A bit of Shaun’s story:
I grew up in Vermont, home to rolling green mountains, cows, and maple trees and tin sap buckets. It's hard to sum up my childhood in the Northeast Kingdom, where I was raised and my family still lives in the log house we built there. Many formative happy years were spent on our little homestead. I was homeschooled, given a little freedom and a bike, and quickly learned to appreciate Creation as I hiked, biked, camped, backpacked, skied, snowshoed, hunted, fished, canoed and photographed my way around the northeast. Loving, nurturing parents urged me to pursue my dreams.
An irrational obsession with rocks and the outdoors from toddlerhood eventually led me into a career as a rock-man (geologist). My professional life provided opportunities to travel all over North America and even into the arctic, flying missions with an aerospace company in Nunavik, Canada and later working everywhere from the American Southwest to the North Slope of Alaska.
In college I studied aerial imagery and remote sensing for geological exploration, and the days of my aerospace career were spent honing my skills in everything from satellite data processing to hyperspectral and thermal infrared imaging. I went to work every day in a twin-turboprop DHC-6 bush plane and flew some of the most advanced imaging cameras in the world. But everywhere I traveled, no matter how many cold pixels of the earth’s crust I processed, my appreciation for this incredible world kept me married to a personal camera.
Today, the bush planes and cryogen-cooled thermal cameras are long behind me, and my personal cameras have gotten a bit more advanced. Photography, in all its artistic expressions, naturally took its place in my life as a full-time pursuit.
I now live with my wife Elisabeth and work my craft in northern New Hampshire - our personal idea of paradise. My history with the White Mountains goes back to my teen years, when I regularly hitched rides into the wild places to experience a remoteness and ruggedness I couldn’t find anywhere else in the East. One may notice in my portfolios that photography has taken me far beyond NH, but my excitement about our return here is impossible to convey. Here is a never-ending list of things that inspire me: white-frosted mountains, weather-beaten trees, deep valleys, and villages filled with the most unique people in the country. Our community of Littleton and the surrounding area is robust and thriving, with ways for nearly anyone to plug in and contribute according to their talents. We are thankful to be a part of this.
I am something of a purist in my approach to photography - I love to search out those really, really special places and that really special light, and replicate for others what I saw in real life, as closely as possible. My work at least attempts to represent my personal experiences in some way. One of my goals is to inspire others to travel and experience the world beyond wherever they live, or at least to see and appreciate the specialness that is right where they are.