Recently found footage of me at work in Rangoon photographing Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. So odd seeing this after 28 years. We spent many days outside Daw Suu's house, in the sweltering heat, crushing crowds, juggling rolls of film and racing to make deadlines transmitting or shipping film out to New York.

Even though I don't do this kind of photojournalism work anymore (I still work on long term documentary...

Sapeoun, aka Gino, posing (left) on the side of a road outside Bakersfield, California in October, 1993. In the photograph on the right, Gino stops briefly to let me take his portrait in Tacoma, Washington this week, almost exactly 30 years later. Stories like Gino's are why I became a photographer - a survivor of America's war in Southeast Asia, the Khmer Rouge genocide, a refugee, a member of some of the toughest Cambodian street gangs in...

When your work gets immortalized in manga! Singapore based sneaker customization artist Bob Ng at No-Brainer*, recently turned one of my images from a 1999 bozosoku biker gang riot in Hiroshima into a manga. Needless to say, my 13 year old kid (and a manga fan) is impressed! read more about Bob's...

The view 100 feet above my home in Seattle after rains passed through. I am loving my new Mavic 3 Pro drone - greatly improved file size and tonal range, good colors. Manually stitched panorama, shot with RAW files and assembled in Lightroom. Onwards and upwards!

By the spring of 1995, I was already a year into my so-called photography "career". I had started well apparently - fresh out of a photography graduate program in 1994 in Chicago, my first assignment was a three week assignment with the legendary editor Kathy Ryan at The New York Times Magazine, hired on the basis of a project on Cambodian gangs I did in the US. By...

Ode to our neighborhood coffee shop, Herkimer Coffee shop on Greenwood Avenue here in Seattle. We’ve been taking the girls there since we moved to the neighborhood in 2008 - nothing like a hot chocolate and a sweet treat for them to allow me to take a few photos.

It's a lightstalkers dream too - large windows facing west on the top of a hill. The space...

Happy to see Catfish books release a second edition of my book 'On the Corners of Argyle and Glenwood', this time with a beautiful yellow/gold outer sleeve! Order yours here.

"As a young graduate student in photography in the early 1990s, Stuart Isett found himself...

Boeing's last 747 jumbo jet took off today from Paine Field, next to the Everett plant where the first 747 rolled out in 1969. I've spent hundreds of hours flying around the world on them since I was a little kid. The last plane may be out the door but we'll get to see them in the air for many decades to come. Bon voyage!

As Boeing prepares to roll out and deliver its final 747, a cargo version of the plane's final iteration, the 747-800, here's some images I've taken of its construction, delivery and first flight over the past decade. It will always be the most beautiful plane ever built, sleek and elegant, unlike its rather bloated rival the Airbus A380 which I also photographed being developed and built....

My new bride after our honeymoon in New York, June 1997. Jennifer and I headed to the airport and our return flight to our home in Bangkok; a few months the later we moved to Tokyo. I've always loved this image but only recently got a decent scan of it, and love it more. My love, the light, the Twin Towers; our lives totally in limbo as we prepared to take the plunge and live in Japan.

Now it's two kids, a cat, mortgage, college 529s,...

Proud to have joined Dorothy Chan on her podcast "Death in Cambodia". Dorothy created the podcast to interview her father and talk about his experiences under the Khmer Rouge during the Cambodian genocide, exploring issues of trauma among Cambodian refugees in the US. It was in that context she wanted to talk about...

On every photographer's bucket list should be covering a good protest in Paris - mace, clowns, late night coq au vin, airborne cobblestones, washing teargas out of your eyes in fountains at Notre Dame at 1am. Watching them unfold again this month after President Macron's government rammed through retirement age changes, sent me archive digging for the riots that rocked the city in 2006 when the government attempted, and failed, to change...

....the more they stay the same. Except for the Duran Duran hair. I miss that. Photos taken in Ann Arbor, MI in 1987 and Seattle, WA, in 2023. One with a Nikon FA, a camera I used for a full decade. Most recent camera is the mirrorless Nikon Z7ii. It's...

