PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY • DENVER • 25 YEARS
ABOUT
Bio
STILL INSPIRED. STILL CREATIVE.
Anyone for a game of chess?
Twenty-five years photographing people for a living leaves you with strong opinions about what works and what doesn’t. I’ve been part of Denver’s professional services landscape since the late 1990s, working with law firms, wealth management practices, financial advisory groups, and the companies that serve them. Clients have included First American Title, CoBank, Wealth Enhancement Group, Cambiar Investors, and Mission Bell, among many others.
I tend to approach photography a little like chess: before making a move, I want to understand the board. Who is going to see this photograph? Where will it live? What does it need to communicate? And what happens next?
Because a portrait has a job to do. It needs to convey credibility, signal competence, and make someone want to pick up the phone. Good lighting and a clean background matter, but they’re not the strategy. Understanding the person, the audience, and the purpose of the image is.
That’s the conversation I bring to every engagement. The camera comes later.
The technical part is the easy part. When I’m not on set, I’m probably walking my dog or playing chess… where, apparently, seeing several moves ahead doesn’t necessarily mean winning.
What I'm Like to Work With
My dog has taught me well. Mostly about the finer points of body language… and how much gets communicated without anyone saying a word.
That turns out to be surprisingly useful with people, too.
I pay attention.
Some people need direction. Some need conversation. Some need a minute to settle in. And some would really prefer that I stop talking, take the damn photograph and let them get back to work.
There isn’t a formula for making people comfortable in front of a camera. You read the person standing in front of you and adjust accordingly.
Seven Questions
The stuff a professional bio doesn’t tell you.
1. What’s a photograph you didn’t take that you still remember?
I was driving through Leipzig in East Germany a few decades ago (Seal’s “Crazy” blasting on the radio) and it had just started to snow… very damp, cold and grey out… winter had arrived… minus the magic.
Then, weaving against traffic, a lone chimney sweep on an old bike came into view. He wore a wide-brim hat and a long thick overcoat… And his sweep stuck straight up out of his back “pack”. Strange juxtaposition of modern traffic (ok, a lot of 50’s eastern block cars and trams) with someone who looked like he’d cycled out of the 1800’s.
I didn’t get the photo.
But I still see it vividly… in black & white.
2. What idea from a book has stayed with you for years and why?
So many books. So little time.
Oldie but goodie? The Count of Monte Cristo. I love the idea of someone overcoming extraordinary injustice, and the complicated question of what happens when justice becomes revenge.
The Holographic Universe. The idea that if the human body operates like a hologram, consciousness and memory aren’t localized to just one spot (the brain). Instead, information is distributed throughout every cell and organ.
Spook. Because perhaps the bigger question isn’t “Is there a God?” but something more fundamental:
What is death?
3. What completely ordinary subject can you talk about for an unreasonable amount of time?
Canine genetics – specifically coat color and pattern.
Don’t get me started. I’ll probably bore you into next week.
4. What’s something most people love that leaves you completely cold?
It’s a Wonderful Life.
Cannot abide it.
I know. Beloved Christmas classic. Heartwarming affirmation of the value of one ordinary human life. Jimmy Stewart. Angels. Bells.
Nope.
Every Christmas, the rest of America can watch it and feel restored. I’ll be somewhere else.
For years I couldn’t understand why a movie everyone else found heartwarming made me so uncomfortable, and eventually I went looking for an explanation.
It was James Stewart’s first film after returning from WWII, where he’d flown combat missions, and some biographers believe he came home carrying what we’d now recognize as symptoms of PTSD. Stewart himself later said that some of the emotion in the film was real… the tears in the prayer scene weren’t planned.
And suddenly it made sense to me.
I think I’d always picked up on something raw underneath the performance. George Bailey’s desperation didn’t feel entirely like acting.
I still can’t watch it.
5. What’s a tiny thing that tells you you’re going to like someone?
You have a completely disproportionate opinion about something utterly inconsequential.
See #4.
6. What’s something you’ve done that almost nobody you meet has done?
I once climbed a 30-foot utility pole (with safety rigging), stood on the top while it was shaking, and listened to 75 people below shouting, “The pole isn’t shaking… you’re shaking the pole!”
Once I stopped shaking, the challenge continued: jump ten feet out into absolutely nothing and try to catch a trapeze bar.
I got one hand on it. And then I fell.
Which, as it turns out, was the more important part of the experience. There’s something profoundly uncomfortable about having to trust strangers to keep you safe while you do something that every sensible part of your brain is telling you not to do. But there’s something rather wonderful about it, too. Sometimes courage is simply doing the next terrifying thing and trusting that the people around you will be there when you do.
7. What’s a decision you made without knowing how it would turn out, and would you make it again?
Moving to the United States. And yes.
I’ll always be English at heart and still call England “home” but after more than four decades here, I’ve realized that’s not as true as it used to be.
Somewhere along the way, America became home and I became far more American than I ever expected.
And in some ways I’m stuck squarely in the mid-Atlantic… My English friends think I sound American. My American friends think I sound English. I still drink tea with milk and sugar, but I will never understand how the English can drink room-temperature beer.
And there it is: “the English.”
At some point, without noticing, they became something outside of myself.
There’s some truth in Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. But perhaps there’s truth in the other idea, too: eventually, you become your own home.
Honorable “American” mentions: air conditioning is a human right; parking more than a block away is an outrage; Thanksgiving is actually a great holiday; enormous refrigerators are entirely reasonable; asking a stranger what they do for a living within five minutes is normal; 200 years is old for a building; driving everywhere is perfectly sensible.
8. Bonus Question: Describe your natural laugh.
Snort. Chortle. Occasional guffaw.
Disturbingly Muttley-like when something really gets me.
Elsewhere
Occasionally I write about photography, business, AI and the increasingly strange intersection of all three for the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP).
- Photography Isn’t Dead — The Old Business Model Is ASMP – The market changed. That isn’t quite the same thing as photography disappearing.
- Creativity in an Age of Automation ASMP – What remains distinctly human when machines can make increasingly competent things.