About Me!

My name is Johnathon! I’ve lived in Wilmington off and on since 2007. After living all over North Carolina, Arizona, and visiting parts of Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Georgia, and Colorado I decided that Wilmington felt the most like home and have been a permanent resident since 2016!

In college I enjoyed shooting photography for the baseball team, but that was in the time of film cameras still ruling the world. Once I was out of college, film became expensive and digital cameras were even more expensive!

Fast forward to 2017 and my daughter was born in January. The following month my wife was diagnosed with cervical cancer. A North Carolina charity called the Fill Your Bucket List Foundation offered a family photography session.

In February of 2019, Emmie passed away.

As I was gathering all of the materials for her funeral it hit me just how important those images of the three of us became. Those were the last images of Emmie before she started chemotherapy. She looked healthy, still had her long beautiful hair, and our daughter was just under a year old. The week after her funeral I bought a camera. I wanted to make sure that I captured every single moment of Willow’s life I could. I became that dad with a camera at all times.

After a year of just taking pictures of Willow I realized that I had fallen in love with photography all over again. In October of 2021, Random Wilmington was formed.

Now, why is the name of the business Random Wilmington and not Random Wilmington Photography or something specific to taking pictures? Whelp, in this day and age of ADHD and building my own business the way I wanted it to be, I didn’t want to tunnel vision into just taking pictures of families on the beach, or only getting to shoot couples on their wedding days. Over the coming months, I’ll be introducing a store section that will have watercolor prints available. I’m an avid woodworker and I’ll have hand carved art, turned bowls, spoons, and cutting boards. I may make the occasional furniture piece! I’m also a musician and I’ll be creating content in that direction along with starting a music/pod cast studio. Videography is also a large part of my work and I’ll be expanding to short productions, commercial work, wedding videography, and business branding!

On top of all of that, I have a severe desire and need to help our community. I have started a charity photography group called The Time in a Bottle Project. The goal is to offer free family and portrait photography to every patient in the local hospitals who are diagnosed with a terminal illness. Getting through the red tape has been a difficult process, but it will be so worthwhile! That’s why I’m here today!

If you’ve made it this far through reading my “About Me” section, you can see that I’m truly hoping to live up to the “Random” moniker. If you have a project or idea, please reach out to me! I’m always up for “Random” and wonderful things!

I hope that I’ll be able to be “your photographer” for any moment you may need one, and maybe even when you don’t know you need one!

Thank you,

Johnathon