Photography Portfolio

All of these photos are people that knew I was taking the photo, and some of them had a little bit of direction from me or chose to add some flair themselves.

King of the Oasis: This is a photo of my younger brother Seth, who will appear again, He's always been photogenic, and there are so many good photos from this hike to an oasis in Palm Springs that it's hard to pick just one.

Hey, I see you: This is one of my best friends at the farewell party we had at the end of Summer '24 in Sugarhouse park, I had been trying to capture a candid photo, but she was too quick!

Show Stealer: This is my good friend Cody, who was not the reason that we were in the woods (we were taking grad photos for a mutual friend, Nora [those are farther down!]), but he struck a pose when I turned the camera on him, and it turned out great.

Triumphant at the Top: This is a photo of my good friend Alex, at the top of the third peak in what San Luis Obispo locals dub the "tri-tip challenge" wherein you hike three "tips" in a row, The P at Cal Poly, Cerro San Luis, and Mt. Bishop. Bishop was our last stop, and this photo was taken at the top, just after sunset.

Sunglasses at Night: This is a photo of Trevor, the King of Wind™, at the Wind Power Bonfire at the end of the 24-25 season. I had the idea for the photo, but he was wearing his sunglasses at 10 PM of his own accord.

Bracelets and Contemplation: This is a photo of my friend Oliver, at the same end-of-summer party as Hey, I see you, looking contemplatively into the distance, which made for a fantastic photo with the shades he was wearing.

Done with You: This is a photo of my younger sister Claire, who will take any and all opportunity to flip me off, including in the Salt Lake Courthouse. This photo was a greater challenge than most of the others, because it's actually 5 different photos, taken at different exposure levels, and then combined in order to have every level of foreground and background properly exposed. The combination came out nearly perfect, but upon close inspection there is likely some artifacting.

Backseat Thinker: This is a photo of my roommate from 2nd year, Declan, in the car on the way downtown (to the farmer's market!). I had the idea to hold the camera backwards over the back of the passenger seat, and he noticed and rolled with it.

Finally, a real smile: This is a photo of my good friend Lara, outside of the office we were both interns in during the summer of '25. She was setting up her LinkedIn, and needed a good headshot, so we went out to the little patio area next to the building to get her one. She was very camera shy, but I finally managed to capture a few good photos, one of which is this one.

These photos are as the title suggests, where object portraits are what I'm calling photos that focus on the object the person is holding, rather than the person themself.

😮: I saw the opportunity to make this emoji the title, and just had to take it. This is a photo of my 2nd-year roommate Kenton, on a camping trip we took to Joshua Tree National Park over spring break.

Caught in the Act: This photo was supposed to be candid, but my friend Tucker has an uncanny ability to stare directly into the camera whenever it's pointed at her, and foiled many of my attempts at catching candid moments, though this one turned out great anyway.

Everyday Outlook: This is another photo from that Joshua Tree camping trip, this one of Gabby, after we had hiked to a nearby Oasis, and been told by multiple groups of old(er) people how we looked like we "did this every day" because we weren't struggling in the heat and sun.

That's Mrs. PAC-Man to You: This is a candid shot of my mom, in an arcade in Vegas, showing off her impeccable PAC-Man skills. I don't know where they came from, as I had never seen her play PAC-Man before this fateful day, but she rolled up and set a new record at this Dave N' Busters, blowing the minds of the rest of her family members.

Doin' his job: This is Cody again (he's going to show up a lot), this time during the 2024 CWC, sitting underneath the tunnel so that he can watch the foundation install and ensure everything is set up for our run.

The Fabled Breadboard: This is again at the 2024 CWC, this is Ryan holding a "gift" that was made for us by the Rice University team, the titular "Breadboard". A breadboard is an electrical engineering tool used to make connections between various components, so they took some components, and stuck them in real bread. It's a cherished memory of mine, it was a fantastic joke.

One of One: This is an "object portrait" of the camera in the photo; That Minolta X-700 went through a lot. It belonged to a friend of mine (Millie, the girl in the photo), but was originally non-functional. Over the course of a month or two we completely deconstructed it, I repaired the electronics, and she gave it the awesome blue paint job, so it is now the only Minolta X-700 to look that way in the entire world.

"How's the game?": This is a photo of my friend Caroline at a large beach party that was put together at the end of my 2nd year. She didn't partake in the ultimate frisbee game that was going on in the background of this photo, but she was invested in its motions and how it was going.

