I'm Mike Reid
I photograph things being themselves. A sleeping turtle. Somebody who has forgotten there’s a camera. A dog stretched out in the sun, completely oblivious to the world around it.
I’m based in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I shoot across the Triangle — Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary, Apex, Wake Forest — with a few trips a year that keep filling the travel and underwater archive.
It started in a high school darkroom, then stopped for twenty years
I took a photography course in high school in the nineties, back when that meant film and a darkroom. I liked it. I photographed my friends, wandered around town looking for something worth a frame, took a camera on trips. Then life happened and I put it down for the better part of two decades.
What brought me back was a friend getting into it in 2016. I bought a Sony a6000 to keep up, and started doing exactly what I’d done at seventeen: photographing friends, walking around town, taking it travelling. My dog Sierra became my favourite test subject and has never really been released from that duty. She’s fifteen now and still gets pointed at whenever there’s new gear to figure out.
The following year I started taking the camera to comic conventions. I’d been a nerd and a comic reader since childhood, and the costumes people build are genuinely extraordinary — I wanted photographs good enough to show people who’d never set foot in a convention hall.
Underwater came last, and by accident. During the shutdowns in 2020 I finally learned to dive, and almost immediately wanted to bring back what I was seeing down there. It started with a GoPro and a lot of disappointing frames. Water eats your colour, everything moves differently, and the editing afterwards is a craft of its own. A couple of years later I moved to an Olympus TG-6 and things improved considerably.
These days I shoot the a7V above water and the TG-6 below it. Photography is something I do around a day job rather than instead of one, and lately not as often as I’d like — but the thread through all of it hasn’t changed since the nineties. I’d rather wait for something real than arrange something that looks good.
Every photograph on this site is one I took myself. No stock, no borrowed frames, no AI.
Four things that don't change
I don't rush
Sessions run until we have the photographs, not until a timer goes off. The good frames usually arrive late.
I watch more than I direct
I'll set things up and then get out of the way. What people and animals do on their own is more interesting.
Honest editing
Colour, contrast, the occasional distraction removed. I won't reshape anyone or fake a sky.
Everything gets delivered
Full-resolution files, all of them, cleared for printing and posting.
Frames I'd keep if I had to pick
Want to work together?
Sessions, prints, collaborations, or a question about something you saw here.