About Me

TLDR; I'm a photographer. I've been a photographer for most of my life. I've been other things along the way, but I've always loved photography, and would love to do a photography project with you, if the photography project you have in mind is interesting enough.

I shoot the nouns.

You know: people, places, and things.

A famous comedian once had a routine that began, "I started out as a child..." I did, too.

I think I was around 10 years old when my brother Bob and I got toy cameras for Christmas (and by "toy", I mean they were made of brightly-colored plastic, and had built-in plastic lenses, but they had film in them, and they could take actual pictures). As we grew older, Bob got more and more into photography: he got a "serious" camera (a Nikon SLR), learned how to develop his own film, and got quite good as a photographer.

I, on the other hand, continued to enjoy photography, but I was more of the "point-and-shoot" school. I never had a "serious" camera and I never got that good at photography. I had a series of cheap cameras (a brownie, a polaroid, and when digital point-and-shoots came out in the early 2000s, a Nikon "Coolpix"), and I took a lot of pictures, but it was just a hobby to me.

Fast forward to 2004: I'd just gotten RIF'd from my job as webmaster for the distance education program at a northeastern university, and part of my severance package was a series of sessions with a career counselor. He mentioned that some people in my situation took being RIF'd as an opportunity to start a new career path, doing something that had previously been a hobby or just a long-standing interest.

I liked that idea, and thought, "Why not be a photographer?" I'd been a hobbyist photographer for most of my life at that point, and the idea of "going pro" was really appealing. So I bought a serious camera (a Nikon DSLR), went to photography school in New York City, and was soon working as a photographer at weddings, parties, and other events.

I wasn't getting enough jobs to make a living at it, but I was doing pretty well as a freelance web application developer, and the photography was a nice side income.

In 2005, the man I had shared a house with while a grad student at the University of Cincinnati was getting married, and I offered to come down and shoot his wedding for free as a wedding gift. When I got here for the rehearsal dinner, I ran into a woman I'd met while in grad school. We were just acquaintances back then, but there was a spark at the wedding. We started seeing each other, and the 750 mile commute got old pretty quickly. Long story short, in 2006, I moved to Cincinnati and we bought a house together. After a while, that woman became my wife.

When I got here I started a photography business, but, as it turned out, I was a better photographer than I was a businessman, and I eventually had to give up on that first photography business and go back into freelance web application development to keep a roof over my head and food on the table.

Eventually, I became the CTO of a business in the software as a service space, but my love for photography never went away, and I continued shooting through the intervening years. Now, as I prepare to retire from that web business, I'm devoting my full time to photography.

If you've got a photography project you’d like to talk with me about, please fee free to drop me a line through my Contact page.