My Story
Without question my childhood was the shaping force for my passionate pursuit of nature photography. Family vacations were often spent in such National Parks as Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Great Smoky Mountains. I was nine when we moved to the west coast where growing up in the shadow of Mount Rainier created a lifelong mountain lover. Between the ages of 14 and 16 I lived first in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, then the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. And at just 16 my first backpacking adventure took me into the Superstition Wilderness Area. This was my first photographic trip recorded on film and I never looked back.
While attending college at the University of Washington’s School of Business, my spare time was spent in the art school’s color darkroom. The lessons I learned proved instrumental in developing my photographic craft. After graduating in 1992, I took a deep breath and jumped head first into the photography business.
Early in my career my primary interest was in stock photography; for which 35mm cameras were perfectly suited. But on a fateful afternoon I walked into a Seattle art gallery and discovered a magnificent exhibition of large format Cibachrome prints. This imagery elevated color photography to a level I’d never seen. I was hooked.
The next several years I made photographic equipment purchases for two medium format systems and an 8x10 view camera. These cameras with their significantly larger film size, allowed me to capture scenes with the detail and resolution 35mm could not. But it was just half the equation; printing was the other. My first prints were Ilfochrome (formally known as Cibachrome), followed by the Fuji Crystal Archive process, and eventually evolving to Ultrachrome pigment ink prints.
My dedication to capturing and printing photographic images of brilliant luminance and clarity has taken me on a long winding road to where I am today. It has indeed been the road less traveled—but for nature photographers that’s often the case.
