The Photographer
Thank you for your interest in my photographic work and taking the time to visit. I greatly appreciate it!
I am a self-taught photography enthusiast—with loads of assistance from books, articles from magazines and the internet, and viewing my fair share of videos from photography YouTube channels. National Parks are among of my favorite places to visit. My top choices of photographic subjects are the natural landscape and wildlife. I enjoy making images of subjects that I haven’t seen before, but I also like capturing photos from popular locations.
It’s the photographic process that I appreciate and take delight in the most. It’s enjoyable to travel to an interesting location, find a subject, compose something I am happy with, make the photo, edit it to portray how it looked and felt to me, and make a print of the final image. I hope my photography can take people places they’ve never been or awaken a memory of a place they have seen before.
Photographic Beginnings
I asked someone the question, “If you were to go to my website and click on the About Me section, what would you want to know?” The answer was the same as my own, “I don’t know.”
Writing about myself is not something I often do. I consider myself an introverted person so I do a lot more listening than talking anyway. Once I know you, I tend to open up more; so, I’m going to treat this like we know each other. I am guessing you visited this site to look at photographs, so I will skip the first two and a half decades of my life and get to the point that I became interested in photography. Well, okay, I’ll give the TL;DR version. I grew up in the piney woods region of East Texas. As an only child I often had to find things to do to entertain myself. I remember several occasions using my dad’s RCA camcorder to record snippets of everyday life, but that is not what got me into photography. Those videos mostly took place in the house I lived my entire childhood. I attended school in the same school system K–12, and I remember going on a band trip to Walt Disney World in high school and buying a film camera at a store near the hotel when we arrived. Over the course of the next few days I took photos to remember the trip, but that still did not lead to my interest in photography.
In the mid-2000s, after graduating college with a chemistry degree, I moved from Texas to Ohio to pursue a graduate degree at The Ohio State University in synthetic organic chemistry. My main focus was working toward an efficient synthesis of a very potent and well-known hallucinogenic molecule. That is when I became interested in photography—not because I was hallucinating, but because I needed a creative outlet when not in the laboratory.
The first “serious” camera I purchased, that was more than a little point-and-shoot model, was a Nikon Coolpix 8800, an 8.0 megapixel camera that fell into the “bridge camera” category. It had more features than a point-and-shoot, but still did not have interchangeable lenses like a DSLR. Using that camera made me feel like a photographer and it helped me become more deliberate with making images. In fact, one of my favorite images I’ve made was with that camera – an image of a dilapidated piano inside an abandoned building that I titled “Beethoven’s Last” seen here. It was not long after that I decided to upgrade to a DSLR system and I purchased the Nikon D200.
The D200 served me well for 10 years. Later on I upgraded to my current setup, which includes the D750 and D500 camera bodies and range of lenses. A camera is certainly a tool for making images, but I think every photographer connects their camera to certain locations and vice-versa. The D200 is special in that way as it was there when I took photos after asking my wife to marry me, and it went with us on our honeymoon to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It saw a variety of sporting events, several family get-togethers, trips to the Texas Hill Country, Big Bend National Park, Florida, Alabama, New Orleans, San Francisco, among others. It allowed me to experiment with different types of photography, including macro, abstract, landscape, sports, concert, architectural, and portrait. Some images captured through the years with that camera are shown in the carousel below. If it sounds like I was a fan of that camera, it’s because I was. That camera has been retired for quite a while now, but I’m grateful for it because it allowed me to determine the genres of photography I am most passionate about.
My Love of National Parks
After completing graduate school, I moved back to Texas with my wife and started a chemistry professorship at a small university. This academic position provides us more flexibility to travel than when I was in graduate school, which is great for photography. As I mentioned earlier, the national park sites are some of my favorite places to visit. There are currently 63 National Parks in the United States of America, and we are slowly chipping away at visiting them. We also enjoy traveling around Texas when we have the chance.
In 2017, my parents made it possible for my wife and I to take a family trip with them to California. I had been to San Francisco earlier that year for work, but it was nice to return, especially due to the second leg of the trip. We went to Yosemite National Park! Before visiting Yosemite my favorite national park, hands down, was Big Bend. However, after visiting, there are few weeks that pass that I don’t think about its beauty. While we were on that trip someone told us about a climber from a few days earlier that had climbed El Capitan without any climbing ropes or safety devices. We marveled that someone could do that – or would do that. As it turns out, while we were in San Francisco—before heading east to Yosemite—Alex Honnold completed the first (and only) free solo of El Cap. It was not until we watched the documentary “Free Solo” by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi that we realized, after seeing the date it occurred, that we missed it by three days. Jimmy Chin has some truly historical images that he made while Alex Honnold completed the greatest athletic feat, in my opinion, ever attempted.
We have visited 13 national parks so far, with Yosemite, Big Bend, Badlands, Theodore Roosevelt, Shenandoah, and White Sands being at the top of the list of the most memorable. These protected lands are important not only to the people that visit them, but also to the wildlife that call them home. I’m excited to continue to share their beauty whenever I can with others moving forward.
