MY STORY

Hey I’m Tim. I’ve been a full-time photographer since 2016. I moved to Colorado with my family when I was 15 and have been here ever since. Originally from Southern California and a few years in Arizona. I went to CU Boulder and studied Business Finance and graduated in 2009. My last year of college, I was working for a bike racing start-up and offered my boss to take pictures of bike races in exchange for my first camera. So I spent that summer going all over Colorado taking pictures of bike races and learning how to use my camera. But the company floundered anyway and I eventually moved on to a corporate job. And after seven years working in corporate finance, I quit my job to work on an app I was developing for the rock climbing industry.  

I started showing up to climbing events in Denver and taking photos for our social media. I showed up to the USA Climbing National Championships in Denver with my camera and as it turned out, USA Climbing needed a photographer that day.  That landed me a job with them and then eventually a job with the Climbing Wall Association photographing their annual event. And then that got me my first commercial photoshoot job at my own climbing gym, Movement Climbing and Fitness creating their 2018 marketing content.

During this same time period, I had the opportunity to go to Thailand for a month. I went by myself and while I was there, new friends I met would introduce me as a “famous photographer” because I had a camera and a big lens. And although I would get embarrassed, I liked being called a “photographer”. I would walk around the streets of Chiang Mai with my camera and people would just pose for me. I felt like I was on assignment for National Geographic. Other travelers would tell me I should be making money with this.  That I should pursue this as a career.

So when I got back to Denver, I had a series of paid commercial shoots lined up and the following weekend I had a media pass for the GoPro Games in Vail, CO.  I was in the media pit with other photographers and I was starting to feel a little more like one of them. Back in Denver, people liked my work and were responding to my story about leaving Corporate America. I was getting hired.  I was loving it and I was doing it on my own terms and in my own way. I was being creative and building a name for myself and I decided I was going to focus my efforts on photography full time.  So here I am today, several years later. Shooting NBA players, fitness instructors, Samsung products, Tinder headshots, pregnant women, Fortune 500 corporate events, and everything in between. And I’m having a blast. Learning, growing, and making it work.  A nice little lesson about showing up, going with the flow, and trusting that somehow, you’ll end up exactly where you’re supposed to be.