Well then, ladies and gentlemen, 2019 is at an end and in its dusk, it was time for me to look back and contemplate.

The old

Without going into much more detail than necessary, I can only say that the past decade wasn’t the best of my life. In 2010, right when we were starting to do greater things, my band kind of folded. In 2011 I lost my first kid and because of his passing we found out that the missus had Myotonic Dystrophy. In 2012 I got diagnosed with PTSD and chronic al depression and had to quit my business which got me into serious debt. Lost a lot of people that simply couldn’t cope with my depression and my wife’s illness.

We spent the best of the following seven years going in and out of hospitals for IVF treatments and several other medical conditions related to the missus illness. In 2014, 13 weeks into a pregnancy resulting from IVF three, we lost a second kid. So, basically, everything I was working hard to achieve exploded in my face. It was there and then that I lost my desire to be creative. It was all empty and useless.

However hard, the same decade also brought me a few awesome things. In 2013 I finally managed to get my driver’s license and bought a car (with some financial help). That new freedom made me meet a lot of new people, some of them who I learned to love and now call my best friends. I put a stop to the drinking and partying ( all seemed empty and useless anyway ) and seaked help for the negatives I was coping with. I seaked help for my PTSD and depression ( no meds tho ) and we went into debt help. I never gave up, and rode the wave until the seas calmed down.

The new

The year 2019 began with a visit to the debt court and that was the closing of a battle that seemed to never end. From one day to the other we had breading space and nearly complete freedom. It was time to regroup and rethink my life.

The war was over, so now what? Good question. Slowly started to get my creative juices flowing. The machine had been shut down for over eight years and it wasn’t easy to crank it up again. I was already working on video and kept on doing that, but also managed to regain my old passion for photography.

Photography

Photography has been a long-time hobby of mine. I was 12 when I got my first camera, A Praktica with a separate din meter so I could measure light and correctly set up the camera. There was no digital stuff back then so I had to learn the hard way. And so I did my first shots. Unfortunately, nothing of that era, including my camera, survived. Life prevented me from making photography a permanent thing then. I had other life challenges to manage at the time, Like moving countries at 16 and becoming homeless basically between my 18 and my 23/4.

Around 2003 a couple of then friends of mine and I decided that it would be fun to start an erotic website. We managed to find some funds and as such, we bought a domain name. I had some experience with photography so that would become my task. Shoot the models. We had a plan, a website and some content and it was fun for a while, but we ran out of money and things went kind of south. The business folded.

I was able to hold on to the camera and continued shooting causal stuff, mainly concerts and such, nothing too fancy. Just point, click and barely anything on editing.  It was in 2010, when I started my new business, that I bought my first DSLR camera, a Canon EOS 550D which I still use today. I kept on doing casual stuff, only with a better camera.

While shooting video, and having the idea of shooting vlogs, I got some studio lights and a background setup. The idea of vlogging kind of faded to the background ( depression made me afraid of starting something new ) so I used the lights and backgrounds setup to do a few cosplay shoots with my wife. For a while I kept asking others to stand in and shoot with me, but somehow very few to nothing came out of that.

New found Passion

It was about at the end of 2018, that things became interesting. I was about to give up on photography and stay on the dash cam video’s course, when I asked a former friend of mine if she wanted to stand in for me. She said yes. I was in disbelief and thought that, once again, nothing would come out of this. But then, a few weeks later, she asked me when we were going to start. Well… That simple yes changed my life. That simple yes made me realize that I had never lost my passion. It made me realize that video was just one way of telling a story and that I could do the same with photos as well. It made me fall in love for the beauty of being creative again.

Within the main part of one year, I went from a silent point and clicker, not really daring to ask for a certain pose (because nerves), to actually putting myself and the photo subject to work and I’m now at the point where I’ve decided to make this part of my life. I’ll keep on doing video, I’ll keep on doing photography, I’ll keep on creating websites but most important of all I’ll keep on going on with the thought that I again dare to dream.