Allow Me to Introduce Myself
I don't know why I skipped doing this for so long but better late than never, right? I want to start this off by saying how excited I am to be apart of this platform and this community in general. I've been social media for a few years now so I'm not an expert by any means but the camaraderie and warm welcome I've received so far has been nothing short of amazing.
My name is Nathanael Billings and I'm 26 years old living in a small town just outside of Seattle, Washington. I'm a professional photographer who specializes in outdoor and lifestyle photography. Basically that means I spend a lot of time working at my desk pitching jobs, editing photos, with the occasional travel. It's not a glamorous job by any means but it does mean I get to see some pretty cool places and get paid to do so. Over the next year or two, I'm working on making travel, both internationally and nationally a bigger part of my job. As the saying goes though you have to start somewhere and for right now, I'm really enjoying the process and progression of my career.
I could probably write several pages going into detail about all the events in my adult life that have led me to this point but I'll give you the gist and focus mainly on what I'm currently doing which is photography and traveling. My summer after high school I spent a year in New Zealand, traveling all over the South Island. I worked on a vineyard in the Summer and in the Winter I worked at a nearby ski field as a lift operator. Every chance I could get, I would go on hiking and 4x4 excursions seeing as much of the country as possible. This was an eye opening experience for me and drastically shaped who I am today. Taking a year to travel is something that I would encourage everyone to do at some point in their lives, especially when you're young and impressionable.
The next three years, 2011-2014, I spent working seasonal jobs in Olympic National Park in the Summer and then ski bumming in the Winter at the various ski fields in Washington. While working seasonal jobs was fun and being a ski bum was an absolute blast and one of the first times I truly felt like I could spend my life doing just one thing, it just wasn't practical. I never had money and if I ever wanted to travel or do something unrelated to being a ski bum or hiking, I just couldn't do it. So I made a hard decision and decided to restructure my life. No more snowboarding until I could find another profession that could support me. I ended up working one last summer in Olympic National Park and felt like I had a new direction in life. Hiking, backpacking, and rock climbing became a bigger part of my life again. It was also somewhere in the middle here (summer of 2012) that I was introduced to Bitcoin. Being someone that never had much money and hated big banks like Bank of America (my bank at the time), I was instantly hooked on the idea of owning my money without having a centralized entity control it. That's a longer story altogether though that I'm sure I'll get into at a later date.
By 2014, I was rock climbing and hiking more than ever before and wanted a way to document my outings. Photography had always been interesting to me, having had a film camera for a couple years when I was younger so right before a big climbing trip down to Smith Rock, I decided to buy my first DSLR... A used Canon 7d with a 24-105 F4. Almost instantaneously I was hooked. I'd felt this same feeling before while I was snowboarding and the excitement was started to build. Almost every waking hour was spent learning the ins and outs of photography: composition, light, exposure, aperture, negative space, color management, you name it.. I looked it up and soaked up everything I could. My photos were still terrible and would be for a long while after but that didn't matter in the slightest. I was willing to learn and to suck at it for however long it would take.
From the middle of 2014 until late 2015, I spent my time working a regular job, hiking and rock climbing whenever I could, and continuing to learn about photography. In that time I ended up saving about $14,000 and my partner and I had decided to head to Australia for a year. We had bigger plans to spend a few months traveling around South East Asia afterwards but that never panned out because our time in Australia was tumultuous to say the least. The last two months of our trip we found ourselves in Tasmania and by that time I could tell that my photos were not so terrible anymore. I was starting to get a little inkling that photography as a career could work. I passed 1,000 followers on Instagram just before leaving Tasmania and in my naive mind I was all set up. I would come back to the states and start my career as a photographer.
Upon returning home in late 2016 I got straight to work doing what I do best... Hiking, backpacking, and taking photos but something was missing, I wasn't getting any jobs. But I had 1,000 followers, shouldn't that be good enough? Boy, was I wrong and upon doing a little more digging I was put right in my place. Not only were my photos nothing special yet but having 1,000 followers on Instagram doesn't mean anything. I reached out to a couple people who are now my mentors who told me what I had to do. Having a large following on social media is one way to find work but since I didn't have that, I had go about it a different way. I began contacting as many companies as I could trying to find work whether it was free or paid it didn't matter. Any work I could find I took it and that ended up paying off in a big way because by April 2017 I had a decent client list and was finally making enough money with photography that I could quit my day job and pursue my passion.
After years of learning, failing, and taking as many opportunities as I could I had "made it". I put that in quotations because I still fail often and I am by no means living large but I'm doing what I love as a job and I feel incredibly blessed to do so. I currently run two photography businesses right now, my own personal one and a media company that I co-own with another photographer. Together we work with outdoor companies and tourism agencies doing social promotion and full suite media production. There's still a long road ahead and a lot of work to be done but 2018 is looking like it's going to be a great year and I couldn't be more stoked about the future.
My main goal with Steemit is to share my work and connect with other like-minded people. Cryptocurrency, photography, and the outdoors are all something I'm deeply passionate about and I couldn't be more excited to find a place where I can share all three.
If you've made it this far, I want to thank you for taking the time to read my introduction! I know it was long-winded and I'm still learning the ropes around here but I really appreciate the warm welcome I've received so far. Now you know a little bit more about me and my journey and I really look forward to getting to know yours!