You're the star.
I'm the sideman.

I was a touring sideman, the guitar player behind someone else's name.

A great sideman serves the song. You bring your own voice, but you shape it around the artist's vision, and when you do it right, the audience never thinks about you at all. They just feel the music.

Photography was always there alongside it. My uncle, a bluegrass guitarist and something like a second dad to me, handed me my first real camera in my early twenties. For years it was a hobby I loved and never took seriously.

Then I met Leslie. I was tired of the road and tired of the sideman's paycheck, so I started asking my musician friends if I could take their portraits. If the photos were good, they could use them. If not, we would never speak of it again. A few weeks later, a $50 Venmo landed in my account. I texted Leslie: I'm officially a professional photographer.

I started with weddings, then added senior portraits, headshots, and film. Today Leslie and I shoot weddings together, and I run a studio just outside Nashville.

My work looks the way it does because of the photographers and filmmakers I have always looked up to, people like Roger Deakins and Christopher Nolan. Intentional light, strong composition, images that feel like a still from a film.

I don't chase trends. I don't make every wedding look like every other wedding, and I don't think your photos should live and die on your phone. If your Aunt Susie could get the same shot on her phone, it doesn't count.

I taught music for over twenty years. I know what it means for a young person to have an adult outside their family look at them and say, I believe in you. I had a few of those people, and they changed my life. I try to be that for every senior who walks into my studio, and for every couple on the most overwhelming day of their lives.