Ok, so I have been going through old hard drives trying to figure out what to post, and damn, it is HARD trying to figure out where to start. So many stories to choose from, I feel blessed to have spent that last 17 years working with wildlife. It has been so great revisiting these moments in time - so many great memories. Looking at my early trips, I realized, I didn’t take many still images. I spent the whole time recording videos, and there was no iphone back then. So that is one of the issues I am faced with when looking at the oldest of my trips. It was also pre- gopro, so much of the video that I recorded, is just underwater footage.

So I decided to begin with a throwback to where it all began for me, which was July 2011, on our whale shark expedition. That trip was one of the very first ones, where I took a gopro with me and just started documenting everything. I wish I continued to do that on every single trip, because those trips are so well documented with video clips, both topside and underwater. So great for story telling purposes. So for today I reposted on our Youtube channel, the first video vlog I recorded from that trip…

As I move forward with these stories and videos from the archives, I will share more details about the experiences. I do remember when I first started, being nervous talking to the camera, but I was also very excited… because a new chapter of story telling had begun.

When I started Shark Diver magazine back in 2003, I knew I wanted to incorporate video into what we did. I felt that we could tell better stories with video, then just with written words. In fact I hired a videographer for our very first expedition (sandtiger sharks, Morehead City, NC). He edited the video and sent me the final product, but it was not what I envisioned and so we scraped the idea. He made a video that you sell to tourists. I wasn’t looking for that. I was looking for a video that shared and showed this crazy life and journey we had just begun.

I attempted to do it again in 2006, and the end product of that, was a documentary I produced, called Summer of the Sharks. Which was a lot of fun. It was a buddy shark diving road trip movie and I loved making it. Again, the film itself was edited and directed by someone else, so it was not entirely what I wanted, but it was damn close.

So finally in 2011, I started learning how to edit my own stuff to try and create moments and memories that were in my mind’s eye.

These early videos are not perfect, and I wish I could go back and correct them, but they are perfect in their in-perfections. This journey and phase of my life was a lot of fun and I was super pumped up about it, because I knew this was going to open up a whole new world for me and the stories I was able to tell. The gopro was going to give me freedom that no other camera had in the past.

So, here we go, the journey continues…