During those initial years of pursuing imagery, I developed a keen sense of people-observation, but along the way I hit a roadblock.
Largely because of my working environment, the more I looked, the more ugliness I saw in people. I started avoiding personal relationships, and I grew more and more critical of people I saw working everyday jobs. As my anti-social tendencies grew, I looked down on people who were married or had kids as failures. I felt surrounded by people who had been roped into marriage and had kids by default, and few of them ever smiled.
In 2001, my passion for photography hit an all-time low. The years on ships had pummeled my confidence and excitement into something dark and unrecognizable, and the thought of making a living as a photographer fell far away. I gave up on my photographic dream and sold all my camera bodies and lenses. A week later I escaped to India for the third time, and I swore to my friends and parents that I would never get married or have kids.
Less than a year later, in 2002, I unexpectedly met my wife on a beach in Thailand. I had been relaxing in a hammock for several weeks at a hidden beach on Koh Lanta, and she rocked my world like no other. We were married just four months later in an 11th-century stone church a few hours outside of London, and I still had such a critical view of wedding photography that instead of hiring someone to shoot our wedding, I bought a 4MP digital Sony P+S and asked my wife’s cousin to take a few shots.
I deeply regret that now.
For the first four years of marriage we traveled and worked a few different jobs and it wasn’t until 2006 that we even considered having children. That year my wife was pregnant, and unwilling to take a regular, uncreative job, I took a huge risk and decided to try my hand at wedding photography…
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In my early adult years, I didn’t know enough about myself or about life to make very many good decisions. When I bought my first SLR, it was 1997 and Andre Agassi was still advertising for Canon. I bought a Rebel G with a 28-80mm kit lens, and shot negative film for a few months.
And I immediately fell in love with creating images. A few months later I upgraded to a Nikon D90s with faster lenses and slide film. I studied the technical and compositional side of photography furiously and became deeply inspired by nature and wildlife artists such as Galen Rowell, Courtney Milne and Art Wolfe. My work focused on landscapes and travel, and though I wasn’t making any money with photography, I really loved it. To pay for the high expense of slides and processing, I worked at throwaway jobs, all the while dreaming of the day my first photography book would be published and I would became a National Geographic photographer.
While my love of personal photography grew, so did my frustration for the generic jobs I took on. I worked intermittently on cruise ships for a few years and I was able to save enough money in one six-month contract to travel for six months. When I traveled, I carried my camera everywhere, but when I came back to work, I was miserable.
Six months on a cruise ship can be a long time. Most crew are generally on ships to escape something back home (I was avoiding the mere scent of being locked into paying rent and having a low-paying job), cabins are tiny, work hours are long, and passengers (PAX) tend to lose about 40 IQ points when they board a ship. Most PAX go into a state of apathetic relaxation and ask the same questions every day, every week, and as my contract dragged, I grew unhappier and more judgmental of my co-workers and customers. I cherished my free time with my camera in various ports and dreaded going back to my floating job. All I wanted to do was make great images…
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