Welcome to The Unvarnished Take

I've spent the last while building two things at once: a documentary called Unvarnished: Lethbridge, and a photography practice built around portraits and stories. This blog is where I bring both of those together — not the polished highlight reel, but the actual process, the setbacks, and the thinking behind the work.

Why Unvarnished

It started with something small and a little annoying: scrolling through Facebook comments trashing Lethbridge in ways that didn't match what I'd actually seen living here. Sure, the city has problems — every city does — but "dangerous" and "nothing to see here" never squared with my own experience walking around downtown.

What I noticed wasn't just people disagreeing about the city. It was people who didn't know much about their own city at all — driving past things every day without realizing what they were looking at, then blaming each other instead of looking closer or working together.

So I picked up a camera and started walking.

Ground level, on purpose

If you've seen any of the documentary footage, you'll notice there's no drone shots, no sweeping aerial views. That's deliberate. Part of it is practical — I don't fly drones well, and I've crashed enough of them to know my limits. But the bigger reason is philosophical: nobody experiences their city from 500 feet up. We experience it at eye level, on sidewalks, in coulees, buried in our phones or rushing between errands.

Unvarnished is shot the way people actually see — street level, Micro Four Thirds cameras, raw over polished. If the documentary is going to show people what they're missing, it has to show it from where they're actually standing.

Where photography fits in

The documentary work and my photography practice aren't really separate projects to me — they're the same instinct pointed in different directions. Documentary work is about seeing a place clearly. Portrait and creative photography is about seeing a person clearly — finding the story in how someone shows up, what they care about, what they're trying to express.

That's shown up in different ways: cosplay photography, conceptual and creative shoots, and more intimate portrait work. Different subjects, same underlying question — how do you photograph someone honestly instead of just decoratively?

What to expect here

This blog won't be tutorials or gear reviews. It's going to be a record of the actual journey — the interviews that fell through, the ones that surprised me, the shots that didn't work and the ones that did, and the slow process of building something from nothing in a city most people think they already understand.

If you're curious about Lethbridge, about documentary filmmaking, about photography as a way of paying attention — you're in the right place.

More soon.