At the age of 15, Jeff Hutchinson squinted at a chemical-filled tray in the dim red light of his high school’s darkroom and watched as one of his own photos developed right before his eyes. It was a captivating experience that sparked his love of photography.

Today, Hutchinson’s photos still develop right before his eyes—but they don’t take nearly as long. That’s because he mostly shoots digital now, but has remained just as captivated as he was back in high school. He hasn’t abandoned the darkroom completely, though, still shooting all formats up to 4 x 5 on film.

While his photography career may have had a pretty typical beginning, the path he’s taken has been a little bit different. After classes and editorial assignments in high school, he earned a B.S. in Industrial Arts Education with a specialty in Visual Communications from Millersville State College.

Following three years in print production management for a packaging corporation, he left the corporate world for the classroom. There, he found that teaching photography to high school students was an amazing way to learn and improve his own skills. It was then that he rekindled his love of photography.

Over the next 17 years, Hutchinson honed his photographic skills on a part-time basis while working in the printing industry. Since 1997, he’s owned Hutch Graphics—something that’s given him a unique perspective on what clients need out of their printed materials, as well as the images that support those materials.

His commercial assignments and stock photography shoots find him in quite a few strange places, too: on roofs, hanging from boom lifts, inside factories, up in helicopters and inside operating rooms to name just a few. But that’s the fun part—never knowing quite where he’ll be or who he’ll meet next.