About

My first real assignment was the high school yearbook. The teacher running it told me I had an eye and should keep at it, and then I put the camera down for the better part of a decade.

Yellowknife is what picked it back up. On a clear night the aurora is simply there, overhead, and at the time no phone could record any of it — they still have trouble. I wanted the people back home to see it properly. That is the entire reason I bought a DSLR, and the reason I bothered to learn how to use one.

I moved north in 2016 for work in the public service and have been up here since — Yellowknife first, Whitehorse now. The photography grew out of the place rather than the other way around.

Air Tindi's planes parked under a green sky at Cassidy Point. The Mackenzie River coming apart in the spring melt. Wood bison standing in the road near Liard like they owned it, which they did. Grizzlies and moose in South Kluane on the same June morning.

Landscapes and aurora, mostly — the aurora on nights when it's not minus fucking cold, which rules out more of the calendar than you'd hope.

With wildlife it's the animals that know I'm there and are curious about it rather than bothered by it. There's a moment where they stop and look straight down the lens, and that's the frame I'm waiting for. I shoot from a distance that leaves the animal's day undisturbed — a long lens is a courtesy as much as a tool.

At live events I'd rather stand back than crowd the stage, and wait for the moment where the performer and the person are the same thing.

Nothing exotic. The body has been to places it wasn't rated for and kept working, which is all I ask of it.