#nashvillevideography

My wife and I began building our family in June of 2009 with the birth of our first son, Will.  He brought such life to our house we thought nothing could be better.  As we continued our journey we soon realized that we were ready to have another child and in November of 2011 my wife gave birth to our 2nd son, Whalen.  Whalen was such a different and welcome change of pace in his first months of life because he was an extremely content baby where as Will was in need of constant attention for the first 6 months of his birth.  After we all settled into our routine as a family it wasn’t long before my wife and I began talking about having a third child and the conversation of hoping to have a daughter came up.  My wife has a very close relationship with her mother and she wished to have a daughter to have the same type of closeness with a daughter.  It’s completely understandable considering it’s in our nature as human beings to be close to one another.  We soon were pregnant with our third child and in January of 2014 we were blessed with our third son, Weston.  As happy as we were that we had another healthy child we both felt our family was still missing something.

We first started looking at domestic adoption and we heard stories about families adopting in the United States that would lose custody of the adopted children sometimes years later after significant attachment was already established was in deed, factual.  This scared both of us and we began to look abroad to adopt and narrowed our search to China and India.  The reason for these choices was because both countries had long standing relationships with American families adopting children from their respective countries.  After further digging we decided on India was the better fit for us.  In September of 2017 we reached out to an organization called Catholic Charities to begin the process of adding our little girl to our family. After a lot of paperwork, court hearings and a psychological evaluation on March 12th 2017 we were matched with a baby girl who resided in an orphanage in Hassan, Karnataka, India.

I can remember as a young boy my step-father waking me up while it was still dark outside.  He would take me duck hunting with him on Rice Lake when I lived in northern Minnesota.  I can remember watching the sun come up and changing all the colors in the sky.  It was shortly after that you could hear the wing beats of the ducks flying overhead, followed by the loud blast of a duck call in an attempt to entice birds close.  I remember how peaceful it all seemed as I still do today.  It was never about the harvesting of an animal but the connection and the sights and sounds of the experience that gave such inner peace.

I had many experiences hunting and fishing throughout my life, and when I was a young man I began taking a camcorder out on my adventures to document my adventures.  I got the biggest kick out of filming animals and bringing footage back to my house and watching it over and over.  Soon I began combining my love for filming and documenting my stories of hunts and fishing trips with my love for wildlife conservation.  I began creating “how to” videos on different food plots to plant at different times as well as habitat to create to provide optimum habit for the wildlife on certain properties.  I the put in an application with a then educational style outdoor show called “Midwest Whitetail”.  My friends and I were responsible for building stories about creating habitat and hunting whitetail deer as well as filming the entire season as it unfolds.  The idea was to educate the audience through trial and error to help aid them in their own outdoor adventures.  

I had an opportunity to film a live music video the other day with Daniel Jordan singing his original “Back to your Man” live at The Sliderhouse in Nashville.  I set this up a four camera shoot using a GoPro, Canon G30, Sony A6500 and a Sony A7iii was the main.  You can see in this photograph I used a “party gel” over the Arri light in front and used the natural lens flare of the rim light behind Daniel.  I thought the lights really set him out from the background of the stage. I also was fortunate enough that Alex at the Sliderhouse let me plug my H4N Zoom mic directly into his sound board which made for great audio recording.  This was a lot of fun to put together and I can’t wait for my next shoot. Hope you enjoy.