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 small things 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 take photos to show things to people, I take photos to show things to 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.
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.
An eclectic shuffle that ignores genre entirely: Fountains of Wayne straight into Ice Cube, a deep bench of Nashville country for days on the lake, and grunge still turned up loud in the garage. The blues saved for a campfire under the stars, and dancing with Heather in the kitchen when dinner runs late. 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.