The Struggle Award: This is a photo of Dillon, the structures lead, showing off our "struggle award" from the 2025 CWC, a fish we named Jeremy. That story is long, but I'll tell it eventually. The only other team to get a struggle award was MIT.

This set is exactly what it sounds like, groups of people, almost all of them purposeful photos, but there are a couple candid ones too, if I have my camera on me and I see a good shot, I'm going to take it. These ones are much harder to title, so I'm not going to, but I'll still give a brief description of each.

1 - This is my family photo from Winter break '24, taken up Millcreek Canyon, above the gate. This is the best of the many photos from that day, because a dog had just run past and slipped and fell, which lent to laughing and real smiles on all of our faces, which look much better than smiles for the camera.

2 - This is another great photo up Millcreek Canyon, this one of my hometown squad. Alli and Oliver from the solo portraits above make an appearance here, as well as Fredo and Shu, the rest of the crew.

3 - This one is of most of the Wind Power team at the '24 Collegiate wind competition, on our way back down to the bullpens from getting lunch.

4 - This is another photo from that end-of-summer farewell in '24, this one of Alli and Shu, sitting on the edge of a creek in Hidden Hollow after we had eaten lunch.

5 - This is a photo from WOW (the Week of Welcome) of two good friends of mine, twins, Katelyn and Erin. Most of the group went kayaking, but they didn't have enough spots for everyone, so a few of us stayed on shore and explored the marina.

6 - This is a photo of the other two that stayed on shore, Asa and Colin, talking on the pier. This is the only candid photo among the group photos.

7 - This is a photo of my mom and my brother Seth in the Boboli Gardens in Florence. There are many more great landscape photos from that trip.

8 - This is a photo of Cody, Tucker, and Liv, the Wind Power Connection Creation Team. Tucker is holding our 3rd place trophy, this photo was taken walking back from the competition on the last day.

9 - This is a photo of the Wind Power Foundation senior project team, they did some pretty incredible work on our system that year.

This set is specific, because these are some of the photos that I took for my good friend Nora's grad photos when she graduated in 2024. I won't title these either, since they're all very similar and obviously related.

The first two were taken on the corner of Cal Poly's campus, at the big concrete sign. The next 3 were taken on the hillside of Cerro San Luis, across the little valley from Cal Poly. It's a beautiful field, and lent for shots like the first one, with her looking back at Cal Poly, and especially the P. The last photo was taken at Montaña De Oro state park, which is on the coast about a 15 minute drive from San Luis Obsipo. This shot is very bright, with the ocean and the sun in the direct background, but it turned out great.

These are all landscape photos taken in and around SLO (San Luis Obispo), my 2nd home.

Golden Hour in the Valley: This is a photo taken from Mt. Bishop just before sunset, across the valley SLO sits in. This was taken after the great browning that happens every year, so the warm tone of the photo is a combination of the sunset and the fact that everything dies around May.

Sunset Souvenir: This is a photo I took in Morro Bay, which is about 15 minutes from SLO by car, and a great place to see the ocean and go to the beach. There's also a large pier, which makes photos of boats easy.

The Sleeping Giant: This is one of "The Stacks", part of an old manufacturing facility in Morro Bay that's been empty for a long while, but is too expensive or dangerous to tear down, and so stays up. The Stacks have become a symbol of the community, despite not running for decades.

Is it gonna be windy?: This is a photo of Cody and two of his roommates, Caiden and Brady, holding kites at the beach. Cody is a big fan of kites, and will take any excuse to get them out, but they can make for great photos, so I'm not complaining.

These are all landscape photos from Utah, both in Salt Lake and in the National Parks in southern Utah.

Across Fields of Gold: This is a view of the Wasatch Front in Salt Lake City. If you know exactly where to look, my high school is in this photo, as are many of my local haunts.

40% and falling: This is a photo of my dad and I on our way out of a camping trip in Canyonlands National Park. We drove his Rivian (electric truck), so we had some battery worries, but they turned out to be unfounded; we made it out with more than 30% after 3 nights in the desert. I am sitting in the passenger seat of the truck flying my drone (which took the photo).

The Spanx of Weather: This is almost the exact same shot as Across Fields of Gold, simply taken in the wintertime. The title is a reference to a line from a movie that I adore, about how snow makes any landscape look better.

Where to Next?: This is another drone shot of our drive out of Canyonlands, this time from directly above as we stopped to reconvene with my grandpa (in the black jeep) and make sure we were going the right way.

