I'm a family guy, the most important thing to me is my wife & four boys. After that, I am definitely a photographer. It's not something I do on weekends or "after work". It is my work. I provide for my family of six entirely with photography. Clients often remark on how hard I work, but I just ridiculously love what I do, and I'm scared to death of making boring photos.
COMMUNICATION is the most important ingredient to great photography, which is why I will ask you to send me example photos that illustrate what you have in your mind for our project together.
Good photography is properly exposed, lit & composed. Really good photography is creative & often takes hard work or risk. GREAT photography is all that and full of real emotion. Real smiles. Real intimacy. Real love. Most folks aren't comfortable showing emotions in front of a lens. The best photographers know how to draw those feelings out, to get people to relax, to be themselves.
I don't wear trendy hats or Elton John glasses. But I do bring professional lights & modifiers to get the editorial "magazine quality" you see throughout my portfolio. I've spent year$$$ shrinking my lights down so they're portable yet powerful.
Literally the smartest thing I have ever done was to propose to my wife on bended knee atop the great Mayan pyramid in Chichen Itza. My life has had great meaning & purpose ever since.
I've traveled around the globe three times, most recently with my 4 boys and wife in the summer of 2019. I've visited 26 countries, speak very bad Chinese & even worse Spanish, am an adventurous eater, have rock climbed 5.10c, have floated the Grand Canyon several times, hitch-hiked from Colorado to Alaska & back, worked in a salmon cannery, worked in the oil fields as a roustabout then as a "ginzledick" (when the whole time I thought I was a "worm" 0_o), built a bicycle from parts then rode it from Colorado to Minnesota to work as a counselor at a camp for deaf kids, supervised building trails in RMNP with a crew of deaf high school kids, was reckless enough to think I could move 2,000 miles to start an Internet email company (& did). I have a high tolerance for risk, have earned been taxed given away spent & lost on Wall Street a great deal of money. I once invited John Stossel to keynote a national conference for people who stutter, he accepted & I was honored to introduce him to 600 of my people. I am a 250 hour complex-certified VFR pilot, was SCUBA certified by a hard-drinking Brit in Thailand, rode my bicycle alone on the 3rd-World-Scary no-guardrail dynamite-blasting under-construction far-from-Beijing-extortionist-Communist-Party-Member thousand-foot-drop dirt road in Tiger Leaping Gorge, hopped freight trains from Wyoming to Chicago & read Atlas Shrugged to pass the time, have attended CATO University five times (slow learner 0_0), slept in dirt floor huts throughout Asia, downed coconut whiskey with Mr Beedee on a Sri Lankan train, sky dived, bungee jumped, busted lots of bones snowboarding & mountain biking & ultimate Frisbee-ing (& once i just fell out of a house).
I'm annoyingly well informed on history & liberty, but I never talk politics on the job, unless you want to & even then probably not. My biggest hero is my wife Christina. I would do anything to protect her & my children. Other heroes include Locke, Montesquieu, Bastiat, Mason, Jefferson, Douglas, Sowell, Friedman, fifty other champions of liberty, & the Chinese dude stopping tanks while holding his groceries.
I thank God every day for the countless blessings He has given me, including my family, my health, my freedoms, the many friends & family who've helped me along the way, His forgiveness, and my ability to support my little platoon making beautiful photos documenting your life.