About

I make portraits for a living, which means I spend my days watching faces do the one thing they do when a camera appears, which is tense up. My whole job is getting people past that, to the moment where they forget the lens and become themselves again. Somewhere in the middle of all those sessions I fell for the smile as a subject. Not the dental version of it, the human one. The way a smile can change a whole face in a fraction of a second. The way people talk themselves out of showing theirs.

This little site is where I write down what I have learned from the far side of the camera. It is about smiles and faces and light, about what actually reads as attractive once you strip away the marketing, and about the strange, stubborn gap between how we look and how we think we look. I write for the person who has ever hated a photo of themselves and quietly concluded the problem was their face. Usually it was the light, or the timing, or a story they had been told about themselves.

A plain and important note. I am not a dentist, a hygienist, or any kind of medical professional, and nothing here is treatment advice. I am an informed enthusiast with a good eye and a lot of hours watching people, no more than that. Everything I write is general and aesthetic, meant to help you see. The moment a question touches the health of your teeth or gums, or whether some procedure is right for you, the right person to ask is your own dentist, who can actually look inside your mouth and knows your history. Please take these as notes from a friend with a camera, and take anything clinical to someone qualified to give it.