My name is Jim and I am a American Firefighter and Photographer who loves to travel!
My name is Jim and I am a American Firefighter and Photographer who loves to travel!
Over 20 years ago my young daughter enrolled in ballet lessons and began performing at our local theater.
I was the stereotypical proud dad, way before iPhones, with a small point and shoot camera trying to capturing my precious daughter’s amazing dancing, and the pictures came out terrible, a bright blob on a dark stage with no detail.
The contrast between watching her live and what I could capture to show the family was miles away, and this frustration and failure inspired me to dive into the art and science of photography.
I thought buying a nice camera would solve all my problems. Boy was I wrong; my photos were still not good. A chef can buy the best oven, but if he keeps burning dinner, the food is inedible regardless of the fancy oven.
So, I embraced this problem with all my might, while balancing a young family, a full time career as a Firefighter in my local town of Tracy, California. It was constant failure for a while, and I cringed on the inside every time I would need to shoot a new event, as I knew most pictures would come out blurry and unusable. But I never gave up and over the years, learning, practicing, reading books, watching training videos on YouTube, I finally began to produce good results, so much so that fellow parents would ask me to also capture their kid’s dance recitals, which I was happy to do. As time passed by, my skill level increase and my desire to start shooting landscapes came about. I found myself with a camera on all family trips and eventually started to travel for the purpose of photography. So far in the past few years, I have traveled to Iceland, Japan, Uganda and the list will be growing larger over the coming years.