About

Two things I've done since I was a teenager: teach, and take pictures.

The teaching started at an environmental outdoor school. I was barely older than the kids I was leading around, learning on the job that knowing a thing and being able to teach it to somebody else are two completely different skills.

The photography started around the same time, early enough that I was shooting slide film. Which meant you fired the shot, sent the roll away, and found out two weeks later whether you'd gotten it. I kept a little notebook of my settings and learned from it. Slowly.

Those two things were never separate. I wasn't building a portfolio, I was building a library of images to teach science with. Rock layers, cloud types, glacial erratics. The camera was the tool. The lesson was always the point.

In between all that I just liked documenting where I went. Somewhere I still have VHS tapes from three weeks in Seattle in the summer of 1994, which is where I fell in love with the Pacific Northwest, and from a two month camping trip across the country in 1998. I never really stopped.

Why I'm decent at explaining this

I've been teaching long enough to know what I'm doing, but not long enough to forget what it felt like when aperture, shutter speed, and ISO were three mystery dials that all seemed to do the exact same thing. I still remember posting an early digital photo to a message board and getting completely roasted by the pros over a very poor white balance choice.

That gap is the whole job. Anybody can define a histogram. Explaining one to somebody who's cold, losing the light, and quietly convinced they're the only person in the group who doesn't get it, that's a different skill entirely. It's the one I got from teaching, not from photography. The education background is what lets me strip a concept down to the version you can actually use at 6am with numb fingers, instead of the version that sounds impressive.

For years I did that on YouTube. PhotoRec.tv grew a lot bigger than I ever expected and taught me more about explaining things than any classroom did. Nothing sharpens an explanation like a few thousand people telling you which part didn't land. I've stepped back from it lately. Turns out I'd rather be standing next to you watching the light come up than talking into a lens in an empty room.

So now I teach in person, in the places that made me want a camera in the first place.

Where that's taken me

Every continent except one. Antarctica three times, which is either very good planning or a mild problem depending on who you ask. The tours are the part of this work I'd give up last, because that's where the teaching and the photography stop being two separate jobs.

The van, and the log

In 2023 I moved into a van. Home base is the Pacific Northwest, and when I'm not somewhere else entirely I'm out hiking my butt off in one of the best corners of the world for exactly that.

In the fall of 2025 I started tracking where I slept each night and what I slept in. Just the coordinates and the bed type, nothing clever. It has since turned into something bigger than that: a running journal of favorite photographs, small unremarkable days, grand days, and a lot of walks in the woods.

All of it lives on the Night Log, weather and hikes and all. It's the most honest version of this page there is, mostly because it doesn't skip the boring parts. You can filter those out, though.