About

Steve McCullough is a researcher, writer, and photographer. He has a doctorate in literature, life writing, and history; loves working with ideas and information; and has photographed everything from e-commerce products to caribou hunting in Nunavut.

Writing

I've  been a writer since I was about ten years old. In public school, I was part of an enriched writing program in which we wrote and performed a radio play for the CBC. I think it was about bears.

My experience and interests are eclectic. I hold a PhD in English, for which I studied women's Holocaust memoirs. My MA research was on a little-studied Middle English long poem by Chaucer. Before I went into the humanities, I studied physics and did electromagnetic field research. And since finishing graduate school, I have worked as an open-source web developer as well as doing freelance writing, research, and photography.

I sometimes blog about things that interest me.

Photography

I love making photographs that combine geometry and proportion of composition with human context and emotional meaning. My photographic idols are masters of this, and include Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Nan Goldin, Lee Friedlander, Galen Rowell and many more.

My first serious interest in photography was spurred by shooting landscapes and urban design / architecture, but in more recent years I have been deepening my engagement with portraiture and event photography.

With the exception of product photography -- where the goal is pleasing, descriptive accuracy -- I consider photography to be an art of revealing relationships: between elements in the frame, between light and shadow, between the image and the viewer.

Life

In my off time, I try to get as far away from computers as possible: I'm an avid outdoorsman who bikes, hikes, hunts, fishes, and canoes.