I remember knocking on a door one late Fall afternoon in Kentucky with a camera hanging off my shoulder and a hundred reasons running through my head why I should just turn around and walk away. A man named Preston came to the door.

He and his wife Amy raised seventeen children together in this house. They now lived alone, but surrounded in the community by their children, all of whom stayed close. After explaining that I was interested in their life and wanted to take some pictures, he invited me inside to watch television with him and Amy.

I came back the next day and the day after that until it seemed perfectly normal that this couple was letting a complete stranger into their lives for the sole purpose of taking photos.

Each morning, I’d get up before sunrise and drive down the quiet main street, through fog rising up off dark green grass and finally to their home surrounded by farmland. We'd first go to McDonald's for Preston’s first morning coffee, my hand gripping the door handle tightly as he drove a little too fast down winding country roads. Afterwards we headed to the diner for a second cup of coffee with Preston’s friends, and then to his son’s auto body shop to look at the crashed cars that had been brought in that day.

Through this routine, the photos began to reveal themselves – in the way that Preston leaned in towards Amy so they could read the local paper together, how he strained to push another Bush/Cheney sign into the grass along the road (convinced someone was stealing them), and when he stopped to look into the barn at a lifetime’s worth of rusty tools.

It hurt to drive away on that last day, to leave Preston and Amy and a daily routine that had become my own. And driving through the rolling Kentucky hills, I was thankful that photography brought me to this place and to these people.

Since then I've moved to Washington DC with my wife, Charlene Kannankeril, and traveled around the world for magazines like Time, Newsweek, Stern and Conde Nast Portfolio, and had my photographs published in several books.

I've photographed stories ranging from water pollution sickening hundreds of people in a rural village in China, to following a couple halfway around the world from their California home to adopt their daughter, to covering the White House and Capitol Hill here in the nation’s capital. Each story invites the opportunity to learn something new, to understand how people live and to see the world with new eyes.