Another question I always get asked as a photographer of a certain age (say, over 50) is whether I miss film. The answer is no, nope, never. I feel no nostalgia, no sentimentality, nothing. I realize that film is becoming cool again, and I say, go for it kids, but I used it for 25 years, mainly shooting slide film with an exposure latitude of about 1/2 stop, maximum. What does that mean? It means shooting in terrible, contrasty light, like...

My friend, and awesome photo YouTuber Dan Milnor, often teases me as the last “Nikon man”. Seems I’m a dying breed but I didn't stick with Nikon because I’m a gear fetishist; as I often joke, it’s simply because I know where the buttons are.

I bought my first Nikon in 1982 at age 16, an FM2, after working in Kingston Market in London for...

Feeling the Top Gun vibe this week! Photos from a shoot on the USS Kitty Hawk, as it prepared for deployment to Afghanistan in November, 2001. I was flown out to the Japan-based carrier for a two day assignment for The New York Times as part of its coverage of the aftermath of 9/11. To this day I'm impressed with the men and women who worked on the flight deck, keeping me safe, all while launching F-14s and F-18s. Yet the pilots get all the...

My now 12 year old daughter always loved to say, "you never know!" when we asked her as a little kid if she'd be coming to our bed that night. Turns out, it's also a handy expression for photo assignments that you accept begrudgingly, mainly to keep a client happy. This assignment was on car salesmen during the...

Mining the archive and coming up with a mining story; a 2008 story shot for The New York Times on the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska. The proposal to build the mine is controversial and 14 years later, still ongoing. The mine contains large deposits of copper, gold, and molybdenum and is in the Bristol Bay region of Southwest Alaska,...

Maybe it was a 1990s thing, but I knew photographers who were quite literally crop-nazis, especially in the end days of film and darkrooms. Slicing off so much as a hair of your frame in the darkroom was a photographic sin. Anyone who worked as a documentary photography in the late 1980s and and 1990s was exposed to this - the more you...

Every photographer's dream assignment is the road-trip photoessay. They're lying if they say otherwise. Hop in a car, hit the road with a camera (and "your" writer), a beat up copy of Kerouac's "On the Road" (confession: I've never read) and search out the small town America of your imagination. I've only done a few such shoots, mostly in Asia, but in 2008 I hit the road with New York Times writer, and a neighbor here in Seattle, Bill...

Sometimes you get home, upload your images, and see an image that means you nailed the shoot. One such image below, the kind of image that goes straight into my portfolio. Photo is from a shoot for Crowley Marine who needed both beauty and working shots of their new tug the Athena. Shot with a Mavic drone near Tacoma, WA, I had about a minute over the vessel before high winds forced me to bring the drone home. Nailed it!

Someone recently asked me how we used to get our film processed and out from war zones in places like Cambodia, and get it to New York or Paris for a deadline. I had to explain, we didn't process the film; back then Time Magazine had their own in-house photolab and all we had to did was get the film to them. That, of course, was often harder than finding an E6 lab in the Cambodian jungle.

This slide was shot on assignment for Time...

After a week of scanning in some old family photos I finally figured out why I may have become a photographer. The four scanned images below were all shot by my mom in 1966 using a medium format camera and slide film. These color photos of my older brother Chris could have been taken yesterday - the tones, colors and detail are stunning. All they needed was a proper scan and some TLC in Lightroom and Photoshop to come to life, which I did...

Recent work for Preservation Magazine, published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, on the Urban Grace church in downtown Tacoma, Washington. The history of the congregation that would become Urban Grace dates back 140 years and the church traces its lineage to the First Baptist Church (1883), founded on Pacific Avenue in what was then known as New Tacoma in the Washington Territory.

I had to go back to the church three...

"A rather unsatisfactory term's work, and I fear not 'O' level material". B.T.G.

This was my school report for "Art" in the summer of 1980 at King's College School in London. "O" levels are standardized exams in British secondary schools and apparently a life in the arts was not in my future. When I suggested to my art teacher that I enjoyed photography, I remember his retort:

"Photography isn't an art, Isett".

Yes...

