Photography has been an obsession since I was able to hold a camera, an obsession that was always just out of reach. When I was younger, my family treated it as if they were any American family, photographs were a way to document events, vacations, and holidays. My mother always kept her Nikon FG at arms distance from me, at the time it seemed as though she feared I would break it, however I now think she was trying to keep me from falling into the life of a photographer. It was the mission of my family to try and steer me into the path of a normal human being, a mission that ultimately was a failure. In the beginning I attempted to work as an IT professional, a position that made me miserable from day one. Shortly after dismissing the IT world, melding the technical and artistic was the next logical progression, so I attempted a career in graphic design. Skip ahead through four years of freelance graphic design, freelance art direction, grand format prepress, and grand format printing I still was stuck in a rut mentally, not in love with what I did for a living. During the graphic design era I had accepted the preachings of the people around me, and didn't think much of photography.
At the release of the original Canon Digital Rebel, I started playing with photography again. At the time, I was an avid automotive enthusiast, and simply started shooting cars. Three months later I started looking for car magazine contact info, and much to my dismay, it is quite a challenge to find contact information for editorial offices in the automotive industry. Finally I found the contact for one of my favorite magazines, Modified. Within six months, I had a feature photo spread and article published in a national magazine. Six months following the first feature article, my first cover hit news stands.
One day the following spring, modified mustangs called with an emergency, their normal "editor at large" could not make it to an event so they needed to send a freelancer, something rarely done in automotive editorial. After the event there were many compliments, and I became the primary event photographer for Modified Mustangs, setting a precedent in the industry as a traveling freelance photographer. After several years as a freelance automotive editorial photographer, Primedia purchased Verticalscope Inc. (Modified, Modified Luxury & exotics, Modified Mustangs) and sold the entire Primedia automotive group to Source Interlink within months. Source Interlink broke apart the Modified group, shut down two of the titles, and cut the pages of the third by 50%. My biggest client was gone. I continued to try and survive with automotive editorial for approximately six months, but the work was sporadic and unreliable. Having started to teach myself studio lighting half way through my career as an automotive freelancer, I decided to focus on developing my fashion and portrait talents, pursuing my original dream of becoming a fashion photographer. As a hobby, I started shooting tattoo portraits, which led to a few tattoo magazine covers, one of which was an italian tattoo magazine bringing my published status to international. In 2008, I was a semi finalist in the Hasselblad Masters competition, and through technical issue with the masters website, I have not been able to enter since. Around the same time, I was approached by Ursula of Switzerland to do their catalog shoots. Being friends with all of the other photographers that bid on the job, I knew what the bids were and decided to do the honorable thing, bid higher than everyone else (by 25%) to assure I was not competing unfairly with my friends. Ursula chose me regardless of the higher price tag.

All of the above was achieved from a small town outside of Albany, NY, with no capital, amature models, amature make up artists and a minimal equipment set.