The part nobody talks about
This isn't my first career. It's everything I've done rolled into one.
Most people know me for the camera. Weddings, portraits, commercial work. What most people don't know is that the camera was the front door, not the foundation.
Where it started
Before the camera, there were the ads.
The marketing brain came first. One of my earliest memories is painting with my dad, and what I painted wasn’t a cartoon. It was a Rice Krispies mascot. Not a Saturday-morning character, a character built to sell cereal. I didn’t have the words for it yet, but I was already pulled toward the stuff made to move people.
Billboards. Commercials. Print ads. I liked magazines for the ads, not the articles. That wiring never switched off. It just got sharper.
The camera came a little later. Photography started as a hobby in 8th grade. My high school didn’t offer a single art class, so I talked my way into representing the school at private-school academic competitions across Texas, and I placed 1st and 2nd against the state. I was shooting and winning before I knew the technical name for anything I was doing.
Then in 2001 I got my hands on Photoshop, PageMaker, and Illustrator, and that was it. Hooked. I went to school for graphic design, and that meant studying marketing, psychology, and advertising right alongside it. The only photography classes I’ve ever taken were part of that program, and they didn’t teach me to see. They handed me the vocabulary for what I was already doing. That was the aha moment.
And I never stopped studying. The obsession that started with magazines grew into advertising award annuals and a shelf of books by the marketers and advertisers I look up to. Then I spent almost seven years in corporate as the only graphic designer on the team. Building full campaigns, running social, handling brand collateral, working next to PR to push it all out the door. When you’re the only creative in the building, you learn every piece of how a brand actually runs.
Texas Monthly
Published ad campaign, design + photo · Altstadt Brewery
Global
Award-winning wedding photography
~7 yrs
Corporate, the only designer
How the camera took over
The side hustle grew louder than the day job.
Photography started as my escape. I loved design, but when I hit a creative block I’d pick up the camera to keep the brain moving.
It grew faster than I ever planned, and before long it was the business. The camera became the thing everyone saw, and the marketing brain never turned off.
Here’s what kept happening. Businesses came to me for photos or a logo refresh, and the deeper we talked, the clearer it got: new photos weren’t the real problem. They needed help with the brand, the message, the whole approach. I could see it because I’d been trained for it, since before I ever went pro. So I started digging. Researching their market, studying their competitors, building a full profile before I ever wrote a proposal. I was running mini audits before I knew what to call them.
Why this exists
Then I turned it on my own brand.
When photography went full-time, I finally took a hard look at my own business, and honestly, it was rough. Last-minute posts, thrown-together flyers, campaigns built the night before. No system. Just hustle and hope.
Here’s the thing: I had the training. I’d studied this for years. So I did the uncomfortable part and used it on myself. Same lens I put on your brand, on mine first. I found the gaps, built the systems, and I’m still building. I read the books and I run the plays, on my own business before yours.
That’s how I ended up here. Not someone who has it all figured out, but someone who’s been in the exact mess you might be in and did something about it.
What you're actually getting
A real diagnostic from someone who's sat in every seat this work requires.
Design, advertising, photography, brand strategy. Work that has run as a published campaign in Texas Monthly, won on a global stage, and shaped brands from across Texas to Pittsburgh and beyond. I'm not a junior marketer running a checklist, and I'm not selling you a system I don't run myself. The audit is where it starts. The honest version of where your brand stands, and the first move toward fixing it.