On my About page I spoke about becoming a photographer for Once A Metro the SB Nation blog for the New York Red Bulls and how it became the place where my photography skill and interest really developed. I felt it was an important enough step in my photographic journey to make its own post about. The Instagram account that I run can be found here.

When I first began taking photos at Red Bull Arena it was with my phone camera simply taken so I had something to post on my very much empty personal Instagram account. Thinking back I am not really sure what sparked my interest of bringing an actual DSLR camera to the games, perhaps I began to desire higher quality pictures as the phone camera just wasn’t cutting it. We Dad has season tickets to the New York Red Bulls so we were there so often that I had plenty of opportunities to capture photos and as I obtained more and more I soon realized how many I wanted to post. However, I also realized that I didn’t really want to turn my personal Instagram account into a Red Bulls fan account as I didn’t think my followers, who consisted mostly of friends and family, would appreciate that very much. So I began thinking about where else I could post these photos, first I considered creating another account completely from scratch but knew I’d have to start from nothing and that wasn’t exactly the best but at least I’d have somewhere to post my pictures. The next problem I ran into was a name, if you have spent anytime at all on any social media platform you’ll know that most of the good names are taken and there are hundreds to to thousands of fan accounts based on almost anything. Creating a name for you an account you plan to post your artwork on can be a daunting task in and of itself.

I consider myself quite lucky, while I was deciding where to post my photos I remembered that two of my friends wrote for the SB Nation blog “Once A Metro” which covers all things NY Red Bulls, the name coming form the fact the NY Red Bulls used to be the Metro Stars. I asked them to ask the editors at OaM if they were looking for photographers or if they had an Instagram. To my surprise they were completely open to the idea of me having access to the Instagram account and posting my content. However, the account was completely empty with little to no followers as they had not used it at all. So even though I had solved the issue of having to name the account I still had to build the account from basically nothing. However, the blog did already have decent following of NY Red Bulls supporters and an active Twitter account with nearly 3,000 followers so I at least had a somewhat pre-installed fanbase to work with that could be directed to the Instagram with some help from a few tweets on the Twitter account.

So I began to post on the account and initially was presented the opportunity by the OaM editors to obtain a press pass and shoot on the field, however I was a bit nervous about doing so at the time and felt I lacked the proper equipment. Not until about 2 years later when I had purchased a new camera and lens did I finally take the opportunity of going onto the field to take pictures which improved the quality and variety of the pictures drastically and was something I should have done much sooner.

Now I just continue to try and improve my skills as a photographer and photo editor as much as I can!