I have always been fascinated by the way a photo could capture a feeling. During my teenage years, on warm days, I would drive all over the back country roads of Johnston County, windows down, stopping along the way to take photos of scenery that caught my eye. Rusty trucks parked in falling-down barns, haybales casting long shadows across freshly mowed fields and of course, sunsets that splashed vivid reds, yellows and oranges across the Carolina sky. Fast forward to 2016 when I bought my first DSLR camera - I did that very same thing - I stopped on some old back road on my way home to photograph an abandoned house in the middle of a tobacco field with the setting sun sparkling through the leaves of an ancient oak tree.

My lens regards people in the midst of their most meaningful experiences instead of landscapes these days, but my passion for capturing a moment before it slips away hasn't changed. It is the same attentive and reflective disposition behind the camera. I love photography because I love the adventure of anticipating the outward expressions of a full heart that come in the form of an admiring gaze, a beaming smile or a tender kiss and to feel the satisfaction of snapping my shutter at that exact moment so that as long as the picture lives, so does the memory.