02/01/2026
I’ve never had just one creative lane. Everything I do bleeds into everything else, and that wasn’t planned. It just happened. Maybe that’s something bigger than me at work. But it definitely wasn’t intentional on my part...
This all started back in 1983 in junior high, when I was forced to take an art class. Funny thing is, that was one of the few times my ADHD and OCD actually shut up. My legs weren’t bouncing. My hands weren’t tapping. I was locked in listening to the teacher introduce us to the Reilly and Loomis methods, and instead of copying what was on the chalkboard, I was drawing Batman and Superman DJing in graffiti-filled alleyways, turntables hooked up to massive Cerwin Vega speakers, while the rest of the Justice League danced in the street.
By 1986, I needed turntables of my own. A friend who already DJed needed $250 to finish buying his second Technics 1200. I gave him the money I had saved and took his used Gemini belt-driven turntables and mixer. I hooked the mixer up to my sister’s Fisher tower speakers and practiced every single day. No cap... I treated it like discipline, like a calling!
That summer, I went a step further. I got signatures from everyone on my block, paid the fee to shut the street down, borrowed barricades, and threw my neighborhood’s first-ever block party. Saturday was the event. By Monday, I was handing out business cards at school. By Friday, the phone at home wouldn’t stop ringing... Birthdays, quinceaneras, weddings, anything with music I was a part of!
In the early '90s, I picked up my first camera; a Kodak Star 110. Simple point-and-shoot. We lived near an alley, so I had my sisters pose against graffiti-covered walls. I’d lie on the ground, shoot upward, experimented with angles. When I got the film developed, one photo stopped me cold. My oldest sister had moved slightly, and the motion blur caught my eye. That’s when the question hit me, "If I can capture movement, what else can I capture?"
There was a fixed light mounted on the alley wall. I moved the camera as I hit the shutter, and suddenly the light, graffiti, and texture melted into something unexpected. That was the moment I understood photography wasn’t about stillness, it was about control.
My second camera came in 2005, a DSLR with two kit lenses. That’s where I mastered the exposure triangle: ISO, aperture, shutter speed. Everything else came later, but that foundation never changed.
In 2010, I got into programming, not because I wanted to, but because I had to. I needed a website, and I wasn’t about to pay $75 to $125 an hour. So I taught myself. Design. Function. Databases. Whatever I could find on YouTube, I watched. That’s when the interest flipped into obsession. CSS. JavaScript. PHP. Once I realized I wasn’t limited to websites and could build actual applications, there was no turning back. Today, I’m fluent in more than 20 programming languages.
Years before all of that, my mother taught me something special. She was a seamstress. We had no money; lived welfare, food stamps, Section 8. That was life. But my mom could make magic with an old sewing machine. My older sister was my best friend and the most charismatic person on our block. Everyone wanted to be her. Her friends passed her fashion magazines like Vogue and Cosmopolitan, and she’d pick outfits she loved. My mom would study them, we’d go buy fabric and patterns, and she’d recreate them.
People thought my sister spent hundreds on one outfit. The truth? Maybe $25 or $30 in materials. That’s where I learned about style, presentation, and illusion, before I even knew those words mattered.
Fast forward to 2020. COVID shuts everything down, and I step into livestreaming. That forced me to learn ATTENTION: "Photoshop. Premiere Pro. After Effects. Lightroom. DaVinci Resolve. Presets. LUTs. OBS. Broadcasting. Storytelling. ALL in real time."
Today, I sit on over 500 gigabytes of custom presets, LUTs, and effects I personally created, stored on a SanDisk Extreme Pro 4TB drive. I use them to elevate the work I capture on my Canon R6 Mark II, paired with L-series glass, EL-5 flashes, softboxes, dream dishes, COB RGB lighting, RODE mics; all of it. The gear is powerful. But the real magic happens in post-production.
Like I said, "everything I do feeds everything else. Always has. None of it was mapped out. None of it was strategic in the beginning."
That’s what makes B-RAGE PRODUCTIONS what it is today.
