A life documented through photographs, film, places, people, experiences, and the moments that became stories.
This archive began long before Cleeeezy™ had a name.
Before websites, destination guides, featured moments, portfolios, or editorial stories, there were photographs.
My mother was always taking pictures when I was growing up. Family gatherings often meant pulling out the photo albums and looking back through years of moments that had already happened. There were photographs of how I dressed, where I went, the people around me, and the everyday experiences that slowly became pieces of a personal history.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was growing up surrounded by an archive.
As technology changed, the way I documented life changed with it—from photographs to video, from physical albums to digital files, from cameras to websites, and eventually to an entire creative practice built around preserving experiences through a lens.
Living The Dream – Untold True Story™ is where those pieces come together.
It is not simply a biography.
It is an evolving archive of real experiences, original photography, cinematic video, documentary storytelling, creative work, travel, people, places, and the moments that shaped the perspective behind Cleeeezy™.
The Instinct to Document
The instinct to document was there early.
In high school, I served as a student government historian for three years and held class leadership positions throughout high school, including Senior Class President.
I was involved in student government, school activities, talent shows, homecoming events, announcements, and other moments that became part of the school record.
Photography eventually became part of that world too.
As part of the Henrico County Spanish-language immersion program, I briefly attended Tucker High School during the fall of 1994, where I took a photography class and learned the fundamentals of film photography—loading film, composing photographs, working with camera settings, developing images, and watching a photograph emerge through the darkroom process.
After leaving the immersion program that fall, I returned to Henrico High School, where I continued my high school years and ultimately graduated.
It was a completely different relationship with photography than simply taking a picture on a phone.
You had to think about the shot.
You had to preserve the film.
You had to wait.
And then you had to see what you captured.
Yearbooks, photographs, school events, performances, and personal memories continued adding pieces to the archive.
The technology changed.
The instinct didn’t.
From Documentation to Technology
As I moved through college and into professional life, documentation became increasingly connected to technology, communication, creativity, and digital experiences.
My first plane trip came in 2000, traveling to Bloomington, Illinois for an NPHC conference. By then, travel itself was becoming part of the archive.
College brought new projects.
Professional life brought new environments.
Travel brought new places.
Cameras became digital.
Video became easier to capture.
The internet became a place where experiences could be published rather than simply stored.
And eventually, the work expanded into web development, marketing, branding, digital products, mobile applications, enterprise technology, and creative projects.
The tools continued to evolve.
But underneath all of them was the same idea:
Capture something. Preserve it. Give it context. Share the experience.
The World Gets Bigger
In 2008, I left Virginia for Los Angeles.
Life became more mobile.
Work, travel, technology, business, creativity, friendships, and experiences began overlapping in ways that were difficult to separate into individual chapters.
There were domestic trips, international travel, photographs, videos, creative projects, business ideas, people met along the way, and experiences that were sometimes documented extensively and other times preserved only through a handful of photographs.
Some moments were planned.
Others simply happened.
That distinction became important.
Because the most meaningful material in an archive isn’t always the material you planned to create.
Sometimes it is the moment you happened to have a camera with you.
Sometimes it is the place you happened to walk into.
Sometimes it is the person you happened to meet.
And sometimes you don’t understand the significance of the moment until years later.
The Cleeeezy™ View — Ibiza, Spain
Some photographs become meaningful before you understand why.
This was one of them.
In June 2017, I traveled to Barcelona and Ibiza, Spain during a period of major transition in my life.
Just days before the trip, I had been laid off after years of giving everything I had to my career. I had spent years working nights, weekends, on-call hours, special projects, and enterprise responsibilities. I had built systems, solved problems, supported critical environments, and continued pushing toward the next level.
Then suddenly, the job was gone.
The trip had already been planned.
So I went.
Barcelona came first.
I arrived ahead of the rest of the group, navigated an unfamiliar airport, figured out transportation, found a place to stay, and eventually met up with the others.
