Professional Insights

From the very beginning, my interest and main goals in photography have always centered on storytelling, especially when it comes to adventure. When I was 13 years old, I was invited to my first ever rock climbing weekend. I fell in love with everything about the experience — but what I really wanted to do was share those weekend adventures with my buddies back on the playground. It was then that I first borrowed my father's camera and began trying to document those adventures. This changed my life, and now, over 20 years later, there is no other job I'd rather be doing.

One of the things I love most about the work I do is that I am a participant in the adventures that I'm documenting. Rather than shooting from the sidelines, I must do what the athletes are doing, be it on rock, water or snow. It's this combination of adventure and storytelling that really fuels my creativity and helps me see the world in the most compelling way. I need to feel that same wind hitting my face, while the same mosquitoes bite my ankles. I need to be wet and cold. I need to be sweating, and I need to be scared in certain environments, but that's the strategy: be there. Don't try to fake it — actually try to capture what's real.

Many of the athletes that I work with are also good friends, which makes working together even more fulfilling: we travel together, we sit together in planes, trains and automobiles. Then we suffer together: we go into wild places; we sweat; we share tents; we get scared. I consider this a great privilege and opportunity to be able to share the stories of people close to me.

In many ways, adventure photography is still a fledgling industry. The rules are still in the process of being written. I feel truly fortunate to have started at a time and place where I can contribute to the overall shape and character of the craft. I think the biggest evolution has been the convergence of still photography and filmmaking. No longer is it one or the other. Today, you can be both photographer and moviemaker. It is tools like the D4 that give us the ability to truly excel in each field simultaneously. Documenting adventure and visual storytelling have changed forever. We're all on the same playing field now. There are no limits imposed by the equipment that we each own. The only difference now is our passion, our individual creativity and the stories we choose to tell.

When Nikon called and asked me about putting together a project that would seriously test the new D4, I really wanted to bridge the passions in my life: telling stories, elite athletes and adventure. From this, the concept for my film "WHY" emerged. I wanted to ask: "What drives the greatest adventure athletes on the planet to do what they do? What motivates them day after day to push the limits of their sport?" The D4 proved to be the exact tool I needed to tell this story — both with still images and with video. Some of the new features allowed me to capture these athletes in a new way. I could shoot slow motion at 60 frames per second while Dane Jackson kayaked over a 60+-foot waterfall. I could push in while filming Rebecca Rush racing through a desert wash using the 2.7-magnification feature. We could monitor sound while conducting interviews with each athlete. All three of these are part of the D4's fantastic video feature set. But at the core, the idea of going out and getting inside the heads of three of my heroes in the adventure sports world was very appealing.