Silhouette of a Line Bird: This is another photo from that farewell in Sugarhouse park in summer of '24, the way this single bird was sitting on the line made it a great focal point for the photo.

Sleeping at the Top of the World: This is an aerial photo of the campground we stayed at in Canyonlands, we were perched on the edge of The Maze, a deep and complex formation. Sleeping 30 feet from a ~4000ft cliff really helps put some perspective into the real size and scale of humans.

This set is from various vacations in the last few years, not including the camping trip to southern Utah showcased above.

A Tour of the Future: This is a photo I took while on a tour of a wind farm just outside of Palm Springs, in Southern California. I am a huge fan of wind power, and it was the highlight of the trip for me.

A Tender View: This is a photo of the Disney Wonder in the bay of Cabo San Lucas while we were tendering back to the ship (it's too large to dock directly in Cabo, tenders are small shuttle boats). This was taken with my old D80, and is one of my favorite photos.

A Different kind of Street: This is a photo of Venice, Italy, taken while crossing one of the many small bridges therein. We were only in Venice for a day, it's certainly somewhere I need to visit again.

Il Duomino: "Il Duomino" is Italian for "the little dome", which is a very fitting play on words for this photo of Il Duomo (simply "the dome") in Florence, Italy. This was taken from the Piazzale Michelangelo, a square up one of the nearby hills that has a fantastic view of Florence.

The Seat of Industry: This is a photo of an old inn in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that I took while I was there for the 2024 Collegiate Wind Competition.

View of the Ponte Vecchio: This is a photo of the Ponte Vecchio, a bridge in Florence, Italy. The Arno is a beautiful river, and lends itself well to landscapes of Florence.

The Reflected Difference: This is another photo from the Palm Springs trip, we were staying on a golf course, and our balcony had a beautiful view of this pond. I managed to catch it at sunset while it was nearly perfectly still, which looked amazing.

View from the Ponte Vecchio: Just as the title says, this is a sister to photo to View of the Ponte Vecchio, they were taken a few hours apart, each from the bridge in the other photo.

Standing Tall: I have no idea what building this is, but this is another photo from the Minneapolis trip, taken while I was walking around Minneapolis. I managed to catch the sunset filtering through the tall buildings really well, this photo (and the landscape version I also took) is one of my favorite backgrounds on my laptop.

This is one of my favorite sets of photos, playing with lighting and long exposures is so much fun, and can frequently be done with friends!

One Team, One Name: This was taken at the beach during the Wind Power bonfire at the end of the '24 season. It took 4 of us a good number of tries to get this right, but I really love how it turned out. You can tell that it's multiple flashlights by the slightly different tinge of the white in the different letters and in the sand.

The Ghost of Adelaide: This one already had a title, because I submitted it to my high school photography contest and won an award with it! I took photography as a class in high school, and for many of the periods the teacher would simply let us loose on the school with our cameras, and there was an awesome lecture hall with no windows that got nearly perfect dark, which is how I captured this one. The girl who I silhouetted with the flashlight was named Adelaide, so it's her "ghost" in the photo.

The Long Commute: This is a photo of I-215 and I-80 at the mouth of Parley's Canyon, in the evening. There weren't many cars on the road, so the timing on this one was difficult, but I love the way that the lights blur in long exposures, and cars are a perfect source of moving light to capture.

Every Which Way: This is a long exposure shot of the ride Samurai at Lagoon, an amusement park in northern Utah. I took my camera on the last day Lagoon was open in 2022, and captured some great photos of the rides, including this one.

Whatever You Drive...: This is a photo of the eponymous Firestone Grill in San Luis Obispo, this was taken at one of the farmers markets last year, it's just such a great neon sign for this kind of thing.

Boom!: This is one of the many photos I took of a 24th of July fireworks show that I've been to a number of times. My great-aunt has a fantastic view of a massive show from her front lawn, so I've visited to watch it on the 24th most of the years of my life. And yes, the 24th of July, which is Pioneer day in Utah, has fireworks shows bigger than the 4th.

Going Up?: This is another photo from that night at Lagoon, this time of the ferris wheel. I specifically didn't capture a whole rotation, which, when paired with the lighting not covering the wheel uniformly, gives an excellent sense of motion to this one.

The Cornerstone: This is one of my favorite shots I've ever taken. The Hotel Wineman is an old hotel in San Luis Obispo that's been converted to apartments, but the sign is a hallmark of the adorable downtown area, and I love the way it looks.

