ABOUT

David LaBelle is many things: a photographer, a teacher, an author, a speaker, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a lover of baseball.  

Above all, he is a Christian who strives to be a compassionate storyteller and celebrate the beauty of life with words and pictures.

He grew up on a frog farm in Oak View, California where he explored the creeks and hills with two sisters and two brothers, along with numerous animals and birds.  He applies many of the lessons he learned during his magical boyhood years in rural California to his photography and writing.

He is an internationally renowned photographer who began his photojournalism career as a weekend sports-shooter and lab man at the Ventura County Star-Free-Press in California while still in high school. Throughout his 50-year career, he has worked with 20 different newspapers and magazines in nine states, including the Anchorage Times, San Bernardino Sun-Telegram, The Chanute Tribune, The Sacramento Bee and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where he was assistant managing editor for photography.  He was the National Press Photographers Association Region 10 Photographer of the Year at age 19, an honor he received for the next two years.

Despite his rich career in photography, he is best known for his work as a teacher and as an author.

David joined the faculty at Western Kentucky University in 1986 and taught photojournalism for more than a decade. He taught at the University of Kentucky, where he was an adviser for the award-winning “The Kentucky Kernel”, before directing the Photojournalism sequence at Kent State University. He has become a popular seminar speaker for conferences around the world.

David has written five books. In 1989, he published the first edition of the acclaimed “The Great Picture Hunt,” a visual how-to book about finding feature pictures.  In 1995, he released the second edition. In 1990, he published “Lessons in Death and Life,” which deals with the ethics of photographing grief.  In 2009, he published “I Don’t Want to Know All That Technical Stuff, I Just Want to Shoot Pictures”, an easy-to-read book about basic photography skills designed for beginners. Most recently, David published his first novel, “Bridges and Angels: The Story of Ruth” in 2019.

Often called the Norman Rockwell of photography for his focus on the beauty of small-town America, David contributes a monthly photography column for Oregon-based Ruralite Magazine, in a blog titled “Bridges and Angels.”