I've never been much of a gear head (for the love of god, don't ask me why I've always used Nikon!) but I'm also smart enough to see the writing on the wall. The DLSR camera was always a stopgap between the worlds of film and full digital, so I finally made the leap to mirrorless cameras with new Nikon Z7ii.

Amazing cameras so far, however you're still not allowed to say, "Hey Stuart, your cameras take great pictures". No better way to...

New work for First Mode, building hydrogen powered engines right here in Seattle!

Nice write up on my book at VOA's website, translated from the regional Khmer article.

Always happy when works goes live! Always happy to be around airplanes. Images taken for McGee Air Services for a complete website redesign done by the awesome crew at Blackwing Creative here in Seattle. See more of the work here.

A recent interview with Siemny Kim of Kiro TV in Seattle about my collaboration with Silong Chhun for my book On the Corners of Argyle and Glenwood. I'm very grateful for yet another great opportunity to spread the word about the project..

A text message, right, I received earlier this month from some Cambodian American folks back in Chicago who saw my recent book, with my photographs of the Cambodian diaspora in Chicago in the early...

Nice write-up in the Tacoma Tribune, focusing on Tacoma native Silong Chhun who helped edit and contextualize the work in my new book "...

I had the pleasure of doing a podcast with Hello Chluy, aka Phanit Duong, a Cambodian American comic based in New York. Along with my collaborators Silong Chhun and Pete Pin we talked about my new book On the Corners of Argyle and Glenwood.

The Tiny Toones break dancing troupe was founded by Tuy Sobil, a.k.a. "KK", a 44 yr old Cambodian-American and former gang member from Long Beach, California who was deported from the United States in 2004. Working out of the Toul Tom Pong neighborhood in Phnom Penh, the Tiny Toone's house runs a drop-in center and community center for at-risk youth and street...

My first copies of "គ្រួសារ - ON THE CORNERS OF ARGYLE & GLENWOOD" arrived today and it looks beautiful. Reproduction of the images is stunning.

Buy your copy from Catfish books here!

Thinking about my old friend A.K. Kimoto who died 11 years ago this March from unexpected, natural causes at the age of 32. A young and talented photographer, with a heart of gold, AK impacted every life he touched and is dearly missed. After his death The New York Times published his work on opium addiction in Afghanistan, a...

Read more here.

"To mark the launch of ‘On the Corners of Argyle and Glenwood’ an intimate series of photographs of Cambodian refugees who settled in Chicago’s north side in the 1990’s, we brought Stuart Isett, Peter Pin...

គ្រួសារ - KROUSAR - FAMILY

"As a young graduate student in photography in the early 1990s, Stuart Isett found himself on the corners of Argyle and Glenwood streets in Chicago, photographing Cambodian refugees who had settled on the city’s north side near his apartment. Isett entered a world which would define his practice, spending much of the next 25 years working in South East Asia, often returning to work on issues affecting the...

So I went to the Washington Post's website today to see it open with a 25 year old photograph I took in Yangon, Myanmar (Rangoon, Burma) of Aung San Suu Kyi while on assignment for the Associated Press. Part of a story about the coup in Myanmar this week and Suu Kyi's failures as a leader.

What was strangest for me...

Do you want to impress your kids? Point to giant wrap around ads on city buses with your images on them while you're driving them around! This one taken recently for the Lake Washington Institute of Technology.

A couple of frames I captured Monday buzzing around Seattle and Puget Sound in a helicopter for a client. Another heavy metal day in the air! On the left, the USS Sampson undergoing sea trials. On the right, grounded Boeing 737 Max at Boeing Field.

Buzzing my house on the way home from an aerial photo shoot of a US Navy ship, I decided to check-in on the kids, home alone for Spring Break. Serious helicopter parent!

After 25 years of working as a documentary photographer one skill I've learned is to enter a space to work quietly and effectively, making people I'm photographing comfortable with my presence. Skills that work really well when I get asked to create what I call "corporate documentary" images, photographs of real employees at work, created with minimal impact to the work day that allow companies to show their staff in the best and most natural...

Recent corporate work for Mainland Construction Materials in nearby Vancouver, Canada.

