Hello & Nice to Meet You,
My name is Dave. In a few words, I’m a full time landscape & night sky photographer, author, educator, and world traveler.
In March of 2015 I quit my 6 figure “American Dream” job as a Boeing Aerospace Engineer to travel, teach photography, and take photos full time. This was the scariest and best choice I’ve ever made.
I’m not a huge fan of talking about myself, but since you clicked on the about me page, let’s make this short and sweet!
Everything you’ll find on this site ( tutorials, videos, blog posts, teaching products, workshops / tours, etc. ) starts as a little light inside my brain that says, “Let’s create this, it doesn’t exist yet!”.
From there I design, build, test, and launch these ideas through this website. It’s all a big experiment to see what works & that’s what makes it so much fun for me!
My lifestyle and travel are 100% funded by this website and photography.
I don’t freelance / use sponsors / partners or create art for anyone but myself.
It’s not that I’m above these methods of making a living. They’re just not something I’m passionate about, so why waste the time?
Instead of building someone else’s dream by freelancing or working for sponsors, I dump 100% of my creative time and energy into this website, teaching, making photos, and traveling.
To work on anything else would be cheating myself and subtracting from the knowledge I can provide to others.
If you invest in yourself & your own ideas, at all costs, things will work out. More than anything we have to TRUST IN OURSELVES.
Anyone has the power to do anything they want, if they work hard and trust their own gut instinct as being right.
More Below the Next Photo…
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| From a Month Long Backpacking Trip Through Patagonia South America – March 2015 |
No matter what, I trust myself, and my own experiences more than anything else on this planet. I know that I’ll be wrong at times and I’ll be right at times, but in the end I went for it. Experimenting is the only true way to find out.
Remember how I said that quitting my corporate engineering job was the scariest thing I’ve ever done?
That fear is still there on a daily basis. I consider fear to be my greatest friend. It’s also a powerful tool, but only if you use it correctly.
Fear drives me everyday to improve at all costs. If the fear isn’t big enough neither is the idea!
If you listen to your fear, quit & don’t take the leap, even the best idea is worthless.
Okay, enough about me. Below, I’ve provided some of my favorite photo tutorials & images, along with some other essential links & resources.
You may also enjoy my Favorite Books List.
Create Everyday & Live Outside the Comfort Zone,
Dave
My Latest Photography Trips & Videos
9 months of each year I live out of my vehicle & travel the wilderness by foot on an endless backpacking & landscape photography trip.
These videos will give you an idea of what I’m all about.
They share my adventures and teach the photography & outdoor skills used on these trips.
View Photos
View My Latest Work Using the Link Below
Photography Tips & Tutorials
I enjoy teaching photography just as much as taking photos. There is a wide variety of free and paid learning material contained on this website. You can find all of the tutorials in one easy to access place.
Click Here – Photography Tips & Tutorials
Photography Workshops & Tours
Join me on an adventure to some of the most remote and photogenic locations on the planet. I offer a wide range of photography workshops & tours for all skill levels of photographers. Click the link below to access the workshops & tours page.
Features, Awards & Publications
A few thoughts of mine about accolades/awards/bragging rights & anything else that may hinder your creative processes in life.
“Allowing society to cripple your creativity with pre-defined awards ( bragging rights ) and place an established value on the beauty you create is giving away your path to the stars, to your dreams, and most of all your path to create something new, something beautiful, something that can not be defined by words, actions or ideas that the human mind has yet conceived.” — Me ( Dave Morrow )
Okay, I won’t lie, I’m not a huge awards fan as you’ll notice by reading the quote provided above. Although I do think there is a time and place for awards, they are so overdone these days that artists stop creating their own art and instead try to create “award art”. In my opinion we would all be much better off if we just awarded ourselves with enjoyment for creating “stuff” we like!
That being said, it’s not so much that I don’t like awards, I just don’t like the entire mentality that surrounds many of them. I’ll continue to create the art I like without thinking about awards. If one happens to come my way, without any extra effort on my part, so be it. Thanks for the award:)
Features & Publications are always great in my opinion. Writing for or showing photos to a new audience is always something I love to do. If you’d ever like me to write for your website, magazine or any other platform click here & shoot me an email🙂
Access the Features, Awards & Publications Page
Quotes I Live By
“One final paragraph of advice: It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here.
So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space.
Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
– Edward Abbey ( One of His Last Public Statements Before Death )
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.
The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
– Chris McCandless
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”
– Terence McKenna
“Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride.” — Hunter S. Thompson
“Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.” — Jim Morrison
“Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?”
― Terence McKenna
“Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives… and to the “good life”, whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.” — Hunter S. Thompson
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” — Aldous Huxley