Then we flew to Ibiza.
What followed was a completely different world—friends, beaches, music, nightlife, food, boats, villas, exploration, and days spent moving around the island.
But underneath all of it, I was still processing what had happened back home.
I had just lost my job.
I didn’t know exactly what came next.
And yet, there I was.
Standing on the rocks at Cala Benirrás, looking toward the Mediterranean and Es Vedrà.
I had a camera nearby. I saw the scene. I asked my friend to take the photograph.
Then I stepped onto the rocks, found my footing, turned toward the water, and spread my arms.
For a moment, there was nothing to solve.
Nothing to explain.
Just the place, the water, the sky, the people, the moment, and the feeling of being there.
The photograph became one of the images I have carried with me ever since.
Years later, its meaning became clearer.
Before I knew the language for it, I was already practicing what would eventually become The Cleeeezy™ View:
Experience the moment. See it from your perspective. Preserve it. Then tell the story behind it.
When a Photograph Becomes a Story
A photograph can preserve a moment.
But context can turn that moment into a story.
That distinction became increasingly important as I continued documenting life.
A photograph of a place tells you where someone was.
A story can tell you why they were there, what was happening around them, what they saw, what they felt, who they encountered, and why the moment mattered.
That realization eventually led me deeper into documentary storytelling.
Learning to See the Story
For six months, I participated in a documentary filmmaking workshop led by veteran filmmaker Bill Badgley.
The workshop wasn’t simply about operating a camera.
It was about learning how to see a story.
Over the course of the sessions, we explored documentary concepts, storytelling structure, visual language, research, archives, interviews, story development, examples of finished work, sizzle pieces, one-sheets, and the many components that can take an idea from raw material to a completed documentary project.
The sessions built on one another.
Each meeting moved the work forward.
And one lesson stayed with me:
Raw footage is not necessarily the story.
The story is what you discover when you understand why you were there.
One experience made that lesson especially clear.
I had captured more than twenty minutes of raw video surrounding the funeral procession for Nipsey Hussle.
At first, I thought the footage itself was the story.
But the conversation in the workshop challenged that idea.
The larger story wasn’t simply that I had recorded an historic event.
It was that I was there.
I had received the news.
I followed what was happening.
I looked at the route.
I prepared to go.
I traveled toward the gathering.
I encountered the crowd.
And along the way, I had a brief personal interaction with Nipsey’s mother.
The footage documented what happened.
My presence provided the perspective.
That distinction changed how I thought about documentary work.
It also helped clarify something that had been developing throughout my life:
The archive isn’t only the photograph.
The archive is the experience, the perspective, the surrounding context, and the story that gives the captured material meaning.
From Documenting Moments to Building an Archive
Over time, the pieces began connecting.
Photography taught me to look.
Travel taught me to experience.
Technology taught me to capture, build, and preserve.
Creative work taught me to shape ideas.
Documentary filmmaking taught me to look for the story inside the material.
And life itself supplied the subject.
The people I met.
The places I visited.
The businesses I built.
The projects I created.
The experiences I shared.
The moments I almost forgot.
The moments I never will.
Cleeeezy™ became the place where those pieces could eventually live together.
The Cleeeezy™ View
The Cleeeezy™ View is a perspective, not a pose.
It isn’t about putting the creator in front of every photograph.
It isn’t about proving where I have been.
It isn’t about collecting destinations for the sake of collecting them.
It is about turning the lens outward.
Toward the place.
Toward the people.
Toward the experience.
Toward the details that might otherwise disappear.
Sometimes the photograph includes me.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes there is a face.
Sometimes there is only a landscape.
Sometimes the most important part of the story is something that happened completely outside the frame.
The goal is not to make the archive about me.
The goal is to make the archive about what was experienced and seen through the lens.
That is the evolution.
From being the subject of the photograph to becoming the person behind the perspective.
An Archive, Not Just a Website
Cleeeezy™ is becoming something larger than a collection of webpages.
