Dustin Griffin 10,000 feet up in Maui, Hawaii, on top of Haleakala (House of the Sun).

Dustin Griffin has loved photography and video all his life. He considers himself a historian, keeping records of things and of people.

Griffin grew up in Roanoke County, placed at a young age in classes for kids with learning disabilities, for his dyslexia. He graduated from Cave Spring High School in 2002 with a general diploma and attended Virginia Western for two years, where he studied broadcasting. He then attended the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in film with a final GPA of a 3.5.

"I want kids in the county, especially those in LD classes, to realize that they have options and can accomplish things after high school," Griffin said. "My personal experiences and my friends that still live in the community have made me realize how important it is for kids to know that."

"Unfortunately during my time at UNCW the campus did not offer a photography program. I found a teacher on my campus that used to work for Eastman Kodak and set up an individual study, bought my own camera and started developing a knowledge base. I pretty much taught myself," he said

After college Griffin headed to Richmond and worked on "John Adams" for HBO as a production assistant. He then traveled to D.C. where he worked on the movie, "National Treasure: Book of Secrets," in various departments, also as a production assistant.

Since leaving the Roanoke area, Dustin has traveled all over photographing everything he sees. He has worked with various photographers, as a second assistant camera operator on some local commercials in the Wilmington, N.C., area, on the sets of the WB show "One Tree Hill" as an extra, and also as a contracted photographer for "Trans-Ocean photos," a company that does event photography on cruise ships; which took him to Hawaii, Alaska, the island nation of Kiribati and Vancouver, Canada.

He did this for 16 months, working 9- to 12-hour days, seven days a week, for 10 months at a time. He still traveled between contracts.

"I always take my cameras with me everywhere I go," Griffin said.

In November he decided to leave the cruise lines. "It was getting to be too exhausting," he said.

He set up his Web site, theworldiexposed.com, featuring his photographic work from all over the world.

"I've been trying to promote my Web site, where you can find and purchase everything I've done in the past three or four years, and everything I am still doing. Exposure, no pun intended, has been a rough uphill battle."

Most recently Griffin was given the opportunity to move to South Korea and teach English to students ages 7 to 12 . He moved on May 11.

"I like kids, and I used it as an opportunity to continue to travel and work on my photography," he said.

"You can read all you want, but you can easily talk yourself out of having the experience if you spend too much time listening to other people's complaints and not judging for yourself. It's part of why I like to travel and see new things; I like to judge things for myself, through my own eyes, that's why my site's named "The World I Exposed," despite the fact that is also a photography pun."

Griffin is contracted to teach in South Korea for a year. He currently lives in Daegu.

"South Korea is a very clean, very modern place. It's just like any city in the states, the difference is you can't read the signs," Griffin joked. "If you think about isolation in American cities, in some bigger U.S cities people don't talk to each other on the streets anyway. People here will come up and talk to me. They are so interested and their culture is so loving. The kids all treat you like a rock star."

As with most artists Griffin wants his work to get noticed. His biggest fear is that he'll have to wait 20 years for someone to appreciate his work. But he'll never give up what he loves.

"The issue with the work that I do is there isn't a lot of money involved because I don't work with people a lot. There are a lot of things that interest me, things the natural world offers, things you don't get to see everyday because the world has become so industrialized. And eventually those things aren't going to be there anymore. My goal is to capture as much of the natural world as I can."

Griffin has no interest in going back into film.

"The technical issues and way you shoot with video and things that come along with the motion of video can take away from the poetry that a still photo frame can capture."

Griffin's goal is to see as much of the natural world as he can.

"I also would love to see one of my images on a billboard," he said. "I love seeing my work enlarge."

Even though he is far from home, Griffin still has ties to the community. His parents and longtime friends still live here. He hopes that those who live in Roanoke will continue to make an effort to promote local artists like himself.

"People need to try to reintegrate art and culture into their lives and into our community. We tend to forget what a dramatic impact it can have on ourselves, on our educations and on future generations."