The Early Years
As a child, I was always making something. Whether taking familiar-shaped sticks and rubber-banding them to my wrists to pretend they were Spider-Man web shooters, or recreating my favorite show characters out of construction paper, I was constantly creating.
I wanted to be an artist through most of my elementary years. Then, at some point in 3rd grade, my dad showed me how to build an electromagnet out of copper wire and an old piece of iron, coupled with an old Morse code key as the switch and a large 9V battery to power it.
All of a sudden, I wanted to be an electrical engineer. With my love of sci-fi, particularly Star Wars at the time, I was convinced that when I was in my 20s, I would be smart enough to create a lightsaber. The electrical engineer dream lasted through high school electronics class, where I built a radar gun out of old coffee cans and spare parts that had accumulated over the years. This changed after the teacher started teaching CompTIA A+ and I realized I knew much more about computers and operating systems than most students.
I realized I could make a lot of money by creating websites as Web 2.0 was rising quickly. However, I was never in love with the idea—I was just getting older and realized that money was going to be the major controlling factor in life, so I should try something I was already good at that was currently in high demand.
Through the years, I kept at it, developing a backend system to manage finances and supply for a small shaved ice business that I owned during my college years, using PHP and MySQL. I turned this in as a final project for a CS101 class I was enrolled in. While most students struggled and were expecting an HTML class, the professor was very current with the day's tech and wanted to teach what was used in the real world. At this point, I realized I had a knack for systems implementation and design. With the shaved ice being a seasonal business, I started looking for IT student jobs on campus.
I was offered a job as a student worker for the infrastructure team, and after several years, I was able to satisfy my aptitude for both creativity and technology by designing and implementing proof-of-concepts for systems like Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. That is, until I took a trip to India in 2006.
Photographic Awakening
During the trip to India, there was much to photograph. At the time, I had a 2.1-megapixel Canon Elph point-and-shoot camera. I thought I was pretty good, as I had dabbled in photography—I was my middle school newspaper's photographer, and in my early teens, I had a job photographing cars for a large used car dealership in the area to assist in online sales.
However, after taking a few snaps of the Taj Mahal from a viewpoint within the Red Fort, another tourist walked up and pointed out that there was an excellent star pattern in the brick, and that I should line the Taj through it and take a creative shot. At this point, I realized that I wasn't opening my eyes to what was right there and how many beautiful options for such things were present in the world that I was clearly ignoring. I was only 20 and had a lot of other things on my mind, so you can't really blame me. While this was a turning point for me, it didn't catapult my photography skills, but rather my attention to the world around me.
As the years passed, I got more advanced camera gear and did a lot of automotive photography, as I was super into cars and performance modifications. The Fast and the Furious was a big influence in the area I was living, and there was a large car scene in the city. However, I like to think I was more balanced, spending some weekends at the local road course volunteering as a grid marshal to get some free track instruction. I spent a lot of time photographing the racers, the cars, and the action, but nothing too creative. I would sometimes learn different Photoshop skills and create blends of my friends' cars with transparencies on the hoods so you could see the turbochargers underneath, for the online car forums. This was the mainstay of my photographic journey until the car scene started to both die and become too expensive to maintain with adult life and things like mortgages.
While I continued to take photos, they were mostly limited to my phone, capturing moments that had some sort of significance to me—the way afternoon light was bouncing off my living room floor and landing right on the face of a Buddha bust that I had next to my front door to remember the way I felt in the first house that I had owned, etc. Looking back on them now, I can remember how I felt at the time, but the phone cameras just didn't capture what I really wanted. The memories are there, though, and they carried forward into my photographic philosophies of today.
Astrophotography
Coming home from work day in and day out, trying to escape the cold winter in 2016, I decided to re-watch Carl Sagan's Cosmos, followed by the reboot with Neil deGrasse Tyson. This inspired me to purchase my first electronically controlled telescope that had a dedicated port for a DSLR (Celestron Nexstar 4SE). At first, I didn't really want to take any photographs—the DSLR part was just a nice-to-have. After the first few nights of observation, however, everything changed. I got so into photographing what I was seeing that I decided to get creative with technology again and started using a Raspberry Pi with a small camera attached to both control the movements of my telescope while live streaming the video feed of Jupiter or Mars to YouTube.
I was quickly hooked and ended up selling much of the equipment after researching and discovering better solutions to photograph galaxies and deep space objects. Still using the Raspberry Pi to help align my mount and track the objects as the earth moved, I was able to really grasp observing the deep universe. Luckily, I lived in an area that was fairly dark on the Bortle scale, so I was able to do this from the backyard night in and night out, even in the winter, as total remote control over the equipment made it so I didn't need to freeze for the photos. Alas, due to some other constraints that were out of my control, I ended up moving to Indianapolis, where I didn't have dark sky advantage. While I would still take my equipment out to rural areas in the warmer seasons, it became more of a chore to safely haul everything out into the country and make sure I always had enough battery power to sustain being out for several hours at a time. At this point, astrophotography took a back seat for the time being.
I still participate occasionally and have some goals of a cabin or tiny home out in the dark regions of the country, but for now, deep space and Milky Way astrophotography is reserved for long weekend road trips outside of LA County. If you would like to see some of my astro work, check out my
Astrobin gallery. They are very generous about hosting extremely large files that have hours worth of long exposure data.
Photographic Re-awakening
As astrophotography became a bit burdensome, I decided to take to the streets of Indianapolis to see what I could work on. Originally going in for some street and skyline landscapes, I started to get creative with longer exposures and moody shots. While learning some new skills and breaking into drone work, I started to see an opportunity to share my skills and my experiences through video. While hesitant at first, I started to create videos of my photo outings that I thought could help give other people insight and inspiration.
In early 2020, I found myself living in the middle of Los Angeles right before the great COVID pandemic. Having visited the city many times prior, I had a list of many places that I wanted to photograph and explore.
Then, as the world started to close off and the streets of LA became more empty than ever before, I slowly started to venture out as THERE WAS NO TRAFFIC! I was able to hit everything on my photo list with ease. I started scouring Google Earth to find the next great vista that nobody had seen yet and continued my landscape work. Then, as the world started to open back up and the streets started to slowly become lively, I found those moments again. The ones that handed out a feeling—whether it was just people drinking a beverage on a bench outside a coffee shop or some skateboarders on the beach—I started to see the blend of landscapes, human behavior, and fleeting moments. I started to focus on the interplay between the urban metropolis, architecture, light, and the presence in the different urban environments (beaches, city, mountains, etc.). I went all in, creating photos and video, which you can find under the portfolio section on the navigation bar on the left if you would like to see my work over the last half decade.