It is an editorial archive.
A photograph can become a Featured Moment.
A moment can become a story.
A story can become part of a portfolio.
A place can become part of a Destination Guide.
A location can preserve where the moment happened.
A collection of experiences can reveal an entire journey.
And over time, those individual pieces begin connecting.
The archive becomes a map of experiences rather than simply a list of destinations.
This is why the work can move between travel, culture, food, places, people, creativity, technology, business, photography, video, and everyday life without losing its identity.
The common thread isn’t the category.
It is the perspective.
The Evolution
Cleeeezy™ has existed in different forms over the years.
The technology changed.
The design changed.
The projects changed.
The ideas changed.
What remained was the desire to create, document, build, and share.
Version 2 is an intentional evolution of that idea.
The archive is no longer simply about publishing individual pieces of content.
It is about creating a connected editorial ecosystem where photographs, stories, locations, guides, portfolios, videos, and experiences can reinforce one another.
A single moment can live in multiple dimensions without becoming repetitive.
The photograph preserves the moment.
The story provides context.
The location establishes where it happened.
The guide expands the destination.
The portfolio shows the body of work.
The archive preserves the larger journey.
Together, they create something more valuable than any individual page:
a living record of experiences.
The Cleeeezy™ View — Sydney, Australia
Years after that photograph in Ibiza, the same philosophy began taking a more defined form.
Sydney, Australia became one of the first complete examples of how the Cleeeezy™ archive could bring this approach together.
A single experience could now be documented from multiple perspectives.
A Featured Moment could preserve the image.
An editorial story could explain the experience.
A location could establish exactly where the moment was captured.
A Destination Guide could expand the story beyond one location and document the surrounding city.
A portfolio could preserve the broader body of creative work.
Photography, dining, landmarks, neighborhoods, coastal experiences, walking routes, and stories could all exist within the same destination without becoming the same piece of content.
This is the framework.
One experience. Multiple layers. One connected archive.
Sydney became the first place where I could see that framework operating as a complete system.
What began with a photograph eventually became a way of documenting an entire destination.
And that is the point of the journey.
The archive keeps growing because the experiences keep happening.
Preserve the Moment. Tell the Story.
Not every moment becomes a story.
Not every photograph needs an explanation.
Not every experience needs to become content.
But the moments that matter deserve to be preserved with enough context to understand why they mattered.
That is what this archive is for.
A photograph can show you the sunset.
A story can tell you why you stopped to watch it.
A map can show you where you stood.
A destination guide can show you what existed around you.
A video can let you experience the movement.
And years later, the archive can bring all of those pieces back together.
That is the power of documentation.
The moment happens once.
The archive gives it another life.
The Journey Continues
There are still photographs to find.
Videos to revisit.
Stories to reconstruct.
Places to map.
Projects to complete.
Experiences that have never been published.
And moments whose significance may not yet be fully understood.
That is what makes this an untold true story.
It isn’t finished.
It is still being documented.
Captured Through the Cleeeezy Lens™.
The journey continues.
Explore the Archive
Go deeper into the journey.
Explore the places, stories, photographs, videos, projects, destinations, and experiences that continue to shape the Cleeeezy™ archive.
Featured Moments
Discover individual moments captured through the Cleeeezy Lens™.
The Cleeeezy™ View
Read the stories behind selected photographs, places, and experiences.
Travel Map
Explore destinations documented throughout the journey.
Destination Guides
Explore more places and experiences documented throughout each destination.
Portfolio
Explore selected creative work across photography, video, design, technology, and production.
Stories & Editorial
Go beyond the image and discover the context behind the moment.
Videos
Explore cinematic moments, productions, and visual stories captured throughout the journey.
Music
Explore original music, featured artists, and sounds connected to the Cleeeezy™ archive.
Gallery
Browse curated collections of photography, places, people, and moments captured through the Cleeeezy™ Lens™.