My work on the cleanup at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in this month's High Country News. The magazine is a real gem of a publication and in an era of shrinking print media, it stands out for its coverage of the American West.

While I do far less editorial photography these days, it's always good to occasionally have a newspaper assignment thrown at you at the last minute, to test my editorial chops. On Monday I drove up to Mt. Rainier National Park on assignment for the...

Work from earlier this year with Herrera, a local environmental consulting firm. Nothing more fun that being invited to photograph at the county garbage dump! The images here were taken at the King County waste site with team members from Herrera helping the county protect the local environment. Not paid actors, real employees, at work; the kind of photo shoot...

My work on the Amazon Spheres in this month's Landscape Architecture Magazine. To see more images from the shoots, click here for exterior images, here for interior work.

Final selects from an awesome shoot with Alaska Air Cargo, shooting their new 737 cargo conversions in Anchorage, AK. Pretty much a dream photo shoot since I've been a plane nerd since I was a kid, plus it was a great team to work with. Now I only have to convince them to return in the dead of winter to shoot the planes and cargo being loaded!

Work from an assignment in Novyy Urengoy, in Siberia, Russia, for BusinessWeek Magazine photographing a new pipeline bringing gas from Siberia to western Europe.

Work from 2018 shot across the country for Summit Materials is finally on their new website. Great project to work on with a great team.

One of my favorite stories to work on over the years was on Yashiro Island, a tiny goldfish shaped island in Japan’s southern Seto Sea, south of Hiroshima. The island was one of the last places in Japan to get regular electricity in the 1970s, and the eastern half of the island, Towa district, has the distinction of being "Japan’s oldest town" with the highest average aged population in a nation...

It's been 28 years since I decided to pursue photography as a career. In the spring of 1990 I returned from a trip to Thailand after spending 4 months teaching english and photographing in Cambodian refugee camps for the American Refugee Committee in my spare time. I had already spent a year in Thailand in 1988 studying the language and teaching english with the plan of becoming an academic, but 1990 was the point where I decided to change...

I moved to France from Japan in 2003, just in time to start getting access to photograph Airbus's latest project, the giant A380 double decker aircraft. On my first trip down to Toulouse to see the first plane under final assembly, Airbus PR folks picked me up at the local train station, drove me to an outer fence and pointed to the airplane in a hanger about 200 meters away with the hanger doors open. Needless to say, I wasn't happy and...

I often get asked what’s the hardest story I’ve ever had to photograph. In 2008, I traveled with New York Times correspondent Bill Yardley to Chewelah, Washington to interview Jeffrey Schrock, 39 at the time, and a devout Mennonite. Mr Schrock and his wife had lost all five of their children in a car accident when a truck driven by Clifford Helm crossed a median on U.S. 395 and drove into oncoming lanes, hitting the Shrock family's truck. Mr....

A few years back The New York Times asked that I follow the cast and producers of HBO’s “Game of Thrones" around for a couple of days while they were on a tour to promote the new season of the show. Apparently I’m one of the few people who hadn’t seen it (and still haven’t, I don’t have cable!) so I knew little about the show and even less about the actors. This probably helped because unlike the thousands of screaming fans who showed up...

The first time I saw Kyoto I didn’t realize I’d seen it. Staring out of the hermetically sealed windows of the Nozomi Super Express bullet train, there was no end to the miles of factories and sterile, cookie-cutter housing projects that sprawl from Tokyo to Osaka, via Kyoto. Occasionally I spotted a rice field or the roof tops of small Buddhist and Shinto temples. At nearly 200 mph they could just be glimpsed through the webs of power lines,...

After spending a day earlier this summer photographing the interior of Amazon's new bio-Spheres here in Seattle I finally started shooting some exterior work for landscape architects Site Workshop. Working from dawn 'til dusk I tried to capture all the shifts in light and activity that happen around...

I got to enjoy every 3 year old kid's dream of playing with life-size Tonka toys this month, visiting another of Summit Materials quarries this time their largest one in British Columbia Canada, just north of my home base in Seattle. Sadly I could only photograph the machines, not drive them!

