Cinematic journeys across the Mongolian steppe
I've made just about every ethical and technical mistake possible while shooting documentary work in rural Mongolia. Here are the five that cost me the most — and the specific lessons each one taught me about earning the frame instead of taking it.
After weeks on the steppe where the loudest thing for miles is wind moving through grass, landing back in the US felt like walking into a machine that never powers down. Here's what silence actually costs — and why we keep trying to buy it back.
Out here, your phone is a brick and your best GPS is a herder named Batbayar who points with his chin. A practical field guide to route planning where the roads exist only in memory — and why that's the whole point.
You will be handed a bowl of something you can't identify, and the only correct response is to eat it with both hands. Notes on nomadic food culture, the etiquette of saying yes, and why the best meal of your life won't come with a receipt.
I went to western Mongolia chasing a sound I'd only heard through laptop speakers, and found it in ger kitchens at midnight. A field guide to hearing — and respectfully recording — khoomei, the morin khuur, and the long songs where they're still alive.
Somewhere between a nine-year-old racing horseback across open grass and the liability form I signed at an American zip-line park, I started wondering when adventure travel got so careful. Mongolia doesn't manage risk — it raises kids inside it, and somehow everyone turns out fine.
Everyone romanticizes the Gobi until the diesel gauge drops and the sandstorm rolls in. Here's the honest ledger — dollars, liters, and hours — behind my crossing of Mongolia's harshest desert.
The best evening of my last trip to Mongolia exists only in my memory — no frames, no card, no proof. A reflection on why the most meaningful moments of travel photography are the ones we choose not to take.
Most travelers meet the Kazakh eagle hunters in October, when the golden grass makes for easy pictures. I went in January instead, when temperatures drop past minus 30 and the tradition itself feels closest to the bone.
I grew up going to county rodeos in Montana, so I thought I understood what Mongolia's Naadam would feel like. I was wrong in the best possible way — and the difference says a lot about both cultures.
I went to the Mongolian steppe to take pictures and came home questioning my entire relationship with my iPhone. A first-person account of living at the pace of a nomad family — and why America's hustle culture can't compete.
Mongolia doesn't hand you compositions — it makes you earn them. Here's how I work the light on the open steppe, shoot by firelight inside a ger, and photograph nomadic families without ever treating them like subjects.