James began taking pictures as a teenager. Fascinated with the way the best pictures seemed to have something magical about them he fell under the spell of this magic, majoring in photography at college. On graduating he moved to New York to work with the photographers who were his heroes and to learn some of the magic for himself.

His primary subject matter has always been people. "I love people. The fact that my work allows me to come into their lives and share their experience is incredibly rewarding," he explains.

For James, photographing weddings is an opportunity to share a time of intense emotion, with people he might otherwise never meet. His goal is to capture some of the feelings unique to that day and preserve them for the future, not only by recording the day itself, but also by interpreting the event through the expressive magic of the lens.

"Not only that" says James, "the more weddings I shot, the better I got at it and the more I enjoyed photographing them. Now I really enjoy photographing weddings. It's a lot of work but it's fun!"

James Daley has now been a professional commercial photographer for over 20 years. During that time he has worked for clients on projects ranging from editorial magazines assignments to national advertising, annual reports and even catalogs. He has shot both in-studio and on-location all over the U.S., Europe, Africa and the Caribbean.

James and his wife live outside Chicago in Warrenville, Illinois, in the scenic Fox River Valley.