My Story

I never set out to be a photographer.

In fact, I’m not even sure I like that word. It makes me think of wedding photographers or those big cameras used in the old Olan Mills studios. Photographers create images. What I’m trying to collect is a feeling.

Most of my work explores environments that exist largely without human presence — underwater ecosystems, remote Arctic landscapes, and abstract patterns formed by ice, water, and geology. These places are beautiful whether anyone is there to see them or not. Photography simply gives me a way to witness them.

Let’s go back to the beginning.

I bought my first “real” camera to use in my dental office. I’m a dentist, and I needed a way to document cases and communicate with labs. I ended up with a Canon 10D and a wide-angle lens. At the time, all those numbers meant nothing to me.

I started taking the camera home and experimenting with it — photos of the family, random things around the house. The more I used it, the more I realized some of the images weren’t half bad.

A few years later I attended a dental seminar where one of the lectures was about photography. Before the talk began, the presenter played a slideshow of underwater images — sharks, coral reefs, schools of fish moving through blue water.

I had always loved the ocean, especially sharks, and I remember thinking, maybe I could do that.

Within a week I was working on my scuba certification. My checkout dive took place in a rock quarry in Lebanon, Tennessee. Not exactly tropical, but it got the job done.

My first ocean dive was in Florida, and almost immediately I knew I needed to bring a camera underwater with me. I started with disposable cameras, then a small point-and-shoot.

Then came the pivotal moment.

I watched a documentary about sharks filmed at Cocos Island. The divers were surrounded by hammerheads and other species, calmly moving through the water. The narrator interacted with them as if it were completely normal.

I remember thinking, if he can do it, maybe I can too.

Not long after that I bought my first serious camera and an underwater housing and headed to Cocos Island myself.

That trip started years of underwater photography. I traveled to places like the Bahamas, Mexico, and Indonesia chasing sharks, colorful reef fish, and tiny creatures hiding in coral.

Eventually I started wanting to explore photography in other ways.

I kept seeing landscape images that stopped me in my tracks, and many of them were from Iceland. So that became my next destination.

What started as curiosity quickly turned into an obsession with cold places.

First Iceland. Then the Faroe Islands. Iceland again. Greenland. Svalbard. The farther north and colder the place was, the more I wanted to see it.

Something about these environments felt raw and unfinished.

As I visited these places I started to notice something that has become a recurring theme in my work.

Many of the most beautiful places in the world don’t need us at all.

A perfect ice formation floating in a Greenland fjord would exist whether anyone ever saw it or not. The underwater world is full of life and beauty, but humans can only visit it by “cheating” — bringing air with us so we can breathe.

The Arctic is similar. Places like Svalbard are harsh and unforgiving environments that humans were never really meant to inhabit, and yet they are incredibly beautiful.

In many ways photography has simply given me access to places and moments that humans were never meant to see — and allowed me to bring a small piece of them back.

When I look across my work — underwater images, Arctic landscapes, aerial river patterns, even desert environments — I realize I’ve been exploring the same idea all along:

Moments and places that exist entirely on their own, whether we are there to witness them or not.