“Every shot I take of something beautiful, I’m preserving it. In the back of my mind I know in 100 years, it’s not going to look that way, and possibly never again.” 

 “I started taking pictures when I was around seven. I would grab my dad’s camera and hope that I wouldn’t get caught. I was always nervous when my dad would take the film to be processed. Because, you know, they get developed and the gig is up… There would be some good photos in there that he wouldn’t recognize and he finally figured out it was me who was taking them, so he gave me my own camera. That first camera was a Vivitar 110, and since then, I’ve pretty much used everything from 4x5, to medium format, to 35mm.” 

 “When I was about eighteen, I went on this road trip with a couple of friends fresh out of high school. We started at home in Knoxville, TN. We wanted to see Yellowstone and several other national parks along the way, with our ultimate goal of reaching Jackson Hole, Wy for the summer. I was hired at Mountain Camera in Jackson, with none other than Jon Stuart- who had been one of Ansel Adams assistants. I used to help him research camera equipment, lenses, etc., and Jon would break out his 8x10 field camera and we’d play with that. 

"I had a really great experience there and it kind of shaped me.”

After obtaining a degree in Professional Photography from Colorado Mountain College, it came down to a coin flip between an opportunity for the LA Times as a photojournalist for the arts and entertainment division, or Fine Print Imaging in Fort Collins, Co. Will says, “It was a good coin flip”. In Fort Collins, Sullivan became a master print maker and an ICG drum scan operator under the tutelage of Mark Lukes, founder of NANPA, the North American Nature Photography Association. 

For nearly a decade, Sullivan honed his craft collaborating with the finest nature photographers and artists in the world, many of whom often published in Outdoor Photographer Magazine and the National Geographic.