THE HOURGLASS

Although he grew up in a house with a darkroom and a subscription to National Geographic and has had a camera in his hands since he was a tot, it took a stint as a pre-med student to convince Brown Cannon III that his future lay in professional photography. “We had to build a pinhole camera for a chemistry class and explain the chemical process by which the image comes to life,” he remembers. For Cannon, the experiment proved to be the proverbial light bulb moment. His pinhole shot, of the clock tower in downtown Denver, prompted a radical change. “Within a month I was at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena,” he continues. “My family and friends thought I was crazy.”

One of Cannon’s teachers at the Art Center, James Fee, stressed that the goal of a photographer is to be constantly shooting what inspires you. “That really got me thinking about what I enjoyed as a kid,” Cannon says. “Being outdoors, big open spaces, being around people who were active, nature. Those were what my best memories were about.”

That Cannon has ended up shooting mainly travel photography—which, as he notes, encompasses everything from landscape shots to portraits—is no accident. Growing up, he spent summers in northern Colorado and Thanksgiving and Christmas in Hawaii, where he has relatives. Whether in the mountains or by the ocean, he was constantly in environments that inspire awe and wonder. “As a kid, we would spend every summer in a doublewide trailer on our family’s ranch in Fort Lupton,” he says. “Every afternoon, the thunder storms would come in. You could see them coming across the sky and feel how the air changed and feel the wind and then smell the dirt when it got wet. It’s one of those memories I cherish. I love being in places where nature hits you right in the face.”