A Bum Shoulder, a Good Friend, and a Hand me Down Camera

It all started for me about 10 years ago while I was a student at Lewis and Clark College. I was a baseball player with a small amount of professional potential and the aspiration and drive to make it as a pro player. Those dreams came crashing down in the blink of an eye when after what seemed to be normal shoulder soreness turned into something much worse, a torn labrum, or in the eyes of those in the baseball world, a death sentence for pitchers.

After the injury I was lost, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life post baseball and was struggling to find something to replace what used to be the biggest part of my life. Luckily for me, that winter while I was snowboarding to take my mind off the situation, I met up with a friend who just so happened to be a snowboard videographer and spent the afternoon shadowing him. I have always had an affinity for cameras and photography, but after watching my friend work I wanted to make it a goal of mine to be able to creatively capture fleeting moments of time. It was that summer that my friend gifted me his old camera as a graduation present and I was no longer lost.

Thanks to that hand me down camera, I taught myself the basics and hit the ground running. Since then I have filmed social media and branding assets for Timberline Lodge and Airblaster outerwear among others, as well as created media assets used for grant proposals by the non-profit Snowdays Foundaion. I have contributed to year long snowboard video projects for Videograss Productions and been an invited videographer to Snowboarder Magazine’s annual SuperPark events. While not doing client work I filmed, directed, edited, produced and coordinated the premiers of two independent full length skate video featuring local underground skateboarders in the greater Portland area, .

These experiences only gave me a desire to learn and grow more as a story teller and pushed me return to school and earn my Master of Arts in Multimedia Journalism, which I completed in June of 2019. Now that I am graduated, I want to find the right opportunities to combine my skills as an “Action Sport” videographer and photographer, with the story telling aspects I have been honing in school to work with brands and/or companies to tell their stories in new, interesting ways.