Our gorgeous Seattle Augusts have lost their deep blue skies only to be enveloped in a smokey haze. Still, it may have helped this image, flattening out the depth from Seattle's Space Needle to the nearby towers in Belltown. Taken today between assignments.

With my daughter Phoebe, summer solstice day, playing airplane and hoping my back can still hold her up. Shot on iPhone 8.

I'm sad to hear about the fire at the Aberdeen Museum of History that destroyed most of the building including the Kurt Cobain exhibit. Apparently destroyed was the couch Cobain used to sleep on, which I didn’t realize was part of the exhibit until...

Images from an unpublished story I photographed in Shanghai in April, 2004. Sometimes it happens, I’ll run across an interesting story, spend a few days shooting it, then get tied up with other work and shelve it. 14 years later you rediscover it and see something interesting in the work. The photoessay was on the Xujiahui Cathedral (or St. Ignatius Cathedral) built in 1851 in Shanghai where in the 1960s during China's Cultural Revolution,...

In the spring of 2002 I traveled to the North Korean border, near the Chinese city of Yanji, for Time Magazine to report on North Korean refugees fleeing the country across the Tumen River. Here, a young North Korean boy, smuggled into China by human traffickers, enjoys some sunlight on his first morning in China. The hills behind are North Korea. Most of the refugees I met were in terrible shape - malnourished, lice infested, many with...

Video grab from a shoot I just did in Anchorage with Alaska Airlines Cargo, using my favorite new piece of kit, a cherry picker!

There is, apparently, a hashtag for gear porn photos. I've never been much of a gear-head, and have never done such an image myself, but I'm about to head up to Alaska for an industrial, corporate and aviation shoot with a lot of variables and a ton of unknowns. What gear should I take?

All of it.

This photo was recently found in an old shoebox of mine. Taken in 1986 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while a student at the University of Michigan and back before I knew I wanted to be a photographer or even how to be a photographer. But I know I liked Nikon glass! Using a Nikon FA and sporting some serious Duran Duran hair.

Recent work for Summit Materials and Boxley. Shooting in Lynchburg, Virginia, documenting their operations from the mines to the roads. When ever I see their plants I can't help but imagine that pounding big rocks onto little rocks was probably one of the earliest businesses ever created!

I just returned from a two-day scout for a client, in Alaska at Anchorage's Airport. One important lesson I learned, it's always best to get off the runway when a Boeing 747-400 cargo is approaching for a landing! This photo, though, was taken as we drove across the runway with permission from air traffic control. But still, move quickly in such situations!

No, I'm not a product or table top photographer, unless you need your products shot in context, being used by real life folks, in natural settings. That was what Stanley tools asked me to do for their Proto line of professional tools, working with an awesome team of Alaska Airline's engine mechanics at Seatac Airport. The shoot also let me introduce LED lights into my work, which are great fun to work with in tight situations where you need...

After 2 1/2 hours flying in a two-seater R22 helicopter, with one door off, in the train and cold, shooting a US Navy destroyer in the Straits of Juan de Fuca, north of Seattle, I was ready for a beer. We left Seattle in the rain hoping that the weather and light would be better as we flew north. luckily the gods cooperated on this one otherwise I'd be out there again next week!

The return trip included a brief layover in Sequim to...

I often feel isolated living in Seattle. Stuck up in the far northwest of the country, it's not the center of anything. Living in Tokyo, Bangkok, and Paris before moving here, we had a constant stream of friends coming through town. Not so much in Seattle. An extraction city built on the water's edge, surrounded by mountains, it's taken nearly decade to actually begin to appreciate our isolation, captured well, I think, in this image I took...

Images from a recent shoot in San Diego for Portland-based design firm Walker Macy. I studied photography in Chicago where you learned very quickly about the marriage of photography and architecture, so I love shooting for architecture and design magazines & firms. I'm not hired as an classical architectural photographer though, but asked to use my documentary skills that show spaces being activated and reanimated through design. I go to...

It took many months but work I did earlier this year is finally up on Concur's homepage. Great team to work with, you can see on their homepage here.

