This work did not begin as a design project. It began with a hand-me-down and a growing fascination with blending into the woods.

When I was ten years old, a close family friend, a Vietnam veteran, gave me my first woodland camouflage shirt. It had belonged to his son and had been outgrown. Rather than throwing it away or passing it along elsewhere, he gave it to me because he thought it would help me blend in better while hunting. That simple gesture mattered more than anyone realized at the time.

The photographs I've included above are from that same season back in 1980. They are both actual pictures of me, one sitting on the tailgate of my dad’s old Ford truck, the other from the backyard of my childhood home in Columbus, GA. This was my my very first deer, a huge 200+ pound twelve pointer. Needless to say, that moment changed my life forever!

As a ten year old kid, I didn’t quite understand camouflage in technical terms yet, but I was already paying attention to how it worked, how it broke up my outline, how it let me disappear instead of stand out. That moment marked the beginning of a lifelong fascination with concealment.

As I got older, that interest deepened. I spent time in Army–Navy stores studying patterns, fabrics, and variations. Woodland, tiger stripe, field jackets, pants, hats, shirts, anything camo. Camouflage became something I actively sought out and studied. To me, in those stores, I felt like a kid in a candy shop. While other kids moved on, camouflage stayed with me. I wore it hunting, wore it outside with friends, wore it wherever I could. It wasn’t a phase or a trend... It was instinctive.

What separates my approach from someone who came to camouflage later is how I see the woods themselves. When I look at a landscape, I don’t just see trees, leaves, and brush, I see concealment. I see breakup, shadow, foliage depth, and what a human form needs to disappear in that environment. My mind naturally evaluates terrain in terms of camouflage: what works here, what fails there, and why. I don’t know where that wiring comes from, it’s simply how I’ve always seen the world.

Over decades of hunting, that instinct sharpened into something deliberate. I learned how light shifts color, how shadows destroy outlines, and how patterns either disappear at distance or betray a hunter when an animal closes in. Long before I ever thought about creating camouflage, I was studying concealment constantly in real conditions.

Straight Shooter Camouflage Systems came much later and began humbly, first as camo pattern creation, then to a Shopify project meant to explore those ideas. As the work progressed, it became clear that the camouflage itself was stronger than I'd even realized. These patterns weren’t built for trends or casual use. They belonged on serious gear, designed for hunters who depend on concealment when it matters.

That realization changed the direction entirely, from patterns to systems, from individual patterns to an intentional, repeatable approach to camouflage creation grounded in real hunting experience. This site represents that evolution and the work that grew out of a lifelong connection to camouflage and the woods.