This is me, and this is what I'm going to do. (Introducing Tristan)

Hey!

My name is Tristan and I’m really glad to be joining this amazing Steemit community today! Ever since I heard about the platform, I have been soo excited to join and share all my creative energy with you all. Before I tell you some of my exciting ideas for this platform though, and since this is my first post, let me share a little bit of my story with you.



Now that we’ve met face to face, I can tell you that I am a 22 year old student living in Ottawa, Canada. However, while I live here the freezing great white north right now, I am half South African (where I was born and went to high school), and I have also lived a lot of my life in Kenya which is where my family lives and where I went to primary school.

From one continent to another

I was born in 1995 in Cape Town, South Africa, to a half Canadian half South African mother and a South African father. However, after 6 months in South Africa, my mother and I moved to Canada where I lived until I was 8. There I grew up in a few small French Canadian towns speaking french and a little english. I had many fond memories of growing up in Canada; the pure enjoyment of playing in the first snow of the year or to learning to ride a bike in the summer in the beautiful Laurentides area of Quebec.

After Canada I moved to live in Kenya and join the rest of my wonderful family working in that area. There I joined a new primary school and grew up in a mixture  savannah and costal landscapes, and the busy streets of the capital city, Nairobi. After finishing primary school there, my mother and I moved to South Africa where I attended a wonderful secondary school hidden away in the rolling northern cliff of the Wolkberg in the province of Limpopo. After high school, I decided to a gap year (or two) in order to find out a little about myself outside of an institutionalized schooling system. During the next two years, I worked in two school in Kenya and Tanzania, helped to start a conservation project in Kenya, and also spent time backpacking in Europe and around Southern and Eastern Africa.

After these two years, I decided that I wanted a change. I applied and was accepted to study Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and moved there directly from backpacking in Europe, arriving with only my backpack and no real clear idea what I hoped to achieve except for living a new adventure.



My first year in University was an incredibly transformative experience as I learned to contend with the transition from living in Africa most of my life, to suddenly living in the capital city of one of the most developed nations in the world. While my heart will always lie in Africa, I came to love the new Canadian way of life and all the wonderful new people I met.

The single hardest experience of my life
Sadly though, as my first year was coming to its end I endured the hardest experience I have ever gone through.
My kind, supportive, loving mother and single parent suddenly died, leaving me parentless on the other side of the world with a huge hole in my heart. As I am sure some of you have felt, the death of someone close to you is something no one can prepare you for, all the realities of life suddenly come rushing in, creating a pain that can only be healed by time.

As I contended with this new reality of loneliness, sadness and anger, I took some time away and went backpacking to Peru in the search of a new experience and to bring some peace to my mind. Before leaving though, I impulsively bought my first cheap DSLR camera in the hope of picking up a new hobby.

This changed my life.

Within days I was hooked on photography, capturing every moment, landscape or smile I could find. As I returned from my trip, I started to share some of my favorite pictures online! One of these pictures, “The Rainbow Mountains of Peru” (below), won a National Geographic submission competition and spurred me to continue my photography work once I returned to Ottawa for the new academic year. I was hooked.

While the time after the passing of my mother was incredibly difficult for me, photography helped me discover a new creative side of myself I never knew I had. For the first time in my life, I felt like I could go out and create art, and thanks to the beauty of the internet, I was now able to share this art with welcoming communities online.

And so now I find myself here on Steemit, posting my first post and introducing myself to you all. If you have made it this far, I would like you to know that I have never posted this kind of information about myself online, but it reflects my goal to be as honest and open with you all as possible on this Steemit journey.

So why am I so excited about Steemit?
A few days ago, a close friend of mine called me up for a coffee and told me about Steemit, and how he thought it would be the perfect platform to share my work. Naturally, I went home and started to read as much as I could about the platform. Since then, I have become fascinated by the platform and everything it stands for. I love the idea of its decentralized nature and it’s been amazing to see how efficiently regulated the whole site is by the community. I’m really excited to build new relationships within this community, learn new and interesting information, and most of all, support and help grown this platform by actively engaging with it and you as much as possible.

What will I be doing on Steemit?
As soon as I have posted this first post, I will start sharing some of my adventures, passions and ideas with you all.

These will include:

• Sharing my photography and videography content with you.
• Creating photography tutorials so that you too can learn more about my passion.
• Reviews of some of the equipment I use for my work.
• Create travel photography blogs of some of the favourite places I have travelled to and want to share with you!
• Create a today in photography, where I go out every day to take new photos of what I encounter and share them with you.
• Write some general blogs where I can share a little of my mind with you!

 
(One of my pictures of Ottawa, Canada where I live)

Now that I’ve told you all about me, let me know a little about yourself in the comments and what you do on Steemit so I can find more interesting people :)

Best wishes and see you on the next post,

Tristan
(25th of January, 2018)