My first assignment in Seattle was at Microsoft, assigned about two days after we moved here, by The New York Times. I suspect, one day, my last assignment will be there too. This time I went back to document how the company is redesigning office spaces in order to compete with Amazon and other local tech companies, for millennial talent. Apparently they need places to walk their dogs and cannot be further than 50 feet from a coffee shop....

I got a nice spread in Taschen's new book "Explorer" on the Alaskan wilderness. Originally shot for The New York Times and edited, many moons ago, by the great Lonnie Schlein, who sent me off to the wilds of the Tongass National Forest on a wing and a prayer.

I have probably shot for 50 different newspapers over the years, including many overseas. It was a great honor this week to finally shoot an assignment for The Boston Globe; an honor because of the Globe's famous photo department and some of the incredible photographers and editors that have worked there over the years, including a friend Yunghi Kim. Story is on...

When I tell clients I don't do product photography what I mean to say is I don’t shoot heavily stylized product photography. The kind of shoots that take an entire day setting up lights to shoot a single object. I respect photographers who have the patience for that, it's just not for me. Having said that, I do shoot products in their working environment, organic images of tools or food in the real world. What I lack in patience for an all...

I don't shoot as much for The New York Times as I once did, but when I do, I get a nice big opener in the Friday Business section!

Yesterday, in a stunt about removing statues, a small group of alt-righters and Trump supporters decided to protest the infamous Lenin Statue standing in Fremont, Seattle, right near our home. The protestors failed to noticed a few big differences with the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, of course. 1. It's privately owned...

I finally checked out one of my most unusual image usages - a photo of the opening of Cannabis City, Seattle's first legal marijuana store, used by the owner on a commemorative brass plaque outside the store in Seattle's SODO district.

I probably didn't charge enough but I'll be honest, but how often do you get an offer to turn an image into brass outside a pot shop?

The original photo of James Lathrop celebrating his store's...

Photographing art installations around the Allen Institute for Brain Science's new headquarters in Seattle's booming and rapidly changing South lake Union district.

Watching my daughters playing I sometimes hear the Tom Wait's song "What's he building in there?" in my head. Here Phoebe was acting this out in the doll house my grandfather built in the 1930s for my mom. Refurbished in 2010 with all new wiring, floors and paint, the girls always building something in there. It's not a playhouse for the...

The forgotten story of Cambodia’s Lost Boyz in AmericaWelcomed to the U.S. as children, deported as adults - featured in Timeline

Just got back from 4 days in Las Vegas. Like a lot of folks, I have a love/hate relationship with the city; it's America's "ID" manifested in many dubious ways. However, hidden among all the tricky-tack and neon, the city has some real gems. One is architect David Rockwell's 80-ft. tall "treehouse" restaurant, called Mastro's, at Las Vegas' City Center. Here a 8-frame image of the structure, stitched together in Adobe Lightroom, shot on a...

On assignment on the roof of the Komo Plaza building, next to Seattle's iconic Space Needle. Thanks to my awesome assistant and photographer Hannah Wahl for the snap!

What's my best selling image over my 25 year career? Exclusive photos of Burmese Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi I took on the day of her release? Nope. My exclusive portraits of then up-and-coming actor Joseph Gordan-Levitt, taken during a one minute shoot in a Seattle hotel? Nope. Exclusive access I’ve had with various legendary CEOs in Seattle? Nope.

My best selling image, one that gets licensed at least once a month, even a decade...

I shot one of the installations at the Frye Art Museum for their "Genius" series. The beautiful final book just came out with a double page spread of one of my images included. Many thanks to the editors.

A lull in commissioned work has let me add to my aircraft collage, tentatively titled "Underbelly". Only problem is now I've photographed too many of the same types of plane and need more variety. Seattle's Boeing Field often provides that but the city's official airport, SEATAC, is an endless stream of 737s most days. Maybe a road trip is needed.

Some aerial shoots go smoother than others and I now know my limit for a single ride out over Seattle with Take-san, by favorite pilot in his R22 out of Classic Helicopter. My limit is apparently 2-3 subjects, not 6. When you reach out to clients and say you'll be in the air and whether they need anything, remember your Dramamine limit! Mine is apparently 3 head-spinning shoots. The first was easy though, the new Washington State 144 car...

