Knoxville, Tennessee
About
Michael Hutcheon
From Forfar, Scotland. Based in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Who I Am
I'm originally from Forfar, Scotland, a small market town twenty minutes from the coast of the North Sea and twenty minutes from the Angus Glens. I always had a creative itch I couldn't quite place
At nineteen, after a short spell playing professional football for Dundee FC, I moved to the United States on a soccer scholarship at Radford University where I met my wife Fallon during our freshman year. She's from Dandridge, Tennessee, located close to the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. We spent our summers and holidays throughout our college years on Douglas Lake or exploring the mountains. Having grown up between the coast and mountains, I fell in love with East Tennessee immediately.
Photography started as a way of sharing those experiences with family back home. My mum had a Pentax K30, and every time I visited Scotland or my parents came to visit me, I'd take custody of it and shoot as much as I could. When I graduated from Radford, I used most of the money I had to buy a Canon Rebel T1i and a couple of lenses. That's where the passion really took hold. Every trip we took and every place we visited, I was shooting and experimenting and figuring out what I was looking for.
Over the next several years I built a professional creative career in photography and eventually found my way into production, first shooting branded content and weddings, then taking on more of the operational side of running shoots. Now I'm based in Knoxville permanently, where I run production operations at Big Slate Media, a video production company with around a dozen creatives working across twenty-plus projects at any given time.
Photography remains the throughline. My family fills most of these pages; my wife, our kids, the adventures we go on. Occasionally I get to do it for someone else, and that's a privilege I don't take lightly.
The Work
By day, I run production operations at Big Slate Media in Knoxville, where I also work as a commercial photographer. The freelance photography you see on this site, the elopements, the personal work, the adventures, is a separate thing. It's the photography I do because I can't not.
My personal work happens anywhere. I'm always looking for opportunities to take my camera with me, whether it's quick day trip or a family holiday. I'm constantly drawn the natural beauty of our surroundings and love the capture the moments we spend in them as a family.
The elopement work found me through the personal work. Couples encounter the images from our weekends in the mountains and reach out because they want that same quality of attention for their own day. I take that seriously. An elopement is not a photoshoot. It's a moment that belongs to two people, and my job is to be present for it without getting in the way.
How I Edit
The light as I remember it.
My editing tends toward the cinematic — warm undertones, lifted shadows, muted greens. I'm not chasing a trend. It's just how the mountains look to me when the light is right, and I'm trying to make the rest of the images feel that way too.
Practically: teal-blue shadows, amber midtones, warm gold in the highlights. Blacks lifted just enough to keep the image breathing. Greens pulled toward olive. It's a palette I've landed on over years of making images in the same landscape, and it's become the thread that runs through everything — personal work and client work alike.
Elopements & Couples
Planning something worth photographing?
I'd love to hear about it.
Get in Touch