It started with disposable cameras.
My grandparents put one in my hands on every family trip. Point, click, and wait for the envelope to come back from the drugstore. Something about that process stuck.
By twelve I had quietly claimed my parents’ Canon Rebel XSi. By graduation I had saved enough to buy my own, and spent the next stretch of time crossing the American Southwest with it, figuring out what I was actually trying to say with a camera. I’m still figuring that out, but I’m closer now.
I shoot Canon because that’s the brand I grew up on and the controls are in my hands before I have to think about them. I’m currently shooting with an EOS R5 — a camera I absolutely love — paired with an EF 28-105mm for landscapes and an RF 200-800mm for wildlife. Everything travels in a WANDRD Prvke 31L, which is the first camera bag I don’t hate. I get to most of my locations on foot or by bike, so I keep my kit simple. Not light, unfortunately, but simple.
I’m a nuclear engineer by training and by trade, based in southeastern Idaho. My day job is built on precision and observable fact, and that same instinct runs through my photography. I’m not interested in manufacturing a moment that didn’t exist or coaxing a landscape into something more dramatic than it was. What was there, what the light was doing, what the animal was actually doing; that’s the image. If it doesn’t hold up without enhancement, it wasn’t the right moment.
The sagebrush steppe keeps pulling me back because most people drive through it without stopping.
There’s a quietness to desert country that rewards patience, and a range of contrasts — between seasons, between the low basin country and the ranges that rise above it — that I find endlessly worth documenting. It’s a landscape that doesn’t perform for you. You have to show up for it.
Every print begins long before the shutter fires; in understanding the light, the animal, the moment. That same analytical instinct carries through to how the final image is rendered. Selecting the right surface for a print is just as critical as capturing the image itself. It’s another decision in a process where the details matter.