About William

I grew up the youngest of three kids in a house shaped by two very different forces.

My dad was a NASA engineer — steady, detail-oriented, the kind of person who double-checked everything because it mattered. He documented our family with a camera in a way that wasn’t always artistic but was deeply faithful. It taught me that paying attention is its own form of care.

My mom was more improvisational. She’d been a Navy nurse, but her real talent was empathy. She collected people and made them feel understood, sometimes following her nose after new ideas with more enthusiasm than consistency. If my dad gave us structure, she gave us emotional weather.

My sisters and I inherited a little of both of them: grounded but flexible, precise but attuned to people, calm in the storm but patient with life’s messiness. That mix still defines how I work.

My first job was tech support at a small Internet Service Provider called ToadNet. I liked helping confused people fix their computers — using patience, clarity, and language to guide people towards solutions.

Around the same time, I bought my first camera. Not because I had some grand artistic vision, but because it felt like a way to step into the part of my dad’s world that made sense to me. Photography blended detail and creativity in a way that felt natural.

Then MySpace happened. I convinced about a hundred friends to show up in white T-shirts for identical portraits on a white background. It went mini-viral for the time, and someone emailed me asking, “Do you shoot weddings?”

I was about to be out of my depth, but I was too naive to say no.

My first wedding was chaos — staging family photos was like chasing livestock. The day’s timeline existed mostly in theory. I was overwhelmed, but learned an important lesson: good systems make chaos manageable. 

A short time later, Groupon approached me about running one of their first photography deals. I assumed no one would buy it. Instead, about 400 people did. The $10,000 check felt like a windfall until I realized I’d sold 400 sessions for $25 apiece after Groupon took their cut. 

It took nearly five years to finish them. I built scheduling, delivery, communication systems — all of it. I honored the vouchers long after their one-year expiry because I didn’t like the idea of turning people away — it felt like an integrity thing. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was a hell of an education. I photographed more personalities, moods, and family dynamics in those years than most photographers encounter in a decade.

By the end, I wasn’t just “someone with a camera.” I had real professional instincts — the ones you only develop by being in the room, over and over, with real people.

For a while, I followed the standard advice: grow the brand, hire photographers, build a team. It was flattering, and on paper it looked like the next step.

I still loved these guys, but I didn’t like managing photographers. I liked being with people and making the work in real time. Sending someone else to a wedding in my place felt like removing the part of the job I actually cared about.

Scaling for the sake of scaling isn’t success. It’s drift.

I continued working with Felipe, my closest comrade in photography, but I rebuilt the business around depth — a smaller number of weddings, more attention, more intention, fewer compromises.

I met my husband, Michael, in 2018 at a local municipal meeting where he was one of the only other people under 65. We ended up in the same friend group, and grew closer during the pandemic over video calls and group chats. When things reopened, he asked me out twice. I was commitment shy and turned him down both times. After his third try, a friend told me I was being an idiot, so I said yes.

Spending more time together, we clicked. Michael just belonged in the room with me, and in the long run, isn’t that mostly what being in love is? We married in a tiny ceremony at home in June 2023.

Today we live in Bowie with my dad and our dog, Bailey, not far from my sisters and thirteen nieces and nephews. Our life is simple in the best ways — morning coffee, summer gardens, long walks with the dog, lots of family. When any part of that constellation is missing, the whole thing feels slightly off: familiar, but not quite home.

That sense of home is the feeling I try to bring into my work.

I photograph about a dozen weddings a year — enough to stay sharp, not enough to stop paying attention. I’m calm in moments that would’ve rattled younger me, and I give couples the same honest clarity I learned back when I was the person behind the help desk:

“If we keep adjusting the dress, we’ll either skip photos with your sister or run late to the reception. Either choice is fine — just tell me which matters more.”

My job isn’t to run your day. It’s to protect your priorities while you live it.

Years from now, when you look back at your photographs, I want them to feel like the ones my dad took when I was a kid — not unnaturally polished trinkets, but pieces of family lore captured by someone who cared enough to pay attention.