About - The Grower

I have been keeping reefs since I was fourteen. Florauna is what happened when the photography caught up to the husbandry.

The short version

I started at a local fish store in Ypsilanti, Michigan, sweeping floors and learning to test water. By sixteen I was running installs and maintenance on large residential and commercial systems. I studied Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law at the University of Arizona, worked as the first employee at a Tucson reef store, and interned in the Department of Herpetology, Ichthyology and Invertebrate Zoology at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

The photography

I am self-taught. Macro reef photography is unforgiving — the subject is moving, the light is the wrong colour temperature for a sensor, and the interesting detail is a few millimetres across. Getting a frame where the fluorescence reads the way your eye sees it takes as much husbandry as it does camera work. The colony has to be healthy first.

Why the corals matter to the prints

Everything in The Studio comes from an animal I raised. Not a stock library, not a generated image. When a print is titled, the name refers to a specific colony sitting in a tank in Phoenix — one I can still photograph today, and frag for someone tomorrow.

What Florauna is for

Reefkeeping taught me that the most persuasive argument for protecting wild reefs is showing people how astonishing they are up close. That is the whole thesis: grow it responsibly, photograph it honestly, and put a portion of what it earns back toward conservation.