The Canon AE1 - a fully manual camera. [My mother] had a 50mm, which is a standard lens, and then I got a 28mm. Then I started a little punk magazine, a zine, when I was 14 or 15 years old. I was shooting my friends skateboarding and it was the beginning of the Macintosh. We wouldn't do layouts on the computer; we would pick the font and then type up a paragraph and then print it out and cut it up and put it in a little mock-up and Xerox it.

Learning that aesthetic as a kid - seeing those photos - made me think that that's what photos are supposed to look like. I never understood snapshots. I was looking at them like, "This is horrible; that's not what a picture is supposed to look like." I was taught by these photos. So when I picked up the camera, though I had never done it before, I kind of already knew what I was doing.

I always wanted to live in L.A. The other thing that always inspired me was movies; that's why I'm here. I always wanted to be a part of the movie business and make movies. That's why I went to AFI grad school for filmmaking.

Well, I talk about one moment in the book, but I don't know if that's my moment of discovery. It was a moment. In the book, I talk about how I started shooting, how I became a photographer.

I was doing a lot of web design at the time. And anybody that has an agent thinks, "Why do I need an agent?" Maybe it's a little different as an actor - of course you need an agent - but any kind of agency that's selling something for you, you think, "Why can't I sell this myself? It doesn't make sense."

It 2001 when we started. But prior to that, I had made this website called sundancepics.com, where me and this other photographer, Randall Michelson, could sell our images from Sundance online and it was successful. Steve Granitz, who's my main partner at WireImage, we were already working together, and I was like, "Look dude, this is it. We can do this."

The Canon AE1 - a fully manual camera. [My mother] had a 50mm, which is a standard lens, and then I got a 28mm. Then I started a little punk magazine, a zine, when I was 14 or 15 years old. I was shooting my friends skateboarding and it was the beginning of the Macintosh. We wouldn't do layouts on the computer; we would pick the font and then type up a paragraph and then print it out and cut it up and put it in a little mock-up and Xerox it.