Biography

I began playing with a camera when I was in junior high. My father had always been interested in photography, and he had a couple Nikon bodies, some lenses, and many accessories like extension tubes, bellows attachments, and tele-extenders. He let me use them anytime I wanted, and I remember slapping a 2x and 3x extender on a 500mm lens to take a full-frame image of the moon. I remember taking detailed pictures of the back of a ten-dollar bill with the macro equipment, and asking people to guess what it was.
	I saved my paper route money and bought a Nikon FG with a Tamron 35-135mm lens, which I used until last year. I took it on some canoe trips in junior high and high school, and on a round-the-continent bicycle trip a few years back. I never really took photography seriously, though, until I moved to Alaska last year.
I grew up in Nashua, New Hampshire, a town of about 100,000 on the Massachusetts border. It was a great place to grow up, small enough that we had a pond across the street from our house, and big enough that we had 750 people in my graduating class. My parents took my brother and I hiking and camping in the summers, and we did a couple week-long canoe trips on the Allagash in Maine. That whet my appetite for the outdoors.
	I studied physics at UNH, and loved it. I thought about going to graduate school in physics, but I wanted to live in the real world and not be a student for a while first. I applied to Teach For America, and was placed in New York City. I taught four years of science at Junior High School 123 in the Bronx. After my second year of teaching, I bicycled from Seattle to New Hampshire in the summer. The next summer I went from San Francisco to Georgia. The following year I quit my job and rode from Seatle to Maine, down to Florida, over to California, and up to Alaska. I finished that trip in July of '99, and bought a motorcycle three weeks later.
I went back to New York and taught three years of math at IS 218 in Manhattan. I loved teaching in New York, because every school is in its own tight-knit community. I knew I'd leave someday, though, because I wanted to be able to climb a mountain or run in the woods after school. So in July of 2002 I sold my beloved motorcycle and moved to Sitka, Alaska.
	I love living in Alaska. Sitka is a town of 8000 people, with 14 miles of road and mountains everywhere you look. I love teaching and going home to run through the woods, or jog up a mountain, returning home in time for a late dinner. I picked up my camera again as soon as I moved here, and began taking photography more seriously. How could I not pick up a camera, living in Alaska? It is absolutely beautiful, rain or shine, warm or cold, clear or socked-in. Most of the images on this site were taken on hikes in the Sitka area, but I will always travel, and almost always carry a camera on my travels.
My motivation in photography has always been to share the beautiful places I see. As a child, photographs of mountains made me dream of far-off places. I hope that these images inspire those same thoughts in others.
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