I took this photograph below in late January, 1996, while covering the last days of the Cambodian Civil War on assignment for Newsweek Magazine. It’s another of my favorites, and also luckiest photographs, just scanned in on an Imacon scanner. I was standing on the side of Route 57, the main road from the Northwestern provincial capital of Battambang to Pailin, a Khmer Rouge stronghold to the south, when the tank appeared out of the bushes...

After years of using a Nikon Coolscan LS-4000, bought in 2001 in Japan, I recently was able to use one of Hasselblad’s Imacon film scanners....

Just spent another morning between assignments hanging out in the back streets around Seatac Airport, this time photographing incoming aircraft with my new Nikon D810 and it's monster files. Flying used to mean adventure, and as a kid, risk, but as I’ve gotten older the adventures have been tempered and flying is, well, just so safe. The thrill is gone. This recent series is shot from straight under and the dirtier the plane the better. The...

Last autumn I spent a day James Lindley, 34, a former Marine and undertaker who today volunteers his time to provide proper military funerals for homeless and indigent veterans. Article by Michael Phillips:

"Each year, some 250 people die in King County without money or family, some after years in nursing...

Recent work for The New York Times on Weyerhaeuser's new urban office in downtown Seattle. After years in one of America's most beautiful suburban office campuses, Weyerhaeuser decided to move into Seattle's urban core as the company reshapes itself from a forestry and timber business...

One of the benefits of having a (then) girlfriend when you’re a student photographer is having a model to call on for studio lighting classes! Not that Jennifer (now my wife) enjoyed the experience. Like most of us, she’s always been self-conscious, but I can say she is still the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen and a stunning model for me to learn lighting with. A real inspiration.

Some of my latest work for Microsoft, photographing the work done by their Redmond based IT team for the 'Gears of War' gaming team based in nearby Vancouver, B.C. Shooting tech is hard, very hard. The first thing that you see is rows and rows of people sitting at their desks, staring at the computers. With a little patience & creativity, though, you can capture some interesting moments but the most important trick is making sure your...

It took just under two years of work, from the keel laying ceremony with Nate Hardy of the San Francisco Fire Department, to launching that city's new fireboat, built here in Seattle by my client, Vigor. The hardest part of photographing the construction of the new boat? The final beauty shots of her during sea trials in Elliot Bay just off of downtown Seattle. Luckily the weather gods cooperated as did the boat's powerful water canons - when...

After years of dull, poorly lit portraits that often look like mugshots, it seems companies are finally wising up and seeking out more imaginative, personal and intimate types portraits of their staff. One thing doing years of editorial portraits for clients like Fortune Magazine and BusinessWeek has taught me, is the ability to work with subjects quickly, help them relax and get images that capture their personality. Sometimes I call them...

Lukas and his daughter Lola, Cape Disappointment, Washington. No explanation needed.

On assignment in the small Eastern Oregon town of Redmond last week. As the sun set, hordes of people - homeless, bikers, rednecks, families with strollers, skateboarders, street punks, a couple in a BMW - all arrived in the town’s small park to play Pokemon Go.

I’m not sure if I’m appalled by this game or not, but after a month of terrible news in the US, maybe folks getting away from their TVs and Facebook and wandering around and...

I just came back from an assignment in New York, with a quote from a friend stuck in my head. Over dinner, talking about our kids, my old New York Times colleague and mentor, Howard French said, "Our children consume us". Two days after getting back, with that quote in my head, I shot this image (on my new Fuji X100T camera) of my daughter Phoebe and wife Jennifer getting ready for school in the...

Long before the iPhone panorama swipe mode came along, there were actual panorama cameras that mechanically scanned across the view, capturing the image on a wide format negative. It's hard to image the technical skills needed to operate such a camera and process the negatives, but imagine doing it with a few hundred rowdy English public school boys, myself included. The threat of detention was the tool used to keep order during these photo...

Ten years ago this month I was maced at work for the first time. It always sounds strange thinking about getting sprayed by police with mace but what was stranger was after the image here was published, the French police spraying me sent a charming letter, apologizing for hitting me and asking for a copy of the photograph. C'est la vie of a photojournalist!

