My 1st National Magazine Cover Photo

As a student photographer for Texas A&M’s Marketing and Communications Department, occasionally they would give me a special assignment that was outside of my normal duties when their full-time photographer didn’t have time to do it. Those special assignments usually focused on a person the university or some outside entity wanted to feature; one time I took photos of a well-renowned chef who was in charge of A&M’s Dining Services. But this particular assignment in 2008 I was instructed to travel to the residence of Lavell Merritt, Jr., who was a US National Park Service ranger attending A&M as a Recreation, Park, and Tourism Sciences doctorate student. Port of Harlem Magazine contacted the University and wanted to do a cover story on Lavell and they needed a good photo for it, so my bosses instructed me to contact him in order to set up the session. He suggested that we should meet at his house and take photos of him on his boat in the nearby lake. I got in the boat with him and took a few shots in the boat as he was rowing around the lake. We took the photos in the wintertime, so the trees were still dead.

After the session, I submitted the photos and a few months later I had my first national magazine cover.