I built my chops the old-fashioned way shooting feature-length assignments around the world for National Geographic Magazine. The stories varied but the mandate was always the same: work with every kind of person under any kind of condition and create timeless yet contemporary images for a client with the highest visual standards on earth.

All of my work as a photographer and filmmaker explores big questions through intimate stories about real people. Learning from people who inhabit different worlds and realities never gets old. The experience keeps my mind open and serves as a constant reminder that people are never quite what you think they’re going to be.

Filmmaking allows me to use a different set of tools to tell the same kinds of stories I have always told as a photographer. Working with moving images, sound, score, editing, and sequences of time is the opposite of trying to freeze a single moment in time. In this sense, filmmaking picks up where photography leaves off. BOUNCE, the first feature documentary I co-produced and DP’d, premiered at SXSW. I’m equally comfortable making films as I am making still photographs.

My experience as a National Geographic photographer and Filmmaker informs my commercial work. Whether it’s for big companies like Apple and Sony or small non-profits like Caringbridge, I specialize in telling stories about real people. The best stories inspire us to be part of something bigger. To make connections. To take action. I believe real-world well-told stories do this in a way nothing else can.

At home, I live with my wife and two children in a 220-year-old farmhouse and work out of a post and beam barn on two beautiful acres just outside of Portland, Maine, a place that has always triggered an instinctual sense of belonging in me. My family, my home, and Maine ground me and fuel the boundless sense of possibility and hope I bring to my work.

I continually marvel at how endless the opportunities are. Now is the time to start exploring them.