This isn't a résumé. It's a repository of the things that have my attention: what I cook, where I point the camera, the bottles worth keeping, and the people I come home to.
The reason for everything that follows. Loud dinners, small hands, and the people who turn a house into the place I actually want to be.
I don't shoot as much to show other people as to show myself.
Light through a kitchen window. A stranger caught mid-laugh. The ten quiet seconds before anyone notices the camera. I keep the ones that feel like being there, not the ones that look impressive.
I cook because I love to eat.
Basil from the porch, garlic on my fingers for days, and a standing argument about whether the crust is the best part. (It is.) Every good meal is really just an excuse to sit down and have another.
The first quiet ritual of the day.
Beans weighed, water just off the boil, and the slow pour that wakes the house before anyone else does. I'm not chasing the perfect cup so much as the ten minutes it takes to make one.
A slow shelf, built one bottle at a time.
I'm less interested in the rare and more in the pour you reach for on an ordinary Tuesday. Neat, no rush, and good company that's in no hurry to leave.
What I'm reading says more about me than what I've done.
Steinbeck one week, Hemingway the next, a fat Michener saga when I want to disappear for a month. The stack on my nightstand never quite agrees with itself: history beside fiction beside whatever caught my eye at the shop. Dog-eared paperbacks, a few too many left unfinished, and the handful I re-read every year because they feel like old friends who always know what to say.
A house is never quiet here.
A standing commitment to grunge that never quite let go, the blues when the day calls for it, and whatever indie playlist I've worn out this month. Dancing with Heather in the kitchen, and listening to Miles Davis out in the garage while the rain comes down. Ask me what's playing and I'll always have an answer.
I travel to get a little lost on purpose.
Less itinerary, more wrong turns. The meal you didn't plan, the street that wasn't on the map, the small hotel whose name I can never remember but whose breakfast I never forget.
I come home with too many photographs and a notebook of places I swear I'll go back to. Some I do. The list, mercifully, never gets shorter.