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My wife Cherie and my pal Goofy

I’ve been taking pictures since I was 10. I developed an interest in photography amid the smell of photographic chemicals and Kodak posters adorning the walls of the large commercial photofinishing business where my dad worked. He supervised the night shift where they would process an average of 10,000 rolls of film each night. My first camera was a Kodak Automatic 35 that he gave me, a sample from the Kodak Co. I took it to Disney World in 1972, the first full year the park was open. I keep it on my desk to this day. Having my photos developed for free at my dad’s workplace made it pretty inexpensive for me to learn the art of photography.

I grew up in Chattanooga and moved to Knoxville to attend the University of Tennessee in 1980. I worked my way through college in the Art Department’s darkroom facility, at a local camera store, and finally at JCPenney, way back when they had a camera department. I also worked at one of the first one-hour photo labs in the country at the 1982 World’s Fair here in Knoxville. In 1985, I graduated with honors with a BS in Accounting, but I knew my first day on the job at the prestigious Price Waterhouse CPA firm, that I had picked the wrong career. I’m just too much of a people person to look at piles of financial statements all day.

After a few years in the accounting & financial services industries, including a stint at Dean Witter Reynolds as a stockbroker, a friend asked me for help incorporating his new business, after which I wrote a book to teach people how to incorporate their own business, something unheard of at the time. I started a small publishing company and self-published the books. My first order from Barnes & Noble, was for 300 books that I printed at Kinko’s and hand-bound on my kitchen table. Along with the books, our company also sold custom-printed stock certificates, corporate seals, and related materials that grossed an additional half-million dollars a year in sales, in 2004 dollars.

I spent a year writing my first book while my good wife taught middle school to support us. I was Mr. Mom (LOVED IT) and did accounting and bookkeeping too. My “How to Incorporate Without a Lawyer” and “How to Incorporate in Any State” series of books (33 vols.) became best-sellers, selling over 100,000 copies at major bookstores nationwide. I sold the business in 2005 to spend more time with my fast-growing photography business, something I had been doing in addition to the publishing business for some time. Although now out of print, my books are still occasionally listed as used on Amazon, under the name W. Dean Brown.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve photographed over 8,500 properties (as of 2025) including rental cabins, condos, and hotels here in East Tennessee, the Smoky Mountains, and in Florida, luxury homes for magazines like CityView Knoxville and Knoxville Magazine, as well as professional business portraits, sometimes called “head shots.”

I’m easy going, easy to work with, and really enjoy what I do. I like to hear and share a good story and a laugh. They say that behind every successful man, there’s a surprised mother-in-law, but there is also a great wife.

My wife Cherie runs our business, doing most of the communicating, all of the scheduling, billing, and (yuck) the taxes and such. So when I say we, that’s who I mean, me and Cherie. We were high school sweethearts and are inseparable. As we say, I do the creative, and she does everything else. 😉