After graduating high school in 2005, I landed a job at BEST VIP Transportation answering phones and booking reservations for people in need of town cars, limousines, and buses for whatever the occasion may have been. That summer would also be the end of my “racing career” as I called it quits in August of 2005. I quit racing, had no camera, and was absolutely terrible at my job answering phones. TERRIBLE. Thank you to my then boss, Rob Vaughn, for not firing me when he should have and, instead, letting me quit. From there, I would go onto land a job at Disneyland where I spent almost two years working for The Mouse. During this time, I had saved up enough money to purchase a used Canon 20d and a used Canon 17-40 L-Series f/4.0. I, again, started bugging Donn about a job at TWMX. But I would get nothing more than a silk pass to SX that would allow me to bring in my camera to shoot photos from the stands. I remember shooting like crazy all day and even the night show. I would wander the stadium levels by myself, armed with a Canon 20d, a rented 70-200mm with a converter to give me 300mm, shooting everything I could. I would submit my photos to Donn in hopes something would, at best, make the TWMX website, but it never happened. I kept shooting, bothering Donn and eventually, in 2007, Donn told me he’d have a credential set aside for me at the 2007 Hangtown Classic to shoot on the track for TWMX. It was all I had dreamed of! If I couldn’t be on the track as a racer, this was, unequivocally, the next best thing!
Swap told me that TWMX would not pay for my air travel, lodging, food, or rental car. So, if I wanted to do this, it was on me to find a way up there. At this point, I had been fired from a Starbucks and was now working at an art supply store stocking shelves. I saved up all the money I had from that job and paid for my own travel to get up to Sacramento. In 2007, we were still on the old outdoor format of flying in on Friday, practicing on Saturday, and racing on Sunday. So, for a kid making $8.00 an hour, this three-day jaunt was costly. But I had no option; I had to do this in order to invest in my future. Armed with my credential and light brown photo vest—I remember hustling my butt off that weekend—shooting everything I could in hopes something would catch the eye of Donn and Garth. After the weekend concluded, I submitted my selects to the crew. Honestly, I had no expectations. If I could get a small gallery on the website, then that was a win. And, this was pre-social media, so being on TWMX at this time was a big damn deal. Somehow, Donn and Garth liked what I shot at Hangtown. They ended up buying close to 10 photos for print. Yes, that’s right. I said print! They didn’t want a web gallery, they wanted to purchase my work to run in the magazine. Not only did they run multiple photos in the Kickstart section of the magazine, they ran a few of my shots in their Hangtown feature and, most importantly, Garth selected a photo I shot of Ricky Carmichael to run in the SCAN section. Back then, SCAN was, essentially, Garth’s art gallery of still imagery. And, to have your shot in that section was the closest thing to winning a championship. It meant you had a damn good eye and were somebody to take notice of, especially because it was primarily Garth’s work that lived here. So, if you saw a different name credited for the photo, you knew that was somebody damn talented. I ended with a half page shot of RC in SCAN and wrote my own caption for that photo. That moment changed everything. I was a published photographer. The paycheck was cool, but I didn’t care about that. The fact that I was now a published photographer in the most iconic section of the biggest MX magazine in the world during this time was baffling to me.
