About Paul

I was very fortunate to grow up on Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada where we were one of the few non-Inuit families living in a small settlement of 140 Inuit. The Inuit taught me how to survive in the Arctic, read the weather and, most of all, they taught me patience. As a kid, without television, radio, and computer games, my friends and I would spend all of our waking hours in the hills watching wildlife, weather and the light play shadow games across the landscape. At that young age, the seed to become a nature photographer was deeply planted.

In my fourth and final year of studying marine biology at the University of Victoria, I was having a very hard time preparing for my genetics final. The night before the exam, I had a huge revelation. Instead of studying, I wrote feverishly on scrap paper, outlining my career as a nature photographer, right down to the tiniest detail: species, locations, goals, dreams, travels and the list goes on. As expected, I failed the exam miserably but passed the course. But best of all, I had a blueprint for a career filled with passion and hard work. It is kind of eerie how much of what I wrote that night has come true.

As anticipated, I worked as a wildlife biologist for four years in the Northwest Territories. I was fortunate enough to work on numerous unique species such as lynx, grizzly bears and polar bears. Finally, with my feet firmly planted on the ground, I left for a three-month solo expedition into the high Arctic to live on the open tundra with the bears, wolves and open sky. That trip helped me confirm that I could better serve wildlife populations by becoming a nature photojournalist rather than a biologist.

My goal is to bridge the gap between scientific research and the public by producing stories for magazines such as National Geographic. Since 1994, I have been fortunate to see my work published in hundreds of magazines around the world. In the last few years, I have published seven stories in National Geographic Magazine: "Atlantic Salmon," July 2003, "Northern Exposure," January 2004, "Phoenix Islands," February 2004, “Where Currents Collide,” August 2006, “Deadly Beauty: Leopard Seals,” November 2006, “Life at the Edge,” June 2007, “Narwhals,” August 2007. Other stories are in the works and I will be on assignment for National Geographic for much of the next two years.