My artistic journey began when I was seven years old, with a little Casio keyboard I found under my older brother’s bed. It was the kind of keyboard with bright orange buttons and groovy demo beats pre-programmed. This discovery eventually led to piano lessons, which led to guitar lessons, which both led to musical studies at a small university in central Ohio. Four grueling semesters of music theory prompted me to change my major to International Studies. It was around this time that I picked up a well-used Pentax K1000 35mm camera, which accompanied me on studies abroad in Belize and South Africa. I quickly discovered the power of photography as I used the lens to document and process my experiences in these places.

Today my lens is focused on the community and region where I now live, attempting to honor the stories and capture the strong sense of place found in the Allegheny Highlands of West Virginia.

In the years since I first picked up a camera, my engagement with photography has shifted from documentary to expressive—less “I am seeing this,” and more “This is what it feels like to see this.”

While I have enjoyed producing digital photographic work for publication for nearly a decade, I am also a practitioner of traditional black-and-white film photography. For me, producing black-and-white prints in my darkroom is a welcome departure from digital image making with silicon and electrons. I enjoy being engaged in complete control of each facet of the photographic process: from capturing images with fully manual, vintage cameras to processing the resulting film and prints. I find the alchemy of the darkroom blends a sense of meditation with the photographic process—something I find increasingly elusive in a world saturated with digital technology and the expectation of instantaneous results.

Most recently, my film and darkroom work led to an interest in one of the very earliest photographic processes: the wet-plate collodion process of the mid 19th Century. In the summer of 2011, with help from a grant from the West Virginia Division of Culture and History’s Commission on the Arts, I had the opportunity to study with one of the foremost wet-plate photographers of our time, John Coffer.

I see wet-plate photography as a wonderful means to engage with black-and-white image-making in a new and challenging way. In stark contrast to my photojournalistic and commercial work, mostly done in digital and on deadline, wet-plate photography demands that the practitioner slow down—even more so than working in the darkroom. You must focus the image on the camera’s ground glass, prepare and sensitize the plate in your portable darkroom, load the plate in the camera, make the exposure, and take the plate back to the portable darkroom for developing. One image at a time. No clicking off multiple exposures in a fraction of a second. To me, it’s modern photography’s equivalent of the Slow Food Movement.

My photographs appear regularly in the pages of The Pocahontas Times, where I work as the newspaper’s Digital Media Manager, as well as a writer and photographer. My work has also appeared in The Sun Magazine, The Washington City Paper, Greenbrier Valley Quarterly, and the book The Old Man of the Mountain: Eldridge McComb. I was also a founding member of the Pocahontas County Artisan Cooperative Gallery and have exhibited in juried events at the Randolph Community Arts Center in Elkins and the West Virginia Cultural Center in Charleston. A solo exhibit, Elemental Photography: Light, Silver, Iron—featuring a selection of recent tintypes, alumitypes and gelatin silver prints—is currently on display in the Old Stone Room Gallery of Carnegie Hall, in Lewisburg, West Virginia, through January 2012.