Portrait shot, taken at age 12 on my Kodak Disc camera, my first camera. Aunt Ann and My mom.
I shoot for the energy of the moment.
I'm intimately aware of color, tuned in to shifts and distinctions in it that a lot of people don't register. It's part of why color work, grading, matching, correction, is where I do some of my strongest editing.
With portraits, I engage the person directly rather than just pointing a camera at them. I'm after a natural gesture, something that comes from who they actually are, not a held pose.
I've worked with Photoshop off and on since 1997, and in recent years that's turned into regular, hands-on retouching and compositing work. On composite pieces specifically, I don't treat a background swap as a simple cutout. I rebuild the color temperature and light direction on the subject to match each new scene, so the result reads as a real photograph, not something pasted on.
I got my first camera at 8, a Kodak Disc, for Christmas. By 12, on a school field trip meant for the Blue Bell ice cream factory, I was more interested in the bluebonnet field along the way, and spent the whole trip photographing flowers instead. I work by feeling the energy of a scene or a person, then shooting persistently until I've caught it. I keep taking pictures until the image in front of me matches what I felt.
Based in Liberty County, on the Trinity River.
