When I studied photojournalism at university, my favourites were black-and-white images that told a story. However, assignments pushed me to learn to photograph landscapes and dislike formal shots of people. I developed an infatuation with rusted machinery and graffiti, which seem to dominate many of my shoots.

After graduation, I moved back to Vancouver, BC, for a few years. I landed a job teaching in a logging camp on the north end of Vancouver Island, and a new world of nature photography opened up for me. As a bonus, the high school already had a darkroom built into the back of the science lab!

I’m presently living in Royston, BC, and I’m exploring a new area of the Island, as well as travelling in Canada and Europe. I've always used Nikon cameras and still have my F3 on standby with black and white film in the fridge... I'm presently shooting a Nikon Z5 mirrorless camera and have reluctantly sold off many of my F-mount lenses.

We're just a short walk to the beach on Baynes Sound, a small part of the Salish Sea, located between Denman Island and Vancouver Island. Like so many other areas, climate change has started to manifest itself with acidification of the waters, affecting the local shellfish industry. Added to that mix is pollution from septic fields, old industrial sites and waste from the shellfish industry. And not too far away there’s the threat of the TMX pipeline and the BC NDP's LNG dreams, all affecting the local environment and fishery. On an earlier trip to the Great Bear Rainforest, I met a group of young First Nation Guardians working on taking samples from the spawning salmon to create a DNA library... we were standing on an estuary surrounded by broken skeletons of adult salmon. One of the Guardians pointed out that the fish were broken, and we had to work to bring back the runs.