
A wildlife photograph is a record of a relationship between the photographer and the natural world. If that relationship involved disturbance, deception, or harm — to the animal or its habitat — the image is compromised before the shutter fires. Patience is not a technique. It is an ethical position.
Optical Scientist & Fine Detail Critic
Lena Brandstrom brings deep scientific knowledge of optics to photography criticism — the behaviour of light through glass, the biology of what the human retina can and cannot resolve, the precise moment where a lens's maximum resolution meets the subject's finest detail. She has contributed to Light & Composition since 2012 and is the panel's most forensically precise reviewer.
The photograph reveals what the eye cannot hold. The lens resolves beyond the limits of human vision. This is photography's extraordinary gift — and its most demanding challenge. Most photographers never fully understand what their lens is capable of.
Former Cinematographer & Motion Critic
Rafael Ortega approaches the single frame with the same rigour he gives to a sequence, and brings a filmmaker's obsession with time, rhythm, and the weight of a single held image to every review. He has been reviewing for Light & Composition since 2014.
A great photograph is a film that refused to move. Everything you need is in that one frame — the before, the after, the cut that never came. The question is whether the photographer understood what they were holding when the shutter closed.
Photo Historian & Archive Critic
Catherine Byrne brings 180 years of photographic history to every review — the ability to place a contemporary image in the full lineage of the medium, from Talbot's earliest calotypes to today's computational photography. Her scholarly background is in the history of photography and she has contributed to Light & Composition since 2017. She is the panel's most historically demanding voice.
Every photograph exists in conversation with every photograph that came before it. Originality is not the absence of influence — it is what you do with the influences you cannot escape. I ask of every image: where does this sit in the long conversation? What does it say that has not been said before, and what does it say better?
Aesthetics Scholar & Zen Minimalism Critic
Priya Sharma, whose thinking is grounded in East Asian aesthetics and Japanese visual philosophy, has contributed to Light & Composition since 2012. Her criticism draws on the Japanese concept of Ma — the meaningful pause, the productive emptiness — and she is perhaps the only critic on the panel who considers what a photograph leaves out to be as important as what it includes.
Restraint is the hardest discipline in photography. Anyone can fill a frame. The photographer who can empty one — who can trust the silence — is rare. Ma: the pause that holds more than words.
Chief Judge & Award-Context Specialist
Clara Whitfield has spent many years on photography competition juries and award panels and has contributed to Light & Composition since 2008, making her the longest-serving member. She has seen more award submissions than anyone on the panel — which means she has also seen more of what almost worked. Clara's reviews are the ones photographers read last, because they are the ones that speak plainest truth about why an image deserved the award it received.
Awards are easy to give and hard to justify. The question I ask of every awarded image: will someone be glad this existed in thirty years? Most images fail that test. The ones that pass — I want to know exactly why.
Astronomer & Night Photography Critic
Franz Hubner came to photography as a means of documenting what the naked eye can no longer easily see — the night sky as it was before light pollution narrowed our view of it. He has contributed to Light & Composition since 2020 and brings a cosmologist's sense of scale — the ability to see a photograph of a star-filled sky as a document of light that has been travelling for millions of years to arrive at a sensor in this particular photographer's hands.
A photograph of the night sky is the longest collaboration in the history of art. The light in the frame left its source before humans existed. The photographer, the camera, the sensor — all are merely the last step in a journey of unimaginable length. That responsibility deserves to be taken seriously.
Landscape Photographer & Contemplative Critic
Yusuf Al-Hamdan brings a practitioner's reverence and deep patience to every review. He has contributed to Light & Composition since 2011, with a particular admiration for the photograph that required patience — the one that could not have been taken by anyone who was in a hurry.
Light is not something the photographer uses. Light is something the photographer listens to. The landscape photograph is an act of attention — the shutter is pressed not when the photographer decides, but when the land is ready.
Marine Biologist & Underwater Image Critic
Deepa Krishnan brings both a scientist's knowledge of marine ecosystems and a technical understanding of the profound optical challenges of underwater photography — the light absorption, colour shift, and backscatter that make every good underwater image a minor technical triumph. She has contributed to Light & Composition since 2019.
The underwater world follows different physical laws. Light is stolen by water — red disappears at five metres, orange by ten, yellow by twenty. The underwater photographer is working in a world that actively removes colour. Every image that has warmth and clarity below the surface has fought for it. I respect that fight, and I can tell when the photographer understands the physics of what they are doing.
Artist & Experimental Process Critic
Julian Rowe has spent years pushing the boundaries of what a photograph is allowed to be — working with intentional camera movement, multiple exposure, in-camera compositing, and alternative processes including cyanotype and lumen printing. He has contributed to Light & Composition since 2016 and consistently challenges the panel's assumptions about sharpness, clarity, and conventional photographic virtue. He believes the most interesting photographs are made by photographers who have understood the rules and then deliberately broken them.
