I’m a photographer with a passion for exploring the natural world. I’m an avid birder and lifelong naturalist, and I bring that knowledge and experience to my photography and filmmaking. I like to go beyond simple aesthetics, crafting every image both to be visually stunning and to tell a story about the subject. I like it when the image can also speak volumes about the landscape and the diversity of the environment.
Born and raised in Florida, I learned to love nature and appreciate the beauty of my home state. Following my adventurous spirit, I wanted something completely different for college and enrolled at Bowdoin College in Maine. While you could take the Florida boy out of Florida, I must say, I did not love winter. When most of my friends went abroad for a semester in their junior year, I bought a trailer and moved to the Everglades where I lived from January to June, photographing the infinite details of a vast landscape. The photographs and experiences I got during this semester became my honors thesis, a book of photographs and essays about the Florida Everglades.
Upon graduating from Bowdoin, I was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for a year of extensive travel throughout Australia searching for and photographing Australia’s numerous endemic birds. During that year, I photographed more than half of Australia’s over 300 endemic species and saw nearly 600 species of birds while driving about 40,000 miles all over the country.
My next adventure was funded by a National Geographic Young Explorer grant for an educational multimedia project based in the cloud forests of Monteverde, Costa Rica. Partnering with a biologist and cinematographer, we created an interactive multimedia website to bring the cloud forest into classrooms and living rooms around the world. This project first introduced me to the elevated world of technical tree climbing and it has now taken me high into the Redwoods and Sequoias of California and the incredible tropical forests of Borneo. I have taught tree climbing for Cornell University’s Cornell Outdoor Education and enjoy introducing new climbers to the canopies of the surrounding deciduous forests.
A common theme for many of these projects is pushing the way technology can be used to bring a story to life in a new way. I am a self-proclaimed geek of sorts and love to find new ways to tell stories by either using new technology or repurposing older concepts and techniques. My passion for technology and storytelling led me to return to school and get a Masters in Education, Media Design, and Technology.
Over the last couple years, I’ve had some amazing opportunities to work in some incredible places. I’ve created interactive panoramas of a 2,000 year old shipwreck 150 feet underwater off the coast of Turkey and at the excavation of the ship found at Ground Zero in New York City. I’ve climbed trees and photographed birds in the remote forests of both Papua New Guinea and Malaysian Borneo. I have returned to Australia four more times to assist National Geographic photographer Tim Laman on both photography and video projects and continued to work as his assistant on a National Geographic article about Helmeted Hornbills in Thailand. After all of these opportunities in amazing places, I returned to my home state for a long term project, Filming Florida, where I rediscovered the landscape that shaped my passion for nature and exploration.
I now live in Gainesville, Florida where I continue to explore this state I love. I am spending less time behind the camera these days, but more time working with other photographers and researchers building new tools to help their research and storytelling.
