After all, it’s easy to confuse love with sex and sex with love. Of the many stories of adoption reunions, there were a few of brothers and sisters, and mothers and sons, who fell headlong in love, intoxicated by “deep, unrestrained love” and “intense, incestual feelings.” This didn’t surprise or disgust me when I read about it, or even when I experienced it myself. I wanted to be literally in touch, as if separating from him physically would tear off a piece of my skin.Ī book I’d read before getting on the train, The Adoption Triangle, had prepared me for those sorts of feelings. I was 34 then, and he was six years younger than me. He was the sort of man who wouldn’t look away from another person’s gaze probably, I thought, a habit picked up in prison, where to look away meant weakness. I was under a spell of fascination with the resemblance I’d been missing my whole life as an adopted person, and although I looked like all of my siblings in some way, the resemblance was strongest between Johnny and me. I liked rule-breakers.Īt the train station, and all during the week of my first visit to Savannah, Johnny and I spent long minutes staring into each other’s eyes. Unlike some defense lawyers I knew, I liked my clients – and I liked the no-frills, no-bullshit, blue-collar culture of people who were poor and struggling. It sounded like most of my five brothers were a lot like my clients. Would they be so different from me that I’d be repelled? Or would I snap into place with them? I’d learned a little about them all from letters and phone calls. This would be my first time meeting them. My siblings grew up with my mother and their father. I’d been adopted as an infant by a family up North. My mother had been fifteen when I was born, and just three months later she married the man who would be the father of the rest of her children, a daughter and five sons. Riding that train for twenty hours, I swung wildly between worries and hopes about what life inside a new family would mean to me. Learning I was related to someone with felony convictions didn’t bother me I was no saint, for one thing, and I’d also been a criminal defense lawyer for ten years by then. He’d just been released from prison his body was meaty and well-nourished.

He was a good-looking man, as were all my brothers. He had a dimple on one cheek that appeared when he smiled, just like me. His eyes were my eyes, his lips were my lips. Johnny was dark, like me and our mother, who’d died the previous year. Already in tears, I went for my sister first, and then Mike, while Johnny stood quietly and waited his turn to hug me. When the train taking me to the reunion pulled into the Savannah station, Johnny was waiting on the platform with my sister Belinda and my brother Mike.

I have my own kit, and also have strong relationships with various rental companies which allows me to offer competitive rates for any additional hire.My brother Johnny had just been paroled from the Georgia state prison system when I found my birth family. My diverse experience covers factual, drama recon, shooting sequences for large technical setups - see River Monster's clip, factual,observational documentary, helicopter aerial’s, drones, gimbals, interviews, green screen, Steadicam, and live events. I’m capable of shooting without a director and recording my own sound.

I've worked over many years on BAFTA Award-winning programmes with Bear Grylls and Attenborough, giving me specialist experience in filming multi-camera technical setups in normal as well as extreme environments, including jungles, glaciers, deserts, and mountains, able to operate a camera on any terrain. I'm a DOP with a wide breadth of experience in factual, documentary, and drama recon.

Primal survivor cameraman