My whole life I have been drawn to three things, creating art, building things with my hands, and adventure. As a child growing up on Vancouver Island, when I wasn’t in school, or doing the seemingly endless chores that my parents somehow always had waiting for me, I was out on adventures with my siblings, doing things that my parents still don’t need to know about. We would leave the house in the morning and not return until after dark some days. We would go out in the woods and build elaborate tree forts, or down to the ocean and build rafts and try to see how far we could make it. It’s probably a good thing that we knew nothing about tides, because if the tide was ever in our favour, who knows where we would have ended up, instead of just washed back up on the beach where we started. When I wasn’t out getting into mischief, I would spend my time drawing, painting, or wood carving, with vary degrees of success.
When I was in my teens, my family moved to the Creston Valley. It was in high school that my art teacher really helped me improve my creative skills. In my late teens I got my first film camera. I enjoyed taking what turned out to be a lot of terrible photographs, but I still had fun doing it, so I kept on filling rolls of film. The first year of high school I also started metalwork class, which as it turns out, I was reasonably good at, besides the fact that I come from a family of carpenters. I just had to be a little different I guess, and most people would probably say I still am. While still in high school, I began my welding apprenticeship, and after graduating I moved around the interior of BC for a few years while I completed my training and got my journeyman ticket. After getting my ticket I moved back to Creston, got married and started my own welding shop, Black Knight Welding and Fabrication. I also needed some adventure in my life, so I became a firefighter and continued fighting fires, doing vehicle extrication rescues and high angle rope rescue for the next 13 years. While operating my shop, I started to get back into art in the form of blacksmithing. I enjoyed the process of turning heavy metal into artistic forms, that didn’t seem like they were possible in such a rigid material, using incredible amounts of heat and force. The welding shop transformed into Black Knight Forge, as I did less and less welding, and more artistic blacksmithing, creating gates, handrails, furniture and sculptures. Throughout the years I kept taking photographs as a hobby just for myself, and steadily improved to the point where an increasing number of people would tell me that I should get my photographs out where other people could enjoy them. So after working in a metalworking shop for over 20 years, and my body telling me I needed a change of scenery, I closed up shop and started to turn my photography hobby into a career. So now that you are all up to speed, this is me getting my photographs out where people can enjoy them.
Currently with my photography, I strive to create one of a kind photographs, and not just take pictures. I enjoy being outdoors, quietly creating photographs of wildlife, landscapes, old abandoned vehicles and buildings before they disappear forever, or almost anything else that I find interesting enough to capture. In an effort to create unique art and satisfy my need to build things, I also like to experiment with staged macro photographs of water drop collisions and other high speed photography, to capture moments in time that are invisible to the naked eye. I like to use the camera shutter to freeze action that is too fast to see, or compress seconds or minutes into a single image with motion blur to show movement creating images that are impossible to see without a camera. Just like when I was a kid, I still spend a lot of time out exploring in the woods or paddling my kayak to new destinations looking for subjects to photograph. Along with my art, I also enjoy doing commercial work. I have done product photography for websites and advertising, as well as photographs for various tourism campaigns and numerous other printed media.
Thank you for taking the time to look at my work. If you would like to see more of my photography adventures and new weekly photographs, and a bit of the story behind them, then please click on the Facebook link at the top of the page, and please share with your friends and family.