Vineet Teames

I've lived in the northwest for twenty years and it's hard to believe it's been that long. My wife and I and our two dogs, Sweet Pea and Dōgen, share a home that we love in northeast Portland. It's a quiet neighborhood, just the way we like it, and our neighbors are wonderful. We feel pretty blessed.  

Not new to photography, I first took an interest as a teen.  My middle school had a great photography teacher and a well supplied dark room. Yes, an actual dark room.  By the time I reached high school I knew I had some type of photojournalist inside of me. Later I worked on various college papers and I shot a lot of street photography for my own pleasure. 

In the past I've worked as a carpenter and I owned my own landscaping business. I enjoy working with my hands as well as attending to my creative expression and I struck gold when I made the leap to being a professional photographer.  My hands, my eyes, my creative vision and my camera are now my tools.  The process and the product of photographing people is both thrilling and fulfilling.  

I love witnessing and recording the human experience. The layers and history of our stories lay within our expressions, how we dance, how we walk, how two friends sit on the grass and talk in the summer shade. All of these things are artifacts of a story and I consider myself an archeologist of some sort. I bring myself close to these moments when I've got a camera in my hand and I find the gift of presence and awareness. I "enter the zone." Photography doesn't necessarily satiate my curiosity about the human experience or the the world. Photography offers me a path to being an observer looking outward, responding to an experience, another person, another story.