How It Started (And Why It Never Stopped)
It began with a stranger and a camera at a student club event, sometime in 2011, a few weeks after I landed in Los Angeles for my master's degree at UCLA. A senior student handed me a DSLR, showed me what a few dials did, and walked away. I stood there holding this heavy, complicated thing and felt something click — not the shutter, but something in me.
I bought a Nikon D5100 the following week. I had no idea what I was doing.
That was the beginning of a trajectory I've since come to recognize in every serious photographer: the confused beginner who shoots everything, the gearhead who haunts spec sheets and forum threads at midnight, and finally — if you stick around long enough — the person who stops thinking about the camera entirely and starts thinking about light. I've walked all three phases. The gear evolved along the way: D5100 to D800 to, now, the mirrorless flagship Z9. But the evolution that mattered happened behind the viewfinder, not in front of a checkout screen.
Photography also became the reason this website exists. Social media compresses images into something unrecognizable — the detail collapses, the color shifts, the whole point disappears. Adobe Portfolio lets me show the work the way it was meant to be seen. Every trip documented here is, at its core, a photography trip wearing travel clothes.
The Philosophy
I shoot Nikon. I shoot RAW. I do not over-edit.
In an era where your phone can computationally hallucinate a better sky than the one that was actually there, I remain stubbornly old-school. Not out of nostalgia — out of conviction. There is something the Z9's weight does that no phone can replicate: it slows you down. You raise it to your eye, you look, you decide. That forced intentionality is half of what photography teaches. The other half is learning to see the world as a series of frames before you ever lift the camera.
My goal has never been to manufacture a reality that looked better than the one I was standing in. It's to capture the scene as my eye saw it — the actual light, the actual mood, the actual moment. When I nail it, the image doesn't need explaining. When I don't, no amount of post-processing saves it.
I shoot primarily landscape — the long chase for the right light at the right hour in the right place. But I also shoot wildlife, street, long exposures, and star trails, which is its own specific madness: standing in the dark for hours, waiting for the earth to rotate into a good composition.
On portraiture: I believe I'm genuinely capable. My wife, who is my most frequent subject and harshest critic, respectfully disagrees. She finds my portraits insufficiently flattering. I maintain this is a Nikon problem — the infamous clinical accuracy of Nikon color science versus the warmer, more forgiving Canon skin tones. She maintains this is a me problem. The debate remains unresolved. 🥲
The Frontiers
Photography is a discipline with no ceiling, which is both the frustration and the appeal. My current blind spots are also my next chapters: black and white, the ultimate exercise in reducing a scene to its essentials; studio photography, where you build the light from scratch instead of chasing it; and eventually, video production and drone work, which I suspect will break my brain in entirely new and satisfying ways.
The list gets longer the better I get. I've stopped finding that intimidating.