About

I’ve been trusted with a lot of things people don’t hand to strangers.

Passwords. Company systems. Confidential information. Problems that needed fixing. Wedding-day nerves. Family dynamics. The occasional secret.

For a long time, my career put me in rooms where people trusted me with things they really didn’t want screwed up. These days, I’m more interested in a different kind of trust… the people you love, the relationships you’ve built, and the parts of your life that feel completely ordinary right now but eventually won’t.

I’m David. Davey Dave to some people, but that’s a story for another time. Photographer. Husband. Dog dad. Music lover. Ranch-dressing aficionado. Firm believer that if someone asks whether I want spaghetti and meatballs or pizza, the correct answer is obviously both. Life’s too short.

Someday I’ll make it to Tomorrowland. Or Ibiza. Maybe in a year when I shoot 20 weddings and can convince myself that spending $15,000 on a music-fueled European adventure is a perfectly reasonable financial decision.

It’s good to have goals.

The camera part of this story started pretty early. My parents had a video camera when I was a kid, and I was fascinated by it. Much to their dismay, probably. To their credit, they tolerated the small child who apparently needed to document everything and could become completely consumed by whatever had captured his attention at the moment. In retrospect… there were signs.

By high school, I’d found my way into the school television studio. I wasn’t cool enough to be the roving reporter who got to be on camera, so I became the camera guy for the roving reporter instead. Honestly, that probably worked out better for me.

I think my high school archived some of that stuff to YouTube. Please don’t look it up.

One of my teachers wanted me to get better at composition, so he told me to take Mrs. Anderson’s photography class as one of my electives. I used my dad’s Nikon FE-2. I shot film. I learned to wind my own rolls. I worked in the darkroom, made contact sheets, handled chemicals, and got very familiar with the particular kind of suspense that comes from making a photograph and having absolutely no idea whether I had nailed it until much later.

Before presets, there was a darkroom.

There was no screen on the back of the camera reassuring me that I got it. I had to learn to look first… at light, timing, composition and what belonged inside the frame. Photography was normally a one-semester class, but apparently I took to it. Mrs. Anderson invited me back for a second semester with the advanced photography group.

And somewhere in there, photography just… clicked.

Sorry. Had to.

Photography had clicked. Technology had too.

At the same time I was borrowing my dad’s Nikon, winding film and disappearing into a darkroom, I was also the kid helping my high school technology department with whatever they’d let me touch. The school district website was one of those things. During my junior and senior years, one of my electives was part of the first Cisco Networking Academy program being piloted in high schools, with the idea of creating the next generation of network engineers.

Apparently I had options.

At eighteen, technology looked like a career. It had jobs. Salaries. A pretty obvious path to paying the bills. Photography looked a lot more like… entrepreneurship.

So technology won the first round.

I got a job. Then another job. Then better jobs. Eventually I built a career in technology, business, marketing and creative leadership that lasted more than twenty years.

And I was good at it.

I became the person companies trusted with systems, websites, technology, passwords, private information and problems nobody particularly wanted to own. I loved solving problems. Building things. Strategy. Helping people understand complicated technology without making them feel stupid for not understanding it in the first place.

And then there were the years when I was miserable.

Not dramatic-movie-scene miserable. Just the much more ordinary version where I was good at what I did, responsible enough to keep doing it, and increasingly aware that being good at something and wanting to spend my life doing it are not necessarily the same thing.

I think a lot of people know that feeling.

Photography had been running alongside that career for years. I’d been photographing professionally since 2005, learning, working, building a business and getting better. Eventually I had to admit that the work that meant the most to me usually involved making something, solving something, connecting with somebody or leaving something better than I found it.

Photography lets me do all four.

And every once in a while, it lets me freeze something that somebody is going to want back someday.

I didn’t understand the weight of that when I was sixteen in a darkroom. I understand it now.

People grow up. Parents get older. Dogs get gray around the muzzle. Weddings turn into anniversaries. Houses fill up, empty out and fill up again. Things that feel completely ordinary while they’re happening have a funny way of becoming important later.

Dogs are particularly good at teaching me this. They’re just there… sleeping in the same spot, following the same routine, making the same ridiculous face when dinner is three minutes late. Until one day the face is a little grayer, the walk is a little slower, and some random photograph I barely thought about when I made it suddenly means everything.

A photograph can quietly sit on a hard drive for years… until one day it becomes priceless.

That’s why I believe in printing the things that matter. Digital files are wonderful. I have enough hard drives to prove it. But a photograph on the wall becomes part of a home. An album gets pulled off a shelf on an anniversary. A senior portrait becomes impossibly young twenty years later. A photograph of a dog sprawled across the couch becomes evidence of exactly how he used to fit there.

Maybe it’s the guy who learned photography in a darkroom talking, but I still think photographs deserve to exist somewhere other than a screen.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t just making pictures. I was building archives… people’s stories, families’ stories, dogs’ stories too.

And I don’t always get to know which photograph will matter most while I’m making it. Sometimes it’s obvious. Sometimes it’s just IMG_4837.

Then life happens.

There’s another part of my story I used to be considerably less direct about. A very old version of my About page referred to my “amazing partner.” It was true… and also a carefully vague way of saying I was gay without actually saying I was gay.

Today I can simply tell you: I’m gay. I have a husband.

I remember what it felt like to decide how much of myself I was comfortable letting people see. That’s probably part of why being seen and understood matters so much to me.

I don’t need the people I photograph to be anything like me. I just want them to know they don’t have to edit themselves for me.

Being understood matters. So does being able to trust the person on the other side of the camera.

And yes… I know what I’m doing.

I’ve been photographing professionally since 2005, but the learning started long before that. I’m a Certified Professional Photographer. In 2020, I received the David Award from the Twin Cities Professional Photographers Association, where I also served on the board. I spent three years assisting on Minnesota Vikings Cheerleaders calendar productions, and I’ve spent a lot of years learning from, working alongside and helping other photographers.

I’ve also been trusted as an ambassador for some of the photography industry’s leading software and platforms, which manages to make the photographer and the technology nerd in me equally happy.

The résumé tells you I know how to make the photograph.

It isn’t why I make it.

I make photographs because things change. Because people matter. Because dogs get gray. Because sometimes an anonymous file sitting quietly on a hard drive becomes the photograph nobody would trade for anything.

I’ve spent a lot of my life being trusted with things that matter to people.

These days, I get to archive some of them.

And I take that seriously.