I think most event photographers came through weddings and then migrated — I actually came up through independent film. Since my early twenties me and my friends made shorts, from Berkeley to New York and back to LA, with me writing, producing, acting, and shooting, whatever the project needed.
One of those shorts we eventually expanded into a feature. Donald Cried premiered at SXSW in 2016 — I share the story credit with Kris and Jesse, I was one of its executive producers, it played New Directors/New Films at MoMA and Lincoln Center, and it picked up an Independent Spirit nomination for Best First Screenplay. I also worked with Rough House Pictures, releasing it nationally into theaters.
Before that around 2009 I bought my first DSLR — not for photography, for filmmaking. I wanted to actually shoot and not just rely on other guys. Fiddling around with it I picked up street photography on the side, for fun, never thinking it would be anything but practice for film. Then it turned into a blog: shooting strangers, waiting for the real moment instead of staging one.
One night I was photographing people at an outdoor bar in Williamsburg when a woman asked me why I was taking pictures. I gave her my blog URL. The next day she emailed and asked me to shoot her finance company's meeting — on Wall Street.
That one moment of curiosity turned into a career. I spent the next years photographing financial and corporate events across New York — investor conferences, summits, closed-door rooms where discretion isn't optional. In 2014 I moved to Los Angeles and broadened the work: brand activations, red carpets, galas, product launches, auto reveals, and private events — shot with the same documentary eye I brought to a film set and a trading floor.
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