How Dungeons & Dragons Made Me a Better Photographer
When people ask what made me the photographer I am today, they expect to hear the usual suspects, years behind the lens, technical mastery, a good eye for light. And sure, all of that plays its part. But there’s another, far stranger influence hiding behind the curtain, Dungeons & Dragons.
Yes, the dice rolling, elf speaking, imagination fueled tabletop game that has guided more Friday nights than I care to count. And as unlikely as it may sound, the lessons I’ve learned around the game table have shaped the way I work behind the camera more than any photography course ever did.
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In D&D, you don’t play yourself. You become someone else entirely, a gruff dwarven paladin, a smooth talking bard, a shadowy rogue. To play them well, you need to think like them. Feel what they’d feel. React to the world through a borrowed soul.
That same skill, the ability to step outside yourself, translates seamlessly into photography.
Every client is different. Some want soft and romantic, others bold and cinematic. Some feel nervous in front of the lens, others bloom the second the shutter clicks. My job isn’t just to photograph them. My job is to understand them, and adopt their perspective, even just for a moment, and shape the shoot around their vision, their comfort, ensuring their story is told how they want it to be told.
It gave me the muscle memory to slip into someone else's shoes, to ask “What would they need right now?” and act accordingly. Behind the lens, that instinct is everything.
D&D is all about making the impossible feel real. A dungeon carved from dragon bones, a spell that stops time, but when you play, you believe. The game demands that you see it and describe it so vividly that others see it too.
Photography is not so different.
A great image doesn’t just document. It elevates the mundane or brings the surreal to life. This comes to staging a creative portrait, framing a motorcycle like it belongs in a dream, or making a family shoot feel like a cinematic still from a movie that never existed, I’m doing the same thing I did around the table, taking the imagined and turning it into something you can hold in your hands.
No D&D session goes according to plan. The dragon flees. The wizard decides to flirt with the town guard. Someone rolls a natural one and sets the tavern on fire. You learn to adapt, pivot. The same rules apply in Photography. Batteries die. The venue changes. The weather turns. A client’s idea shifts mid shoot. The ability to roll with it, gracefully, confidently, creatively, is what separates a good photographer from a great one. D&D taught me to embrace the unexpected, to collaborate rather than control, and to find beauty in the mess. Every curveball is a new opportunity for storytelling.
Dungeons & Dragons is collaborative storytelling at the end of the day. No one person owns the plot. You build the world together, feeding off and helping each other achieve their ideas, improvising, supporting, lifting the narrative higher than any one player could manage alone. That’s how I treat my photography work, I want clients to feel like co creators, their ideas, their instincts, their input at the end of the day they matter importantly over anything else. My role is to guide, to enhance, to listen, to suggest, and ultimately to serve the story we’re telling together. So yes Dungeons & Dragons made me a better photographer.
It taught me how to see through someone else’s eyes. How to dream vividly and then render that dream in detail. How to think on my feet, embrace uncertainty, and create collaboratively. Photography is not just exposure and composition. It’s narrative. It’s empathy. It’s alchemy. And oddly enough, it all started with some dice, a character sheet, and a group of friends willing to build something magical out of nothing at all.
