About the Artist

Hello and thanks for visiting my site.  I'm a professional phtographer and jack-of-all-trades media person with some light engineering and machining skills thrown in, and a passing interest in electronics and coding.

I hope you enjoy my photos as much as I enjoyed taking them, along with all the other content on this site.

If you would like to get ahold of me, drop me an email using the contact form.  You'll get an authentication email to verify your identity the first time you email.  Be sure to check your spam folder if you don't get the initial email.

Bio

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area with background in broadcast engineering, television production and post-production.  My natural affinity for computers caused me to shift into computer animation, and by 1995 I was doing that full time as the lead animator for a post-production facility in the South Bay. In 1999 I went to work for Digital Domain in Los Angeles specializing in F/X animation (photo-realistic 3D cars, that sort of thing).  After about a year I realized that it was not ultimately what I wanted to do, so I headed back north to join a friend at a television-related startup that failed spectacularly during the original dot-com boom.

In 2001 I got a call from some old clients down in the desert who were starting up a new rocket company.  I joined them as a very early employee of XCOR Aerospace.  I also had some side adventures along the way, having a front row seat for the SpaceShipOne X-Prize flights and working with Burt and Tonya Rutan on the Rocketboosters, which raised nearly half a million dollars for local charities by selling SpaceShipOne related merchandise.

During the XCOR era I became a professional photographer, covering both Aerospace and other genres in my spare time.  My aerospace photos are my most widely published by far, and I have had a number of railroad and live steam images in print as well.  I enjoy travel and nature photography and am accomplished with studio photography.

Along the way I have had several successful home mail-order businesses and co-owned a cafe / art gallery that was still cheaper in the end than obtaining an MBA from Stanford.

Running a miniature steam locomotive

Since I was young, I was bitten by the steam railroading bug.  I am a huge fan of steam locomotives big and small.  I have driven several full sized steam locomotives and my father and I have built one live steam locomotive from scratch and restored another from the ground up, not to mention countless scale railroad car projects to go with them.  Through these projects I learned machining and fabtrication, which helped me wiht my Aerospace related engineering projects.  I am a fan of scale steam and park trains, and love to photograph steam engines in winter snow.

Today I am a freelance photographer, model builder and media producer.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - Robert Heinlein

 Thanks for stopping by!

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