I got my start photographing news and sports for a daily newspaper in college, but over the last decade I’ve focused on portraits and visual storytelling. I also moonlight as an aerospace engineer, led a solar system exploration spacecraft design group at NASA’s JPL, and have hardware with my name on it sprinkled around the solar system, but that’s not why we’re here.

My news assignments ranged from local stories — like a piece on the artists behind city-sanctioned fire hydrant street art — to election night coverage in Washington D.C. as a White House press pool photographer. Experiences like these molded my sense of narrative and story. Successfully photographing fast-paced NCAA Division I sports (basketball, football, etc.) required me to develop the agility to anticipate and capture action. My technical background and fascination with light grew into a diverse range of experience with studio photography — from jewelry catalogs to headshots.

The confluence of the skills gained from these experiences ultimately informs my photographic style: dramatically lit, honest storytelling that doesn’t miss a beat.

Owing in part to my background in journalism, my approach to portraiture is not one of directing what you should look like, but rather educing your genuine nature into an image that agrees with how you see yourself. We’ll go over your goals, choose a direction to explore, and before long we’ll both find a combination of pose, environment, and light that strikes a chord — then I may give more explicit directions to fine-tune the best version of an image.

While I do maintain a complete kit of more typical strobe lighting and associated light-shaping tools, for my more bespoke offerings I prefer to work with the finest of the more traditional continuous lights and modifiers trusted by top cinematographers for detail work on film sets, which offer far more nuanced control. These give way to my signature look: portraits that evoke the grit & glam of 1930s and ’40s Hollywood noir films while maintaining a modern elegance.

The photojournalistic or documentary style has become popular among wedding photographers recently; to a photographer with news and sports experience, however, this is more than a stylistic choice: journalism has required the refinement of many skills — storytelling under pressure, technical prowess, improvisation, foresight, etc. — that I bring to bear on your wedding day.

While I do incorporate elements of studio portraiture in my wedding photography, I won’t take significant time out of your day pursuing fine art awards for myself — I’m there for you, so my approach is to be practical and unobtrusive without compromising quality.