When I look back at my earliest years as a photographer, I see a young man obsessed with precision, control, and perfection. I wanted to master every dial, every knob, every ratio of light to shadow. And I tried. God, did I try.
My first official office space wasn’t in some high-rise or agency building—it was a corner inside the Photographic Center on Swiss Avenue in Dallas, Texas. It was part school, part community hub, and part creative playground. And I was right in the middle of it. My rent included full access to a commercial-grade darkroom and a fully outfitted studio with strobes, softboxes, seamless backdrops—the works.
It was heaven. Or at least it felt like it.
In those early days, I spent hours—and I mean hours—testing light setups, switching modifiers, adjusting angles by mere inches. The studio became my lab. Models came in—some aspiring, some professional—and I learned to speak the language of portraiture. Not just aperture and shutter speed. I’m talking about the real language: body language, eye contact, energy. I learned how to make people feel something in front of a camera. Or more importantly, I learned how to get out of the way and let people be something in front of a camera.
There’s no shortcut to that kind of learning. No preset. No plug-in.
It was a grind. But it was mine.
Eventually, as my confidence grew, I stepped outside the confines of that studio. I swapped strobes for sunlight, seamless backdrops for alleyways and café tables. The moment I started shooting natural light portraits outdoors, something in me cracked open.
The world—uncontrolled, unpredictable, and unscripted—was a better teacher than anything I had ever known.
And yet, the discipline I learned inside those four studio walls never left me. Even today, with an iPhone in my hand and a subject on a street corner, I still see like a studio shooter. I still think in terms of light direction, shape, color harmony, and design flow. But now I work faster, looser, and with more instinct. What was once rigid has become fluid. What was once technique has become intuition.
Back in the day, I built up a reputation for model portfolios. It was my bread and butter. I could knock out six looks in an afternoon and have prints ready by the weekend. But my big break came when I shifted into shooting lifestyle photography for stock libraries. This was during the golden age of stock, when clients craved authentic, ethnically diverse, emotionally engaging imagery—images that felt real but still beautiful.
I was one of a dozen heavy-hitting lifestyle shooters in the global market. And I lived for it. It was great. And I made a respectable living at it.
Home. Family. Healthcare. Education. Workplaces. Travel. All with people at the center of the frame—laughing, crying, connecting, living. We were tasked with capturing life as it was, but elevated. It was fiction masquerading as documentary. Or maybe the other way around.
Whatever it was, it trained me to see people—not just pose them. I got good at directing without directing. Suggesting without insisting. I could show up on set and in five minutes tell you who would shine in front of the camera, who needed space, and who just needed someone to believe in them for a few minutes. It was a sixth sense I earned through repetition, failure, and showing up day after day.
Decades later, all of it—the darkroom, the strobes, the model portfolios, the lifestyle sets—it’s in my blood. It’s who I am. I carry that legacy with me every time I open the Camera app.
Yes, I said Camera app.
Because now, I shoot exclusively on iPhones. And I apply the same damn principles I learned back then. Light is still light. Expression is still expression. Whether you shoot it on a Phase One, a Canon, or an iPhone 16 Pro Max.
I’m often asked how I get such rich, emotional portraits on a phone camera. People assume it’s the gear. Maybe a special lens. Or a secret app.
But here’s the truth:
What makes a portrait powerful isn’t pixels. It’s presence.
You can have all the megapixels in the world, but if your subject doesn’t trust you, doesn’t feel safe, doesn’t feel seen—you’ve got nothing. The shot dies before it ever lived.
The sacred exchange in portraiture isn’t technical—it’s human. It’s a person saying, “Here I am. Will you take care of this?” And your answer, as the photographer, has to be, “Yes. I see you. I’ve got you.”
I don’t flinch when someone looks directly into my lens and gives me a raw piece of their truth. I welcome it. I know what to do with it.
And you don’t need a 5-light setup or $10K worth of glass to honor that gift. You just need a camera you know, a heart that listens, and an eye that’s learned to wait.
iPhone portraiture may look casual on the surface, but the best of it is built on layers of knowledge and lived experience. I don’t need a studio anymore. I don’t need the gear truck. I don’t need a stylist or a shoot coordinator. I just need a good subject, some decent light, and about three minutes of trust.
These days, I can walk up to a stranger on the street, ask to make their portrait, and in under ten frames, walk away with something that moves me. Something real.
And that’s what I mean when I say the studio taught me, but the streets freed me.
The studio taught me how light works.
The streets taught me what light feels like.
The studio taught me how to pose.
The streets taught me how to wait.
The studio taught me to see shapes.
The streets taught me to see stories.
One isn’t better than the other. One is the foundation. The other is the freedom.
That’s the journey.
That’s the evolution.
And that’s why, today, I shoot the way I do—with purpose, presence, and a deep reverence for the people who allow me to photograph them.
Because whether it’s a model in a million-dollar studio or a grandmother on a park bench, the goal is the same:
To witness. To honor. To frame something human.
And if I do it right?
They’ll see themselves in a way they’ve never seen before.
That’s portraiture.
That’s the sacred gift.
And I’ll never take it for granted.
Click.
