 The original scope of the shop was to provide contract professional photography services throughout the region as well as retail of cameras, consumable photography supplies, negative developing and printing.During this period, he was also a stringer for the "Seattle Post Intelligencer" 

Among many others, contract photography topics included the ongoing Seattle City Light project to build a series of hydroelectric generating stations on the Skagit River, which flowed past Sedro-Wooley.He regularly drove up to Newhalem, Washington, to the Gorge Dam and Diablo Dam - the site of one of his more memorable images of the "Skagit River Inclined Railway".