Chief photographer Matthew Worden started taking pictures with his Fisher-Price camera when he was four-years-old. Soon he had a 110mm-camera with real film, which he took on camping trips with his dad near his hometown, just outside of Seattle. As a teenager, he liked to take photographs during his hiking adventures—from the beaches of the Washington coast to Mount Rainier and the Olympic National Forest.      

Worden majored in anthropology at Central Washington University, but his junior year he signed up for the wrong class and ended up working as a photographer for the school newspaper.
  
“I realized that being a photographer is like being an anthropologist,” he says. “You study and record people—I just do it through the eye of a lens.”

Worden joined the Washingtonian in 2000 as an assistant photography editor before becoming a full-time staff photographer last year. He photographs for every section of the magazine from the front cover to the First Person essay on the back page. His 2006 cover stories have included Who We Are (October 2006), Cheap Eats (June 2006), and Great Places to Live (April 2006).

Among Worden’s favorite stories to photograph: Guitar Heaven (November 2006), 25 Beautiful People  (March 2006), Have More Fun (August 2006), Two Hearts Beating as One (February 2006), and Waiting for a Miracle (March 2004).

Worden won a National City and Regional Magazine award in 2001 for Little Miracles, one of the first stories he shot for the magazine, about a young boy born deaf and blind.