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. However, I figured I probably needed to use my finance degree and went to work at a Fortune 500. And after seven years working in corporate finance, I decided I needed a change and quit my corporate job. I was learning how to code and was working on building an app for rock climbers.  

I started showing up to climbing events in Denver and taking photos for 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. I shot their 2018 marketing content and that was my first real commercial gig as a photographer.

During this same time period, I went to Thailand for a month. I went by myself and while I was there, new friends I met would tell me I should be taking photos for a living. 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 to focus my efforts on photography full time.  So here I am today, several years later. Shooting NBA players, Bachelor contestants, PGA tournaments, the NYC Marathon, brand influencers, Tinder headshots, private Kygo concerts, 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.