Grant Kaye was born on the small, rural Hawaiian island of Lana`i. He was raised with aloha by a multicultural ohana, and soon smelled like fixer from being in his Dad’s darkroom. His family eventually moved to the mainland, and he grew up traveling back and forth between Hawaii, California and Pennsylvania. Pursuit of academic degrees and a career in geology and volcanic hazards management took him from Pittsburgh to Colorado, Oregon, Hawaii, California and eventually to New Zealand where he earned a Ph.D. in 2008.
He moved on from being a scientist in New Zealand and settled in north Lake Tahoe, where he worked for the Town of Truckee in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping until the end of 2012.
Photography was something he was growing obsessed with away from work, and eventually he gave in and decided that creating imagery and teaching others would be what he would do full time.
As a photographer, he specializes in landscape and night-sky photography, motion-controlled time-lapse, and creative dSLR filmmaking. He also holds private and group workshops, as he loves to teach other people how to achieve their creative photographic vision.
He is happiest making visual art where the division between technology and art is blurred – creating images where he can push the limits of what modern camera gear is capable of with the goal of matching his imagination. While shooting outdoors, he strives to create artwork that evokes the emotional connection everyone has with nature, especially when they don't realize it.
He joined the Mountain Workshops in Kentucky as time-lapse coach in 2013, and he will be teaching photography classes at Sierra College and Martis Camp in Truckee in 2014. He is also joining the faculty at Shooting the West in Winnemucca in 2015. He is a Mountainsmith ambassador, and his still images are represented by Aurora Images.