Photography almost ended me.

So my whole life growing up (probaly more like 12-13 years old) I wanted to be a photographer. Saved all my money working part time and finally got a canon t1i. Man it was awesome. Started taking photos of literally everything. People, friends, animals, nature, myself, literally everything. As I grew up, i started watching YouTube tutorials on how to take better images of people. I loved taking portraits. The different lighting set ups you can do, how the face can tell a story, everything. I found a photographer online, Steve Haining, who was living in Hamilton where i grew up and I messaged him and just said “Hey I like your photos, if you ever need help, I’d love to come on set some day“. He messaged me back within 20 min and said “hey I’m shooting tomorrow evening, you wanna come?”, and it pretty much started from there.

Its been about 12 yeares now I’ve worked with Steve off and on and developed a great friendship out of it. Been on a few hundred different sets from music videos to interviews to magazine shoots, and dozens in between. My brother Nick was a massive inspiration for me growing up cause he got to meet all these amazing musicians and celebirties working with a company called the come up show. Then he brought me out one day to help film and interview for Wiz Khalifa, i was 16 or 17 at the time. I was pumped, and from there I kept getting more jobs. That was amazing, that was also the problem. I’ll touch base more on that in the story.

Being in high school at the time and doing gigs on the side and in the summer was awesome, but I never really got the grasp of learning the business side of things. Which also goes along with my earlier mention of my problems. So I don’t really have the greatest concept of money (I’m working on it). I’d spend so much money on useless things in my life that I didn’t really need, or I’d always eat take out and never have any money left for anything else. Then I’d use the last bit of my money on equipment, so I never really evolved growing up which made me hang my camera up and just do other things. Which led me into a fitness lifestyle, which led me into fitness photography.

Most of the stuff I started doing before I really understood what and how to use proper lighting, I think I wes between 18-20 in these images here. It was awesome making connections with people in the fitness world cause it also helped me with the fitness lifestyle I was involved in. This opened up a few more doors for me growing up with photography, but unfortunately life got in the way, my camera became obsolete and life got in the way so I hung my camera up again and went on my way with my life again.

After a bit of time I upgraded my camera, this happens quiete a bit in this story, I apologize now.

Once I upgraded my camera, my motivation grew again and grew rather quickly. I got a Canon 5Dmkii. I was happy, and me being me, I only ever used one lens unless needed. It was usually 50 1.4. Always.

But once again, due to poor management skills on my end. I unfortunately left the photography world once again.

After that, I think it took my close to 3-4 year to pick up a camera again. Better skills, better mindset, not so great life. I won’t get into detail about that. Finally joining the sony side of life, I purchased a sony a6000 (my fav camera). Along with shooting portraits, I started shooting video as well. (I went to the Toronto film school for film, dropped out after 6 months, everything that was taught I had already learned through YouTube. The school is still def worth it if that’s your learning style but for me it wasn’t.)

Unfortunatly for the rest of this story, I won’t be posting as many photos or vidoes to go with my story which I’ll explain why shortly (if your still with me). Man I loved this camera, I always grew up loving movies and tv shows. I love cinematography and still do to this day. I wanted to change over from shooting portraiture to shooting cinematic films. Even if that film was only a min long, I wanted it to look amazing.

The major thing I was struggling with, as many people probably face in this industry is, Restarting. Every time I would restart, I would hate myself a lil bit more everytime because I had to get all new equipment, and I always felt like I should be farther than I was. Which started a whole string of issues in my head, which to be honest, were probably there already. So after shooting fitness videos for friends, shooting some personal stuff for me, and just kinda goofing around figuring out how I want to make myself known as a cinematographer, that’s when I learned that I have some issues in my head that I never addressed. I got a big break in film and was able to be apart of documentary film based out of Saskatchewan called “The Long Ride Home”. It was based around the native communities and the hardships a lot of them had faced growing up. We filmed the documentary for 3 weeks, camping in different areas, driving hours a day, or riding horse back with native communities. That unfortunately when I figured out that I had the startings of depression. Which I feel I brought onto myself with all my negative thoughts and all my issues that I felt I had.

Before I started this documentary, I had started dating the girl I’m thankfully still with to this day. My issue was, that with everything going on, all the love and support I had from people, I felt alone. I wasn’t but it sure as hell felt that way. It caused me to do some things that I still regret to this day, and almost made me lose her. We have since stayed together and she’s honestly helped me so much along the way and getting better so we could continue the relationship that we started before all this happened. I’m not blaming the depression for the mistakes I made, they were still my decisions, but it helps understand why I am the way i am somedays. Ok back to the photography side of things. I sadly don’t shoot anymore, mainly for the fact that my camera was unfortunately stolen from my car one night while staying at my girlfriends house. It had fallen out of my bag when my hands were full and landed on a pile of coats in the backseat of my car. I thought nothing of it, locked my car went inside and got ready for bed.

I was very wrong. I woke up the next morning to find that my car was a mess, the coats were gone, along with my camera that was sadly wrapped up in them. At the time I was angry and upset about losing my camera, I still am, but it wasn’t the end of the world. Now it’s been over a year since the loss of my camera, and I still think about coming back to it, but scared to pursue it again. Scared that I’ll fall into the same pattern of depression, scare my girlfriend that I’ll fall into that depression and dedicate my life to something that I might not be able to make a career out of. At the end of the day, I hate that my camera was stolen but I’m also slightly happy that it was. It feels like a stress has been taken off of me and I’m not fighting the urge to buy equipment or be angry that I’m not farther in life (thats a whole different challenge). This is the longest I’ve gone in my life (I’m 28, lost my camera when i was 26) that I don’t have a camera attached to me.

Maybe one day I’ll come back into the photogaphy/cinematography world. Maybe I’ll have a better mindset for it and myself, right now, all I can do is write about it and hope that if someone else is going through problems that I had in this industry, that you fight through it. You never know what could happen after you click that shutter button, you’ll just have to wait and find out.

If you made it this far, thank you for the read of my jumbled mess of a story, but its me, that’s my story. So thank you for taking your time to read my story.

Clinton Andrews