I design the day, I run it,
and then I keep it

How this started

A camera in 1999, and an illness in 2023

My grandmother gave me a film camera when I was nine. I became the one handed the camera at every gathering, long before I understood why. Video came at thirteen, then game commercials in a rented studio at sixteen, which taught me light the only way it can be learned, by failing at it until I stopped.

The stills arrived in 2013. Ottawa in January, minus twenty, a camera I had owned for a week. Video moves through time. A photograph stops it. I wanted to stop it.

In 2014 a friend asked me to photograph her wedding. I said yes before I knew whether I was ready. I shot 480 frames and delivered 380. She cried. That settled the next decade.

Two hundred and forty weddings later I knew exactly what I was doing, and was much less sure I still wanted to. In 2023 a fibromyalgia diagnosis took the choice away and stopped me for months. That is a particular kind of difficult for someone who sees in frames. It also made me quieter, and considerably more spiritual, and I started noticing things I had been moving too fast to see.

When I came back the work had changed under me. A wedding, staged the way the industry stages it, is a performance. An audience to face, a running order to hit, a show to land on time. I had photographed that show for twelve years and photographed it well. Standing at the edge of somebody else's production was no longer enough.

So I stopped shooting weddings and gave all of it to elopements. Not as a photographer for hire. I write the day around the two of you, build every piece of it, run it on the ground, and then photograph and film it myself. An elopement is a union in the cosmos, not a contract signed inside the concrete prisons we call wedding halls. Two people under the sun and the moon, in a place that means something, with nobody to perform for. The photographs are the record of it.

“The photographs exist to outlast the photographer.”

The numbers behind me are the wedding years. They are the foundation everything since is built on, not the offering.