Birthplace: St. Joseph Hospital, Denver, CO (lower center)

All throughout my childhood, I was very blessed to travel and see most parts of this country. It seems like we took a long trip every other year or so. Of course, being that Colorado has so much to offer, we certainly had to take advantage of many camping and fishing trips up in the hills during the summers. Camping and traveling are very much apart of me today, as you may have found out by touring this site. The seed was planted as it were.

Teen years
With all the places we've been, including Hawaii, it was a couple week trip into Banff and Jasper National Parks in Alberta in the summer of '94 that I believe really pushed me over the top in being a mountain freak. That trip was my all-time favorite family trip.

The following two years I attended Concordia College in Seward, Nebraska (30 miles west of Lincoln), a Lutheran school of 1,000 enrollment at the time. I was studying commercial art/graphic design as it has historically had a good art program. With being severely overworked with studies and the lack of any impressive landforms nearby to get away from it all, they ended up being the worst two years of my life. Trips back home never meant so much, and I would get a severe case of goose bumps every time the Front Range would come into view 100 miles northeast of Denver outside of Fort Morgan. I gave up on school after my sophomore year as I just couldn't bear it any longer.

Current
In 1996, I started working in a mailroom for 18 months to start my professional working career.

It was in the beginning of '97 that I started really getting into photography. I had always liked taking pictures with a point-and-shoot, but that would no longer suit my needs to capture the beauty of God's creations that I felt the desire to enjoy, and be a part of, to a much higher degree now. I am a self-taught photographer, but I believe that with all the art courses I took throughout high school and college probably helped a little bit in regards to understanding composition and the like. Regardless, photography is a completely different art form than what I had been studying. I did read one book early on, that being Colorado's John Fielder's Photographing the Landscape: The Art of Seeing. I can highly recommend this book to other landscape photographers just starting out. It covers a lot of the basics with clear-to-understand descriptions, provides great imagery, including bad examples of certain techniques, and is really easy and fun to read. I'm a visual learner, and not much of a reader, so this has certainly been a welcome addition to my Colorado library.

In 1997, a bigger opportunity opened up for me at then TCI cable, then AT&T Broadband, and as of November of 2002, a merger with Comcast, which we are now named. For the past twelve years, I have worked in a tech support group that assists many different cable companies and systems across the country in getting set up with digital cable. Once established, they rely on us for top-level tech support. I am still happily employed there. The vacation time is a generous six-plus weeks a year that allows me to get out a lot and bring home more pictures.

In 2000, I got even more serious about my photography, and switched from cheap consumer-grade Fuji print film to Fuji's professional slide film, Provia 100F. Gone were the days of buying four rolls for under $6! Just the price to pay for better quality images, I guess!

The start of 2002 marked another big step in my photography career when I purchased my 4Runner. I like to think of it as a portable base camp or another super telephoto lens I carry with me. My previous (and first) car, an '89 Camry, was no longer adequate as I needed to have the means to go over the mountains and not just around them, in turn providing me with many more possible photo opportunities.

2003's big event was the advent of this site, which went live on January 7. It took me a good three months to develop all of the initial content prior to putting it out for the world to see. Literally, every step of the way was painful and extremely challenging. Even though this is the most basic of designs, it could not have been any more difficult! I still haven't taken the time to learn anything further about Web design since, which I'm somewhat embarrassed to say. So, this layout is what it's going to be for the foreseeable future with tweaks every now and again as I learn new techniques.

In early 2005, I took up shooting 4x5 large format. I also got rid of my 35mm film camera, and picked up my first DSLR. Almost a complete equipment overhaul within a couple of months! In August and September, I took an incredible six-week solo expedition where four weeks were spent in the mind-blowing Canadian Rockies to relive the family trip here 11 years prior and to make new memories. Time was also spent in the great states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.

I am continuing to further develop my photographic skills by taking extremely frequent trips into the high country. I really can't complain about the single life! I owe much of my motivation to get out and take pictures to all of my fine friends with the Rocky Mountain Nature Photographers group, which was previously a Colorado-specific forum. And friends they are, as I have made many from this extremely talented group, from amateurs like myself to a number of full-timers. Finding that site in the fall of 2003 was the single best thing that has happened to me, photographically speaking. However, in the summer of 2006, my good friend, Jesse Speer, and myself launched the only Web site dedicated to Colorado Nature Photographers, Nature Photographers of Colorado. This site, over time, will prove to be the ultimate site for Colorado's top landscape and wildlife photographers, and I am rather proud to have a big part in it.

About my work
My goal in photography is to simply take pretty pictures that I can bring back home so I can relive my trips at any time, and nothing more. It obviously gives me a good reason to get out and enjoy the great outdoors, and on a frequent basis. There has been a lot of work involved in getting a number of my pictures whether it meant getting up before 5:00 AM (I am the furthest thing from a morning person, and this hurts the most!) or hiking a number of miles and withstanding a thunderstorm with close lightning strikes. The one thing I have never really considered my own work to be is art. Art is what all the amazing scenes and landforms our Creator supplied—I have merely recorded various moments in their time, generally applying very little creativity of my own. This is not to say I don't consider photography to be an art medium; I just can't say that I would apply that term as it relates to my images.

My images are not manipulated, per se, as that pretty much always carries a negative connotation. Optimized is the best way to describe them, as it does for the vast majority of photographers in this genre. All pictures require at least some refinement; film less so, and raw digital images straight out of a camera to a much greater degree—you have to, as they usually look awful and bland in their native form. My digital captures always include a contrast adjustment, usually a small amount of extra saturation depending on the scene, and then sharpening that is best suited for the final output (Web or print). My limited wildlife collection is wild, and to date I've not done any composites in my landscapes, though I will certainly blend multiple exposures of the same composition to gain an extended dynamic range for the final piece.

That pretty much sums things up in the proverbial nutshell and you are now up to date. I hope you enjoy (or have enjoyed) the rest of the site!

Self-portrait, Telluride (most scenic town in Colorado)

Self-portrait, Zapata Falls, near the Great Sand Dunes

Photo courtesy of Brent Doerzman at Hermit Pass near Westcliffe

Self-portrait, Dinosaur National Monument

Photo courtesy of my mom, Canyonlands National Park