About Michael
I am first a documentary photographer. My approach is to be fun and unobtrusive, never directing - to be a witness to the day, because the best moments are those unscripted.
My personal work includes portraitizing the highways and beauty of California. I love my state, particularly the north, and make several roadtrips each year in my well-loved car.
I’ve also started a portrait series on honesty. The term honesty is subjective - to me, these pictures are the stories of people, not just a record of appearance but a recording of their relations to life and the camera. Some are friends, some are family, and some never knew a lens was pointed their direction, but all are what, to me, display the human trait of honesty.
The forests of New England are where I began life, but California is my home. I was also a martial arts instructor for ten years, and create balance for my photography by writing novels, studying history, and drinking a lot of espresso.
A client once described me as her Zen photographer. I liked that.
I’m passionate about documenting weddings. The individual signatures of each day never cease to surprise me, and I wake up excited on those Saturdays to find out what the day holds to be discovered.
Choosing a photographer is a more personal decision than other parts of the wedding, because whomever you choose will be present with you through all the major events of the day. Here’s a little more about me.
Why weddings? People ask me this sometimes, why of all the different subjects to photograph, why do I choose weddings? A lot of photographers try their hand at weddings, and most ultimately choose a different field. Even some highly successful wedding photographers leave the field after a few years. You have to love it. A wedding is a key event in a person’s life, a bookmark by which to remember the years. It’s important. The best stories told - in books, movies, art - are about the extraordinary times of everyday people, and that’s my job too. I tell my clients’ stories. And I love it.
What’s this about writing books? Yup, I write novels. It’s my hobby. I’m not published and not concerned if I ever do become; I already have a great job. Two finished so far - one about a young man who joins a family by bringing home their estranged mother, and the other about a brilliant and sheltered teen escaping isolation to be raised by her older sister. Also written scads of screenplays and directed several of them. Writing and photography came to me at the same time, which is why my focus at weddings is so much on the storytelling quality of the photographs.
Top fives? Big High Fidelity fan, so here goes. Top five books: For Whom The Bell Tolls by Hemingway, Catcher In The Rye by Salinger, In Dubious Battle by Steinbeck, On The Road by Kerouac, The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald (only because of that last page).
Top five albums: Before These Crowded Streets by The Dave Matthews Band, At War With The Mystics by The Flaming Lips, The Wall Live by Pink Floyd, Charles Mingus’s Finest Hour, The Crane Wife by The Decembrists.
Top five movies: Apocalypse Now, Garden State, Into The Wild, Rent, and Sideways. For anyone who wants to know about that last one, why I’d pick such a sad, meager little movie, I have a definite reason. Just ask.
Top five favorite places in California: The beach at Trinidad, downtown Monterey, Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, the 101 Highway east of Santa Barbara, and a little park in suburban San Diego I don’t tell people about, because I don’t want it to be discovered.
Random facts? 1) I’ve always loved roadtrips, being on the road, the freedom of it. Only a short time ago my parents told me that I was actually conceived on the road, while they were moving from San Diego to Vermont shortly after marrying.
2) Like our president, I’m left-handed.
3) I only see out of one eye, my right eye. Being left-handed, this makes me awful at basketball, but it lets me focus more easily when shooting a camera. Unlike other photographers, I keep both eyes open while photographing. I don’t do the camera squint.
4) My maternal family lineage comes from British merchants in the Ottoman Empire. They were so integral to the nation’s economy that the Turks let them stay until the family split up and settled on five different continents. We found a family picture from 1901, and every single one of them had my ears.
5) I met Paul Giamatti in the literature section of a used book store. Nice guy.
My favorite wedding story? My parents. It’s the cutest thing in the world. They met on a European tour, and were engaged two weeks later. The leader of the tour was specifically trying to set them up, and so no other young people were even invited to come. For the rest of the trip across Europe they were followed around by a crowd of giggling grandmothers. And they still love each other today. My father will walk through a crowd of people and ask, “Has anyone seen my bride?”
Ironically, on the day of the wedding their photographer never showed up. My uncle, himself a commercial photographer, provided the only pictures I have of the day, shot on the same Nikon which he’d given my father to use on the European tour.