Bio

While photography has been my passion since I was about 15 years old, I have come to it as a profession rather late and by a circuitous route. I grew up on the Precambrian Shield of rural Ontario and my photography was initially inspired by the beauty I found in the fields and the woodlands there. However, it is only after having meandered through an under graduate degree in Biology, seven years in the RCMP, and an arts thesis in Theology that I have attempted as profession that which has been recreation all these years. I currently live in Vancouver and am blessed with a wife and two small daughters.

On Albums and Objectives

I love to use my photographic abilities to record beauty so that others may share in what I see. I also love to use my skill with a camera to narrate events, but even more to narrate relationships. I am particularly excited when I am commissioned to create a series of images or an album. Whether it is a wedding, or a day in the life of a rider and her horse, or a family event, it is particularly satisfying to produce a significant number of meaningful images and then compose them – ideally into an album. Good album design is a choreography of images into what will, in time, become a repository for memory and the vehicle by which even more memories are recalled. Not merely memories of appearances, but memories of relationships and of stories. A good album is a work of art and as such is more than the sum of its parts. Consequently I am very glad to be able to provide my clients with AsukaBook Albums. These albums are a pleasure to hold and to view. They are both classy and contemporary and they allow me to create unique double page layouts for every album I do. They allow me to do what I like to call “narrative photography.”

On Rider & Horse photography.

I grew up around horses. My grandfather ran a western style children’s camp which at one point had a herd of about 125 registered Quarter Horses. During my high school years I owned and trained my own horse and have missed him ever since I went to university. I mention this because, unless you are a horse person, you can have no real appreciation for the relationship between a horse and it’s rider. It is unique among all the human-animal relationships on the planet with the possible exception of the shepherd and his sheep dog. For the rider, the horse is neither pet nor tool. Their partnership is almost spiritual, for riding is a collaborative effort based on love and trust which must achieve a harmony of two bodies and two wills in order to become that grace in motion which so many of us admire. For this reason my approach to equestrian photography is not event or show driven. To capture the relationship between rider and horse on film requires getting to know both subjects and following them through their daily routines and interactions. It is in the unguarded moments that glimpses of that relationship can be captured by the camera. Telling the story of that relationship is what I strive to do.