I shot this the other day in the heart of Chinatown. The light was irresistible and I knew beforehand that if I didn’t take the shot, I would regret it.

I waited a beat, watched the afternoon sun shine across the old storefronts, and pressed the shutter.

I met Charlotte in October of 1996, almost 30 years ago to the day.

At the time, I had pretty much given up that I would ever meet someone whose life lined up with mine where it counts: an insatiable hunger for travel, a shared love of Asia, and a need to redefine myself.

Someone who would put up with me.

Between departure gates and late-night drafts, we folded work into life and life into work until the border was blurred.

We lived to travel and traveled to feel alive.

What began as a series of “what ifs” eventually became our company’s direction. And when daughter Elle Agnes was born almost twenty-five years ago, she joined us wherever we went.

Charlotte and I built our little company from scratch. We embraced the nascent Internet and took advantage of all its burgeoning potential to allow us to work with almost anything, anywhere.

Call it entrepreneurship if you must; to us, it was more genuine curiosity and an addiction to challenging conventions and not allowing perceived limitations to hinder us.

We failed, learned, moved on, and enjoyed success here and there. Always looking forward. Always enjoying the journey. Never looking too far back.

If luck is about identifying opportunity, creativity is about finding a way to express it. It can certainly be both a blessing and a curse.

It’s a constant tug of war. A hunger that can never be fully satisfied. There’s always a new frame to compose, a scene to document, and a beautiful woman like Charlotte to capture.