Squiggles and Rays: This is another photo from the Wind Power bonfire in '24. This is Nora, from above, this time highlighted and backgrounded by flashlights and movement. The way the long exposure came out, she's both perfectly lit, and slightly soft in a way that clearly isn't photographer error, but rather an artistic choice, and I think it makes this photo look inviting and friendly.

This collection is a series of photos taken at the beach in SLO, but most of them I wouldn't call Portraits or Landscapes, so I grouped them all here.

Opening Strike: This is a baller shot of a few of my friends playing spikeball, the ball silhouetted in the air is so nice against the sunset.

The Perfect Stance: This is a great photo of Jeff, one of the mechE wizards on the Wind Power team, catching a frisbee during one of our beach frisbee sessions (a club favorite).

Don't Put Me Up On Your Bedroom Wall: This is a great photo of Brady, one of the famous Cody's roommates, standing triumphantly on the top of a dune. The dunes are an extension of the beach that allow for some fun vertical traversal and sand exploration.

The Most Scenic Catch: This title could have gone to The Perfect Stance as well, but the atmosphere in this photo is just impeccable. This is Trevor, the King of Wind™, at the '24 Wind Power beach party.

The King of Wind™: This is a great photo of the '24 wind power team (or at least the core squad) making a pyramid on the beach. Trevor is on top, obviously, and then Dillon, Cody, and Nora all make appearances too.

The Power of Flight: This is a photo of Grace, another good friend I know through Cody, launching herself off of the dune featured in Don't Put Me Up On Your Bedroom Wall. We all took turns jumping off of it into the soft sand below, this is just the photo that turned out the best.

These are various action shots I've taken the few times I've tried, action is really fun to shoot, but it's usually more work than it's worth, because I end up having taken some 3000-odd photos, for example, and then maybe 10 of them are even passable.

Stretching for the Return: This is a photo of my brother Seth playing tennis. It was just a game against my dad for the sake of playing, but it was fun to try and catch good moments from it.

The Jump Train: This is one of my favorite photos. To catch this, I set up my camera on a tripod and took a good 30 photos of my brother while he was on this jump, and then in photoshop I layered the photos and cropped the layers so that only he was showing through on all but the bottom layer. I ended up with way more photos than I needed for the effect, but I pared it down and really like where I ended up.

In by a Foot: This is a photo of my friend Kyle getting a touchdown in an intramural flag football game. It was fun both to watch the game, and to take photos of it.

Aaaaaand Caught!: This is another photo of Kyle, from the same flag football game, this time just before making a good catch. The photo looks like it has been seared in vaseline a little bit, because to catch the action in the stadium floodlights (at 9 PM) my ISO was like 25600.

Fore!: This is another photo of Kyle, this time at an intramural softball game, absolutely knocking it out of the park. This game was a lot of fun, because the good action (hits and runs) is very scripted, so I have good photos like this of just about everyone on my friend's team.

The Perfect Spiral: This is a great photo of Owen, the quarterback of the flag football team, throwing a spiral during the same game as the other two. This kind of shot was much harder to get than the catches, as it's harder to keep my eye on the game and keep my camera on the quarterback, to see when he's going to throw, which is why I only got one of these (out of oh so many).

The Butterfly: This is just a photo of a butterfly in SLO, on some of the flowers on campus during butterfly season. I sometimes wish I could carry my camera on me at all times, so I could capture moments like this more often.

Calmly Adrift: This is a photo of leaves drifting down the creek that runs through Hidden Hollow park. This photo is about 5 feet from Group Portrait 4, during the same gathering of friends.

Basking in the Desert Sun: This is a photo of a lizard in Canyonlands National Park. This was taken on the same trip as Sleeping at the Top of the World, the exact location is actually in that photo, if you squint.

These photos are all from the 2025 Collegiate Wind Competition, or CWC, the last one that I'll get to attend. It was one of the best weeks of my life, being there with my team, competing against other teams within a set of rules and conditions that bred creative solutions to interesting problems.

The Speed of Light: This is a photo of our turbine in the 2025 tunnel, spinning so fast that the shutter speed had to be turned way up. Because of the quick shutter speed, the color-changing LEDs, which were set to a turquoise (the CWC's color) came through as the flashes of blue and green that actually make up the color. The banding is because of what is called "rolling shutter", which is how the camera sensor doesn't actually check every pixel at exactly the same time, and instead "rolls" through them, leading to the banding and the blurring of the blades.

