Who I am

Posted by Dustin on Sep 29, 2011 in | 0 comments

I grew up in Minnesota. While working toward a degree in computer design and animation, I enlisted in the Marine Corps and received airfare to sunny San Diego, Calif. As a combat photographer in Hawaii, I embedded with units to document field exercises, such as combined-arms training on the Big Island, cold-weather exercises in Alaska and an excavation mission in Vietnam. I developed visual information procedures for an Operation Kosovo Force press center in Macedonia, while traveling between Kosovo and Greece.

After five years as a Marine, I joined a defense contractor in the Middle East. From 2003-2010, I lived in Qatar and traveled to Cyprus, Lebanon, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. During my travels, I’ve studied the interactions between Arab, Persian and Asian societies. While employed as an Army public affairs coordinator in Arabia, I initiated timely marketing plans for hometown, national and international publications. I redesigned and reorganized an installation newsmagazine to increase community acceptance and contributions. My work reveals the traits of an open-minded, multi-talented experimenter, who uses fundamental journalism skills to stimulate public interest and sustain public awareness. As an information curator, I’ve arranged media interview requests, captured high-quality photographs for public release and promptly authored hundreds of news and feature stories for thousands of publishers.

I enjoy technology. My endeavors have included studying computer workstations: CPUs, motherboards, graphics cards, hard drives and underlying infrastructures, such as IDE, SATA and USB. I’ve also studied HTML, XHTML, mySQL, CSS, PHP, Java, Web content management software, distributed reporting services and social media. I’ve found the migration from film to digital single-lens reflex photography as a powerful transition in imagery acquisition standards, and the rise of participatory media as a tremendous move toward democratizing information.