About Jason
“Jason's ability to dive into the persona of each person he works with, consistently drawing out unbelievably authentic expression has reached a new level again.”
How we do one thing is how we do everything.
I’m either living my truth… or I’m not.
I’m either communicating my highest ideals; aligned with my highest frequency; tapping into flow; and creating for the highest expression of good in the world… or I’m not.
There’s no grey area here.
So when I say that I’ll hold you… myself… and this work to a standard - that’s just how I show up.
Anything less and I’m out of alignment (and therefore out of integrity) with myself and the universe.
It's not the moments that matter…
It's what's between them.
I learned this back in my theatre days when I was 17 or 18 - decades before I ever picked up a camera. My first tech director (Tina Stanley at the Theatre Outlet in Allentown) made us run scene transitions over and over until they were fluid… obsessive, polished.
I didn't fully get it until years after I'd left the industry. I was in an audience watching a brilliant play, but the transitions were so jarring that I couldn't stay with the show. The acting was great, but it didn't matter. The clunky transitions kept breaking the suspension of disbelief.
I realised it’s the transitions that fundamentally determine the experience. Just like how music isn’t the notes. It’s about how artfully one can navigate the spaces between the notes that makes the music.
That's what I'm doing in a portrait session. Not working the moments… that's easy. That's where most photographers look. I'm working in the spaces… the movement between the moments.
I’ve found that's where the expression actually lives.
I never planned to be a guide...
I never planned to be a wilderness guide. I'd grown up in theatre - vampire hours… never outside, never camped in my life.
I was twenty, finishing my last stage management contract before moving to New York to join the union and do it for real. But a little voice inside was screaming at me to change. I was pretty sure I needed to get out of theatre…. But I didn’t know what.
At lunch one day with my agent, I mentioned I was thinking of walking back home to Pennsylvania along the Appalachian Trail to figure out my next move. A few months of walking introspection to figure out my life - you know, the kind of plan that only makes sense at twenty… or sixty.
I found out her father owned a place called Wilderness Adventure at Eagle Landing, just outside Roanoke. I asked for an introduction. I had literally zero outdoor skills. But I talked my way into the job on soft skills alone. Years of stage managing meant I knew how to read a group, hold a room, and bring a lot of disparate pieces into one working thing (even at such a young age).
They taught me the rest - and six months later I led my first trip. Two weeks with a pack of twelve and thirteen-year-olds, two instructors. I was shit-scared. People had sent me their children. I barely knew anything! We hadn't reached the trailhead yet - we were still on-site, still packing - and one girl had quietly tried to bring a hairdryer. I hadn’t realised it yet of course, but that's when I started the actual work. Not at the trailhead. At the packs.
After about 4 years I started working all over North America… eventually Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Malaysia. Two-week trips; four-week trips; leadership intensives. I dealt with everything in those years: a near-drowning, a whiteout in Joshua Tree, a kid who told me about the black cloud that followed him everywhere, broken bones, broken kids… But every single time, there were kids who turned out to be made of something that nobody (including them) had any idea was in there.
Here's what eight years in the field actually taught me. The first step happens before the first step. Long before anyone laces a boot or picks up a pack, you're already guiding. You're reading them. They're reading you. Trust isn't built at the trailhead. By the time you're at the trailhead, it's already either there… or it isn't. It's built in the parking lot, around the pile of gear, in the small jokes about the hairdryer. I found that people will follow you somewhere uncomfortable; but only if they decided they could - before they ever realised that they even were deciding.
The other thing it taught me (and this took longer) was to walk at the back of the line. The more I pulled back (without disappearing) the more they led themselves. The trip got better. They got bigger. I stopped needing to be in front for anything to happen. I feel like that’s when I became a real guide. When I understood that I could let things unfold, without trying to control so much.
I don't guide in the wilderness anymore. But I never stopped being a guide. The terrain just changed.