Sharpness is a choice, not a virtue. The technically perfect photograph is the most conservative possible use of a camera. The photographer who understands what a blur means — who chooses imprecision as a form of precision — is doing something far more interesting than the one who merely maximises resolution.
Colour Theorist & Contributing Editor
Isabelle Fontenay has been a contributing editor at Light & Composition since 2009. Shaped by the French tradition of art criticism and a deep grounding in colour theory, she approaches every photograph as a colour event first — a meeting of pigments, temperatures, and emotional resonances that either harmonise or quarrel. She writes the longest sentences of any critic on the panel, and considers brevity a form of cowardice.
Colour is not decoration. Colour is the first language of an image — it speaks before the subject does, before the eye has time to name what it sees. A photograph's emotional truth lives in its palette.
Shadow Theorist & Philosophical Critic
Dmitri Kasakov has contributed to Light & Composition since 2010 and remains its most philosophically demanding voice — the critic most likely to cite Heidegger in a review of a beach photograph. For Dmitri, every photograph is a moral act: the choice of what to light and what to leave in darkness is never merely aesthetic.
Shadow is not the absence of light. Shadow is where the image thinks. The photographer who controls darkness controls meaning. A photograph that is afraid of its own shadows is a photograph that has nothing to say.
Contributing Writer
Owen Callister is a writer and naturalist who has spent years learning the Latin names of things. He has contributed to Light & Composition since 2017 through a shared conviction that photography and natural history practise the same discipline — patient, specific attention to what is actually there. His Reflections open with a fact from the natural world and discover, without forcing it, a truth that turns out to be entirely human.
Contributing Writer
Daniel Ferreira has contributed to Light & Composition since 2015 with a writer's instinct for what photographs reveal about the cities they are taken in — who owns the street, who passes through, who is visible and who is not. His Reflections read images as social documents, finding the human geography inside the visual geography. He asks, quietly and persistently, the question most photographers leave implicit.
Contributing Writer
Margaret Holt has been writing for Light & Composition since 2009 — she was among the earliest contributors to the platform. Her Reflections take the long way round: she circles an idea from a distance, picking up references from history, science, and everyday observation before arriving, unhurried, at the centre. Readers who come expecting a quick take learn to slow down. Those who slow down tend not to stop.
Contributing Writer
Farida Boussouf is a writer whose best thinking happens between two and four in the morning. She has contributed to Light & Composition since 2019, bringing a rare willingness to write what people actually feel rather than what they intend to feel. Her pieces have the quality of thoughts written before sleep could soften them — honest, sometimes unsettling, always true. Readers describe them as the Reflections they return to at the hours she wrote them.
Contributing Writer
Beatriz Andrade is a writer and city-walker who has spent years finding meaning in streets, cafés, trams, and the particular quality of light in cities at different hours. She has contributed to Light & Composition since 2019 with a flâneur's instinct for the significant detail in the ordinary urban moment. Her Reflections begin somewhere specific — a corner, a café at midnight, a train platform in winter — and arrive, by a route that feels inevitable, somewhere universal.
Contributing Writer
Dominic Aurelius is a writer and classicist whose lifelong conversation with ancient philosophy — the Stoics above all — has given him an unusual lens for contemporary experience. He has contributed to Light & Composition since 2018. For Dominic, every photograph confirms something Marcus Aurelius already said, which is less about the ancients being right and more about how little the essential human situation has changed in twenty centuries.
Contributing Writer
Layla Ibrahim is a writer who has always thought in the form of letters — addressed to friends, strangers, landscapes, and occasionally photographs. She has contributed to Light & Composition since 2020, bringing an epistolary warmth that sets her Reflections apart. Her pieces read as correspondence that reached its reader by accident: intimate, direct, and full of things Layla would only say because she wasn't entirely sure anyone was listening.
Contributing Writer
Cormac Shields is a writer who approaches photography, and most things, with a constitutionally sceptical eye. He has contributed to Light & Composition since 2022. His Reflections begin with resistance — a doubt, a qualification, something he almost dismissed — and then, having insisted on not being moved, are moved anyway. The turn, when it comes, is entirely earned, which is why readers who share his wariness tend to find his pieces the most honest on the platform.
Contributing Writer
Clara Menezes is a poet and essayist — a Lisbonite by heart — whose writing moves between photography criticism and literary fiction. She has contributed to Light & Composition since 2011, bringing to each Reflection a language dense with imagery and metaphor — water, light, seasons, the grammar of things we find difficult to name. Her pieces are unhurried and precise, finding poetry in corners of everyday life that most people walk past without stopping.