I never planned to be a photographer. My first career was in the U.S. Navy, where I flew as a Naval Flight Officer in P-3C Orion aircraft. Long patrols over the ocean taught me discipline, teamwork, and how to pay attention to details that matter. After leaving the service, I earned an MBA at Harvard Business School and started a couple of companies. Entrepreneurship sharpened my sense of how to build something from nothing, how to work with constraints, and how to keep moving forward. But even then, I felt a pull toward documenting the world, toward making sense of experience through images.

For more than twenty years I’ve been carrying a camera into places that are often hard to reach and harder to forget. I’ve worked at the South Pole, stood in the thin air of the Himalaya, and spent time at sea on ships and submarines. My work has also taken me into laboratories, boardrooms, and classrooms where the frontier of science and technology is being advanced. I’m drawn to people who are fully engaged with their craft...scientists at the bench, astronauts in training, leaders wrestling with difficult choices. What interests me is the intersection of the personal and the profound, the way a face or a gesture can reveal a life devoted to discovery.

Today I serve as Artist-in-Residence at the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, where I lead the New Heroes portrait project. The idea is simple: we know the names and faces of entertainers and athletes, but far fewer people can name a Nobel laureate or the inventor of a life-saving vaccine. Through this series I want to bring the public closer to the real heroes of our time, the scientists and innovators whose work touches every part of our lives. I try to photograph them as they are, surrounded by the tools of their trade, without stripping away the clutter that shows the reality of their work.

Along the way I’ve had the privilege of photographing people like the 14th Dalai Lama, Nobel laureates, astronauts, and engineers. My work has appeared widely, from magazines and books to album covers and even the screens people glance at each morning. I’ve exhibited internationally, collaborated with Leica on a national exhibition, and taught others through workshops like “Impactful Image” at the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. With Natural World Safaris, I guide groups into remote parts of the planet to help them come back with images that carry meaning, not just proof of travel. My next book, Polar, created with Pico Iyer, is an attempt to gather two decades of work in the high latitudes into one story.

Service and community remain important to me. I sit on the board of CatchLight, advise the Union of Concerned Scientists, and am a member of the Explorers Club, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Aspen Institute’s Henry Crown Fellowship. Each of these communities reinforces the idea that storytelling and science are not separate, but connected by a shared need to understand and to act.

I live in San Francisco with my dog Sadie, a Bernedoodle who makes sure I spend enough time outside and reminds me that joy is part of the work too. When I pick up the camera, I’m looking for more than composition or light. I want to capture the dignity of people doing real work, whether that’s designing a new instrument, charting the stars, or stitching together a line of code that might change the way we live. My goal is to make visible what often goes unseen: the human side of science, exploration, and creativity.