Something I learned this week: fighting the wind, cold and a spinning head are needed to photograph a fast moving pilot boat from a helicopter. One of the things I love about my work is I learn something new every assignment. I've done numerous aerial photo assignments of ferries and ships for local shipbuilder Vigor Industrial, but shooting a slow, lumbering ferry in Seattle’s Elliot Bay, I...

Another amazing day at the Vigor Industrial shipyards here in Seattle. After nearly two months of rain, the sun finally shone, creating some wonderfully epic light to document the company's work on the USGCG Healy, the nation's largest icebreaker. The U.S. Coast Guard currently has only three polar icebreakers: two heavy (the Polar Sea and the Polar Star) and one medium (the Healy), so there's a serious push by state and local officials for...

So decided to really throw back, with an old photo I found in a box, taken by fellow photo student Chris Finger while at Columbia College in Chicago in 1993. Myself with my then girlfriend, and now wife, Jennifer. I love this image, Jennifer looks so in control!

Recent aerial work of the new Artists at Play playground at the Seattle center, featured in Gray Magazine.

Double page spreads in actual magazines are pretty rare these days. I managed two in this month’s Geo Magazine from Germany for a piece on Paul Stamets and his amazing work on mushrooms.

Even when I try to take a break from being a photographer, I can’t. The image above was caught while on a camping trip with my daughter Zoe in Mount Rainier National Park. I only brought my little old Fuji X10 but when I saw the light at Shadow Lake I knew it was back to “work”.

Earlier this month I got a tour of Shell Oil’s controversial Polar Pioneer, an exploratory oil drilling platform berthed at the Port of Seattle before heading to the Arctic to search for potential oil reserves. The rig was met by protests when it arrived and departed Seattle and helped coin a whole new word – “kayaktivists” – for the protestors who met the rig in their kayaks. If Shell plans on bringing these rigs back to Seattle, judging by...

After spending a day earlier this summer photographing the interior of Amazon's new bio-Spheres here in Seattle I finally started shooting some exterior work for landscape architects Site Workshop. Working from dawn 'til dusk I tried to capture all the shifts in light and activity that happen around...

Always nice to get an old style, double page spread (two!) in an actual paper magazine. Makes me feel young again!

Twenty three years ago I took a photograph of two young girls in an alley in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. Wendy Om (age 3 at the time) and her sister Olivia (age 5) where sisters to Ricky, an 18 year old member of a local street gang called the Loco Boyz who were, like Wendy and Olivia, Cambodian refugees who had survived the Khmer Rouge genocide. Ricky was party of an extensive...

There’s probably not a documentary photographer alive who hasn’t been influenced by Mary Ellen Mark. Mark, who died today at age 75, was a seminal photographer, especially for those of us...

I just returned from a 3 day assignment in Las Vegas, doing a travel story for a Spanish language magazine. It’s been 22 years since I was last in the neon-lit, desert town with a camera, working on a story with Gino Siang, a young Cambodian refugee and gang member who I spent nearly two years photographing as part of a story on the Cambodian diaspora. One of my favorite images was taken as we passed the famed Flamingo Casino on the Strip, in...

I first realized I could use my camera to protect myself from unpleasant realities while working on a story in Cambodia on land mines. Photographing in the Battambang Hospital I was confronted with the daily toll of war as people – young and old – flowed into the emergency rooms with horrific injuries caused by land mine explosions...

I finished my first plane spotting collage, working from the images I wrote about earlier. I have no idea where this will go, right now I’m envisioning wallpapering my office with a giant mural and letting my head spin. I guess I’m trying to bring the thrill back to flying, something I find very pedestrian these days. Some people complain about how...

My daughter Phoebe enjoying Washington’s stunning Pacific Coast in Kalaloch, WA. My work usually slows down this time of year which means more photos of the kids than normal!

Would you pay $400,000 for this home that’s Zillow says is only worth $73,325? What if you knew it was the childhood home of Kurt Cobain, legendary singer for Nirvana, and that second floor window might give a glimpse into the struggles and inspirations of his life?

The...