Three Months of Steemit – Who Am I?
Wow, three months to the day since I signed up to Steemit. 93 days, 2232 hours or 133,920 minutes if you prefer. A quarter of a year! In many ways it only feels like yesterday that I first started researching Cryptocurrency and stumbled across an article on Steem. In other ways it feels like an age ago! Steemit has fast become a part of my daily routine, keeping up with the people I’ve come to know on here and replying to comments takes more time than you first imagine!
One of the ‘issues’ with Steemit is that posts tend to drop off the radar completely after 7 days, not the end of the world, especially if you’re keeping active, but it can make that first ‘intro’ post pretty redundant. I know when I did mine I had less than 100 followers and very few who I was regularly interacting with. As such, and because it’s cold and snowy outside and I relish a good excuse to sit on the sofa and ‘work’, I thought I’d do a bit of a intro/evaluation post!
’Progress’
So first of all I’ve been really surprised at how much Steemit has progressed for me in a relatively short space of time. Ok, so part of that was the amount of articles that I post, especially in December/January. Truth is the pace I was going was a little bit unmanageable, in fact I was probably spending an average of 6 hours+ per day on Steemit. Unfortunately I do still have a real job, so I’ve had to scale the articles down a little!
Still, 670 followers and a reputation of 57! I’m pretty stoked with that! I have no idea how to calculate where my rep will be in 9 months time but if I can keep momentum on the followers front that’s 2680 followers by the time I’m 12 months in! Most importantly though I’ve found Steemians that I absolutely love to follow, it’s not just about clicking like on every post, I’m talking about the kind of people who’s posts you click on right away and give a genuine, relevant comment.
This image was one of the first that I got a good upvote for!
So Who Am I?
My name is Chris Sansom and I’ve been a full time wedding photographer for the past 8 years with my wife Verity (
). We first met at university where I was studying for my Bachelors Degree in Film and Moving Image Production at Leeds Met Universities Northern Film School. I quickly realised that as much as I loved Film production, I didn’t really like how the industry worked! Photography was the logical move really, totally independent but with much of the same creative freedom as Film making. Perfect!
Well 8 years in I’m not sure I’d say perfect, but it’s given us a pretty fantastic and totally unique lifestyle so I certainly can’t complain! Early on we craved the kind of ‘recognition’ that most photographers yearn for in some shape or form. I’m not really sure what drove that, possibly just the competitive streak in me! Either way weddings and wedding photography quickly took priority over just about everything in our lives. We wanted to be ‘the best’ and some 5 years in we started to feel like we were finally getting there. In fact in 2015 we won pretty much every award we had wanted to win (For those of you in the wedding industry our big awards back then were Junebug Awards, ISPWP awards, MyWed Photographer of the Year awards and a few more) culminating in an inclusion in Rangefinder Magazine’s ’30 Rising Stars in the World of Wedding Photography’ at the end of the year.
Dreams vs Reality
Honestly, the reality of keeping up with the best photographers is a lot less glamorous than we had imagined. In fact it kind of killed the passion for me for a while there. I was spending ALL of my time thinking about wedding photography, in Facebook groups and ‘networking’, not to mention writing articles and talks when we started on the speaking circuit. All of that was well and good, but it wasn’t really paying the bills, the truth is most of it just appeals to other photographers!
Long story short, we both concluded that we couldn’t really be bothered with keeping up with the photography Joneses. We loved taking photos, but the whole ‘awards’ thing had really become too much for us, so we just backed off big time! We started getting our photos edited and suddenly we had our lives back!
TV Experiences
I kind of compartmentalised my personal and professional life. Wedding Photography is my job, and a damn good one, but it is still a job. I decided there was nothing wrong with switching off occasionally and sticking to office hours. I’m a big believer that we aren’t put on this planet to just work until we die, and it isn’t something I’m prepared to do!
I’ve never had any great urge to be on TV, but I love a good challenge and somehow I’ve found myself on ITV quite a few times over the last few years, and on ‘Watch’ earlier this year for ‘The Wave’ where I competed with my dad (video below) I’ve been big on sports my whole life, so taking a step back from weddings allowed me more time to train. I actually ended up making the final of Ninja Warrior UK series 2 off the back of no training at all so I started training down at the climbing wall. As it transpired I wasn’t selected for Ninja Warrior UK 3 or 4 and this year I’ve dedicated all of my training time to Triathlon. Last year marked my first Half Ironman Triathlon and this year I hope to do a couple more – a lot more efficiently this time!!
About Us
My little family consists of
and I, our two cats Angel and Ponyo, our Black Labrador Kaya, A couple of Bunnies, A tank of Tropical Fish and a couple of Leopard Gecko’s. Yep, we love pets! We’re the kind of people that want to spend as much time as we can together, and for us there’s no better place for that than at home with our pets!
(Me and the wonderful
2018
This year is already a fairly radical divergence from the past few years. I’m spending a lot of time working on things outside of photography, Steemit being probably the most time consuming but also the most rewarding. I’ve started a small Cryptocurrency portfolio which I’m planning on building up over the year. Honestly I have no idea where the whole Crypto movement is going, but I’m excited to see and it’s definitely not something I’m going to miss!
As I said, Triathlon is another big goal for this year and I’m targeting two 70.3 (Half Ironman) Triathlons, the first in June and the second in September. They are actually the exact same course, so it will be a great way to test my progress throughout the year!
I’m also starting an entirely new, entirely stress free business venture. My dad is a landscape gardener, and I spent the best part of a decade working for him part time. It’s a tiring job but one completely devoid of stress. I’m not really a stressful person, but weddings do tend to come with a heap of responsibility and as much as I love them, I don’t want to HAVE to shoot as many as possible! I love the idea of doing a few less weddings, and spending a bit of time each week out in my van with Kaya doing honest work!
That’s me!
So that’s me! Thank you to everyone on Steemit who has supported and followed me up to now, I can’t wait to carry on putting out as many useful articles and blogs as I can and seeing what all of you incredible people produce!