Don began his photographic career in grade 12 when a local TV station, CHBC-TV in Kelowna, BC, had neglected to put a photographer on staff to capture images of products for local advertisers. Instead, they went to the high school for a kid. Don picked up a Bolex 16mm camera at the station and began shooting newsfilm.  He then persuaded them to buy an Image Auricon camera that recorded optical sound on the film and began shooting documentaries.  After his undergrad work at UBC, he started a film production company in Vancouver and shot industrial films, as well as far too many television commercials.

Don moved to Calgary, where he is now based, to design and run a motion picture production program at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, for fourteen years.  While there, he took a sabbatical to complete a Masters Degree in Fine Arts from York University in Toronto.

In the mid-90s Don and his wife, Val, began to travel extensively, and to specialize in wildlife photography, a passion that continues to this day. Don has visited 114 countries to date, photographing wildlife in all of them. His style is evolving, and he prefers to react to what he sees and find a way to frame it effectively rather than to exercise the high level of control necessary for producing TV commercials.

While teaching, Don moved away from the concept of ‘composition’, which is what painters do when working with a blank canvas, where they can place things wherever they like, to ‘framing’, which is the process of photographers and cinematographers when deciding on how to position the frame to capture images of what is already in place. He discovered the work of his students noticeably improved when he taught the concept of framing rather than composition.

Don is a member of the Cochrane Camera Club and CAPA.