I'm an on again off again hobbyist with some professional experience. Been too busy to do much in way of photography or stuck to nature and urban stuff. But now that I've moved to a new location, I'm hankering to take advantage of the scenery. In real life, I make comic books.

I've done a lot of photography in on the back end of the lens, working in a few capacities. I've enjoyed working with models on my own, doing body paint and fantasy prosthetics with Victor Ciccarelli (taught me all the basics, that man) in my early twenties. I continued on to experiment with urban exploration and landscape photography when I had less time to work with models -- and I was on a 3 year journey to race around the US. I've been in a different city every weekend for the last three years working on the promotion of my comic work. Between this and visits with friends and family that kept me rolling, I had so many opportunities to persue my passion of exploring the US National Park system. I'm not much of a photographer, but in the last years I've spent time for kicks shooting nature, urban decay and landscape in Zion National Park, Joshua Tree, Yosemite, Death Valley national park, Mojave desert, Waimea Canyon, MANY locations on Honolulu (sadly not Kauai since we were struck by a massive storm on the one trip we managed to get there. The ramshackle, gloomy hotel made for some great shots on its own, though.) I'm a restless soul -- some of my favorite places are the Salton Sea, the north shore of Honolulu, Seattle, Central Park, Muir Woods -- so much beauty is out there for us. Wistful sigh.

In my early twenties I had a STRONG cosplay career and ventured even to Japan to cosplay with my partner at Comicket when we were about 21. It was an awesome experience, the best of memories. In my hobby of cosplay, I worked a LOT on a hobby level on both sides of the camera. My life doesn't let me create costumes any more but I still love doing cosplay on the rare occasions I can manage it.

I have a pretty complicated relationship with gender that has been a life-long exploration that I'm finally reaching something with. I spent my life fluctuating between MALE and FEMALE in search of what label I was supposed to use until I finally let go. Let go of looking for a gender and instead looked for what was going to make me feel happy. I looked at myself and how I express myself and realized that there was no reason I had to assign a gender to myself. And because of that, I was FREE of the confines of either gender to show the world whatever I like from day to day. It's been an incredible experience. It's made me more comfortable with myself and my body to experiment through style and gender tweaking, searching for where *I* feel best, rather than where I SHOULD feel best.

I've been thinking lately that I would love to try working with a photographer and perhaps a make up artist to give REAL modeling a try. I get a lot of ideas for shoots but I would never have the guts to approach a friend about doing something like this, hahaha. The truth is I'm INCREDIBLY shy in weird ways, mostly about talking about myself and taking credit for my achievements, believe it or not. But after growing out of being a really AWKWARD fugly kid, the idea of playing dress up has  its appeals, no matter if it's a prom dress or dress fatigues.

As far as bodies go, I've got a pretty curvy girl body. I'm no supermodel by any stretch of the imagination -- I'm around a size 12 right, 5'4'' but I'm told I have pretty decent proportions. (These are all things *I* think of as a photographer. The Next Top Model finale is like my Superbowl.)

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