Full Tilt: This is a shot from what we dubbed the "fun run". I'll go into more detail about this when I eventually write my post about the CWC and what a great experience I had, but at the end of the competition, the organizers asked us if we wanted to run our turbine at the maximum power the tunnel could produce. We said yes, of course, and I was told by multiple people from other teams that it was the coolest part of the entire competition; we went almost twice as fast as the official test, and pushed it to the limits.

Ready and Waiting: This is a view of our turbine, looking down the flow straightener at the front of the tunnel before we started one of our runs. This one was hard to catch, because the flow straightener is a couple-inch hexagonal mesh at the front of the tunnel, so I had to be a good 20 feet away to be able to see through it, and even still it's obviously in the photo. I do think the effect it had was cool, though.

Turbine Emergency: This was our "album cover" for the trip. I took this photo with the express purpose of making it stylized, and I think it turned out great. I should do this with more of my photos, the heightened contrast and texture looks great.

I don't get the opportunity to take these types of photos very often, because I essentially have to be camping in the desert, but I love astrophotography, it's such a change from any other discipline, it's like an entirely separate hobby.

Make a Wish: This is a beautiful photo of the Milky Way, taken from Joshua Tree National Park. This photo takes place at around 3 AM, I was asleep, but I had gotten up at 2 to set up my camera and have it take photos throughout the night. I set this up all three nights I was in Joshua Tree, but this vertical one is by far my favorite, mostly because of the shooting star.

Due East: This is a photo from the same camping trip as Sleeping on top of the World, but was taken at a different campsite, not that you can tell. This photo was taken by stacking more than 100 2-minute exposures into a single photo comprising the star movements of nearly 3 hours. I started the camera at 1 AM, and let it run until the battery died, then layered the photos together in post. This pattern literally shows the rotation of the earth, I would love to recreate it in each of the four cardinal directions.

These are the rest of the photos that I don't know what to do with, they're all awesome, and deserve to be in this portfolio, but don't obviously fit in with any of the others here. The bottom three are all from the same trip, (the same cruise as A Tender View, in fact), but the top three are entirely separate.

A New Way Around: This is a macro shot of my skateboard that I bought this summer, leaning against the windowsill of the room that I'm staying in all the way out here in the middle of nowhere (Herndon, VA). Learning to skateboard has genuinely been a very fulfilling journey for me.

Ready to Roll: This is a really great shot, because it looks incredibly focused, but that wasn't accidental. This is actually close to 30 photos crammed together. It's called "focus stacking", where you take a number of photos of the same thing at slightly different focus points, and then combine them in a way that puts the whole subject in focus, instead of just the point that you're focused on.

One Way Color Tunnel by Olafur Eliasson: This is a photo of an art piece at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and it's fantastic. The tunnel is one-way, both in design and in intention, what cannot be seen in the photo is the fact that all of these lovely colorful panels are one-sided, so from the other direction, the tunnel is a flat black color, which was quite a cool effect after walking through it.

The Sea off the Starboard Side: This is a view of the pacific ocean from Deck 4 of the Disney Wonder (the ship in A Tender View). This is a long-exposure photo, but not a very long exposure. Just enough to blur the waves and make the clouds fuzzy, but not enough that they're featureless. This was one of those photos where I just kind of went "this might be cool" and tried it without much thought, and it turned out fantastic.

Fire and Ice: This is a photo of a fireplace, shot directly through a glass of cold water. This was taken at a resort in San Diego, the night before we boarded the cruise mentioned above. I love photos of fire, because the things you can capture go so far beyond the normal view of what a fire is, and lets you break down the individual pieces of flame that make up the larger fire as the human eye sees it, which I think is really cool. The view through the glass is simple juxtaposition, the way it recreates the shape of the fire in the glass because of the distribution of the ice was accidental, but turned out beautifully.

The Cadillac Lounge: This is one of the bars on the Disney Wonder, called The Cadillac Lounge. I was wandering the ship taking photos, and tried the door on a whim, and it was perfectly empty, even the bottles cleared away. The vibe of this lounge is absolutely impeccable, all of the furniture and decoration based on the mid 20th century Cadillacs, and the dark wood everywhere makes for a very welcoming atmosphere. It's obviously friendlier when it's full of people, but I kind of like the calm, inviting atmosphere when it's empty.