Johan Ronsse photography

TL;DR: aside from being a freelance designer, I’m starting as a freelance photographer.

Over the past two days I’ve been building a new website. It’s the site you’re visiting right now.

It consists of a portfolio and a blog. The goal of this website is to promote my commercial photography. I’m still a bit scared to call myself a “photographer” but I’m very very serious about going forward with this.

My passion for photography got a major boost when I started my 365 project a few months ago (post a photo to a blog every day – see the archives of this blog) and I’m ready to take it further. To this end, I will start taking on photography assignments and will actively be pursuing them.

I know this will be a slow process, probably starting off with small assignments, learning along the way.

I don’t fancy myself a high-end super-skilled photographer, but I think there’s work out there that I can definitely handle, and where I can deliver a professional result.

Some businesses might benefit from the fact that I can deliver branding, design and photography in 1 package. I see a lot of photographers out there that — while taking pictures I can only dream of making — frame them in ugly websites or watermark them so much that their careful composition is ruined.

Let me tell you a bit of my “photography” story. I bought my first second hand DSLR in 2007. It was a Nikon D70. I started photographing concerts and events in my free time.

I learned a bit about photography but after a while the camera started gathering dust while I concentrated on my job as a web designer for a web design company called Netlash (now Wijs).

I worked there for a couple of years learning all I could about web design. The company started doing other things (SEO, SEA, marketing etc.). I felt ready to make a career jump so I decided to go freelance as a UI designer.

Under the name Wolf’s Little Store I design user interfaces for software. These days it’s mostly iOS/Android/Windows Metro interfaces. Aside from that, it’s varied work: sometimes UX work for large-scale backends, sometimes a small website for a new company.

Fast forward to summer 2011, the Nikon D7000 is out and I’m buying one. This kind of marked the start of getting back into photography. The kind of photos you can take with that camera are pretty amazing. I don’t want to get into a gear debate here but better gear definitely gets you better results.

I started expanding my skills. I learned about off-camera lighting (“strobist”), I took a course on flash photography. I got a driver’s license and I have a car available. If that last part seems unrelated, it’s actually very important for shoots.

I shot more and more and to keep things going and to keep learning I started the 365 project. The goal of that project was to post a picture to a blog every day. I’ve been doing that for over 100 days now and it’s been great.

It’s been so great in fact that I want to keep doing this. But I also want to keep the design side going. Why not both? So – from now I’m not a freelance designer anymore but a freelance designer/photographer.

This site contains a selection of my best work. Over the next few months I’m aiming to expand it with more commercial looking work to give potential “buyers” a better idea of what I do.

Thanks for your attention and if you have any feedback, drop me a line or post a comment!

P.S. If you want to follow this site via RSS, use http://photography.johanronsse.be/rss as the RSS address.