Don Stratton got started in photography when he was 5 years old, using an old Nikon SLR he borrowed from his father to shoot a family wedding. Most of the pictures he took were out-of-focus and pointing in randon directions (remember, he was FIVE), but the ones that came out well were enough to inspire him to learn more! By the time he was 7 he was growing surprisingly adept at composition, and had a remarkable command of his photographic equipment (mostly Kodak 110 and 126 Instamatics).

When he was 14 years old his father gave him his first 35mm single-lens reflex camera, a hand-me-down Mamiya with a broken internal light meter and only manual exposure, which Don credits for forcing him to become acutely aware of how to properly expose a scene. By the time he was 22 Don has moved up to a Minolta Maxxum 5000i, one of the first of the new breed of "autofocus" cameras, which he credits with allowing him to concentrate more on composition.

At 23 years old he was offered a job at a local photo studio/lab in Santa Barbara, California, where he first got into commercial photography (primarily focusing on portraiture). Soon the studio added computer imaging services, where Don first learned to do flatbed and film scanning, compositing and retouching (in Photoshop 2.5), and outputting professional-grade work to dye-sublimation printers and digital film recorders. Don's skill and knowledge of the nascent field of digital imaging gained him respect throughout Santa Barbara's photography community, and he was asked to lecture on the subject as part of a special presentation at the prestigious Brooks Institute Of Photography, widely considered to be the top photography school in the world.

By the time Don was 25 he started his own company engaged in digital imaging, primarily focused on still image manipulation and digital video effects for television. Unfortunately his business was temporarily halted when Santa Barbara found itself terrorized by a serial arsonist who set 6 massive fires in a single night, and Don's gear went up in smoke. While visiting his father in Montana Don was in a severe car accident due to a commerical auto parts delivery driver running a red light and totalling the car Don was driving. He spent the next 18 months rehabilitating, and decided to put professional photography behind him for a while.

Don moved to Nashville in 1995, where he met his wife Deborah. He landed a job with Griffin Technology, rising through their ranks from technical support to product development and finally to the product manager for the wildly-popular iTrip product line for Apple's brand-new digital music player, the iPod. As digital photography finally matured to the point that professional digital cameras were as good as old-fashioned film cameras, Don got back in to photography, at first concentrating mostly on documenting the Tonkinese kittens he and his wife started raising in 1998 and continue to breed to this day. Don left Griffin Technology in 2006 to pursue his own business goals; Temporal Force (an electronics design and consulting firm) and Don Stratton Photography.

Don proudly uses Canon EOS cameras for the utmost quality and reliability.