I didn’t start with portraits. I started on the street.
Long before I was photographing families along the Space Coast, I was a kid from South Florida with a camera, wandering city sidewalks and waiting. Street photography is mostly waiting. You can’t pose a stranger crossing an intersection or ask the afternoon light to soften — you learn to watch a moment build and trust yourself to catch it the second it arrives.
That patience is the most important thing I ever learned, and it’s the reason my portraits look the way they do.
When you photograph strangers, you stop trying to control people. You start paying attention to them instead. The way someone laughs a half-second after the joke. The way a dad rests his hand on his kid’s shoulder without thinking about it. The quiet look between two people who forgot the camera was there. Those are the frames I’m always chasing — not the posed smile, but the real thing that happens right before or right after it.
A lot of portrait photography tries to manufacture emotion. I’ve never been interested in that. I’d rather give you room to be yourself and stay ready for the honest moments, because those are the ones you’ll actually want to keep.
Here on the Space Coast, that approach feels right at home. We’ve got long stretches of quiet beach in Melbourne and Indialantic, soft evening light coming off the water, and a slower pace that lets people relax. I’m not going to spend our whole session barking poses at you. I’ll set us up somewhere beautiful, give you a few gentle things to do, and then mostly watch — the same way I learned to watch on those city streets years ago.
It means your gallery ends up looking like you. Not a stiff, holding-our-breath version of your family, but the way you actually are together. The teasing. The closeness. The little in-between moments that you’ll look back on in ten years and remember exactly how they felt.
That’s the whole reason I fell in love with photography in the first place. It was never about perfect. It was about true.
If you’re somewhere on the Space Coast — Melbourne, Palm Bay, Viera, Cocoa Beach, Rockledge — and you’ve been thinking about portraits that feel like you, I’d love to hear from you. No pressure, no script. Just reach out and tell me a little about who you want to remember and where you are in life right now. We’ll take it from there.