My love of photography began at about 6th grade, with camera I “borrowed” from Dad. After many years of playing around with photography as a hobby, I began a decade of exploration into how I might make a living with it.  I originally tried landscape photography because I really do love being outside and traveling around exploring wild places. I eventually gave up on that dream after a few years of having magazine editors tell me depressing things like, “Wow that photo is so beautiful, we really want to use it as a double page spread in our magazine and we’ll even pay you $100 for it.”

Eventually I was invited to shoot pictures at my sister’s wedding and I absolutely loved it.

That first encounter with wedding photography slowly led to more and more jobs until before long I realized that I could actually pay my bills doing this. At that time I was working part time as a Biology substitute teacher in the winter and as a rafting guide in the summer. In the fall of 2000 I became a father to a wonderful little guy named Jade. Being a dad suddenly encouraged me to quit playing around and get more serious about making a living at this wedding photography business and from there photography took over more and more of my life. Fast forward to now…   Jade and I are riding mountain bikes together and he just got accepted to Oregon State to study Engineering.

Along the way, that camera has taken me along on some amazing adventures. I look at all the spots on my photography map and each one is filled with memories of the people I’ve met and the things I’ve seen and done in each place. All the places blend together in my poor memory, but my portfolio slideshow probably brings back as many fun memories for me as it does for the couples I’ve worked with over the years. The faces and the taste of wonderful food and beautiful mountains and coral reefs with incredible fish and huge sea turtles and colored eels and birds and butterflies and rum and music and people dancing in the sand and lonely beaches and mangoes and coco and the smell of Plumeria and wild taxi rides and Rastas and muddy trails that wind deeper and deeper into the  jungle…

Who would have thought that a camera could take you to so many strange places.