Duration: Starting my sixth year.

Staff: Myself, a few regular and excellent assistants, and my agent, Pamela Hamilton, at Sparks Productions.

Education: A bachelor's in English from Dalhousie University, and a brief stint at the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara. Five years of assisting some excellent advertising and food photographers is where I received my true education.

Cultural Influences: I'm very much influenced by music—anything from 1970s jazz-fusion to Wilco to old Soul/R&B. I can get a bit giddy when I am booked to photograph a musician or a conductor or someone in that world. I also have a big thing for travel history; right now I'm reading books on the history of the spice trade.

Environment: I do a fair amount of travel shooting, and although I love the familiarity of my Toronto studio, any project that takes me abroad is when I feel the most alive and in top creative form.

Philosophy: I always aim for my shoots to be collaborative, low-stress affairs, and the way I have found to do that consistently is by having a group of talented and like-minded people working with me to make the details run as smoothly as possible. I'm fortunate enough to get to use photography as a tool to see the world, and I often have moments when I think to myself, “I can’t believe I get to do this for a living.”