It started in a basement. My brother studied photography formally and kept a darkroom at home — chemicals, enlargers, red light, and the slow magic of an image emerging from nothing. That early exposure to what light and chemistry could do together shaped something fundamental in how I see. I never lost it.

At Kean University, studying Visual Communications, photography was not an elective — it was the foundation. Multiple courses grounded the craft in theory and professional application, and the connection between design thinking and photographic composition became something I have carried into every project since. When I graduated and took a position as a graphic designer and then promoted to art director at Healthways Communications — a major pharmaceutical advertising direct mail agency — I brought both disciplines with me. I also founded their computer graphics department, an early signal of where the industry was heading and an early lesson in building something from nothing inside someone else’s organization.

The real education in working photography came at Siemens Medical Systems, where I managed the Graphics Center. Corporate documentation, product photography, professional visual communication at an international scale — this was the crash course that no classroom delivers. You learn differently when the work has to be right, on deadline, every time. No excuses. No reshoots because you were not prepared.

After Siemens I founded Graphic Images, a graphic and presentation company serving the pharmaceutical industry, while simultaneously doing freelance art direction for Publicis Groupe in New York. The office space I rented was inside Colour Works, Inc. — a full service photographic lab. That proximity to a working professional photographic lab changed everything. From lighting to chemistry, from enlargers to trade show production, from product photography to large format print — this was where the complete picture of professional photography came together in one place. I did not just observe it. I was part of it, building their computer graphics department while absorbing over fifty years of combined photographic knowledge from the people around me.

The camera never stopped after that. Through a decade running North America Trader LLC, photography stayed constant — sporting events, live events, nature and landscapes, portraiture, shore and seascape work that still fills my hard drives today. You do not accumulate forty years of visual discipline by putting the camera down when business pivots. You keep shooting because it is who you are.

When the shift to real estate media became clear, the decision was immediate. I already had the equipment. I already had the expertise. I already had the eye. What I needed was the operational infrastructure to deliver it professionally at scale — and that is exactly what TriSky Media was built to be. Not a freelancer with a website. A media company with a system, a brand, a proprietary process, and the credentials to back every claim it makes.