The connecting thread of my career

When I was a kid, I wanted to either be an Olympic sprinter, a race car driver, or a fighter pilot when I grew up. All things that go very fast! That's hilarious to me, because I don't do well at heights, I get motion sickness, and let's be honest, being an Olympian is extremely difficult to do. So, how did I end up as a nature photographer/graphic designer/author? All things that go very slow.

I thought I'd approach that question the following way. Have you ever had a conversation with someone that starts on one subject, then meanders to something completely different and eventually you look at each other and say, "How on earth did we get on this topic?" That's the way I feel about my career, to some extent. I will admit it's not entirely out of left field for me to follow a creative career. I have had interest in creativity since childhood, but I wanted to look more closely at the figurative thread that connects everything together. In doing so, I found it quite interesting how the most influential moments in my career path seemed to be quite insignificant at the time.

During childhood, I definitely enjoyed creative pursuits. Drawing was my favourite, but I also enjoyed art classes where I would paint, sculpt, or build things. I remember many childhood days where I would sit on the living room floor on the carpet, either cross-legged and hunched over or lying on my stomach propped up on my elbows, drawing portraits. I would find pictures of people inside of magazines and I would spend countless hours drawing them as accurately as I could.

Several of my graphite pencil drawings during childhood.

I kept at it and got more serious about it in my teen years. That's where I really began to hone that skill and improve the quality of my drawings.

I enjoyed creativity and creative tasks enough that my parents enrolled me in art classes outside of high school as well. Those classes helped to cultivate creativity and teach me a few new artistic skills.

During my teen years, approaching graduation, I really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and despite my heavy interest in creativity and art, it still didn't cross my mind that it could be a viable career path. Choosing a direction for what felt like the rest of my life seemed like too big a commitment, and I'll be honest, I was a pretty scared, shy, anxious, and nervous kid growing up.

University of Manitoba campus.

I didn't really know what I wanted to do as a career, but I did go into university, hoping that it might help me find a direction. I enrolled in U1 at the University of Manitoba. I sampled some classes, with most of them centered around either mathematics or creativity of some sort. Those were my strengths in grade school. I sampled classes like art history, statistics, a professional development type of writing class, math in art, and one called environmental design. That last class was the one I enjoyed most. 

The class was centered around designing spaces, whether outside or inside. I believe most of what we were tasked with creating were outdoor spaces and I really enjoyed it. I actually looked forward to going to that class, and I enjoyed the exercises and the projects that I worked on. I kept overhearing that many of the people that excelled in that class would eventually end up studying architecture. Coincidentally, architecture was something that a lot of people told me I'd likely be good at because of my interest in creativity and mathematics. The problem was that to me, architecture sounded like an intimidating field of study and an overwhelming amount of work. I just didn't feel ready for that at the time.

As I finished year one and still didn't know what direction I wanted to go, I knew that I did enjoy that one class and that must've stuck with me. Completing that environmental design class was the first key influence on my career that I didn't even realize at the time. It showed me that I enjoyed design. Creation with a specific goal in mind.

Because I felt lost, I asked my parents if I could continue living at home while I tried to figure things out, and luckily for me they were very supportive about it. I'm incredibly grateful for them. Deep down, I felt that I was meant to attend post-secondary studies in some capacity.

I stayed at home and I got a full-time job working in retail. I worked in retail for close to 8 years and I was pretty good at it. I had a lot of positive moments working that job, but I wasn't certain I wanted to continue down that path.

Then one day, a co-worker pulled me aside and said, "Hey, just so you know, I put in my two weeks notice. I'll be leaving to go to college." I was really curious and started asking about it. During that conversation, I mentioned how I thought I saw myself going into post-secondary education, but I didn't know what to study. He encouraged me to look into Red River College, where he was going. It was something that I had never really considered. He suggested that I go on their website, look through their classes, and their offerings. The same night, I did just that and I came across the Graphic Design program at Red River College. Every class sounded enjoyable to me. I gave it some thought and decided to go for it.

That very conversation is another one of those moments that I didn't really think was significant at the time. It was an unexpected conversation that led to something much bigger. Obviously enrolling in college was significant, but the conversation that led to that didn't feel that way. It was in college that I had another couple moments that really set me down the path that I'm on. 

My expectation was to study graphic design, which for the most part is what I studied. What I'm trying to say is that I had no interest in photography up to that point, but I think some of the lessons and teachings did somewhat encourage, or at least reference photography as a good skill to possess.

As the program progressed, I began to see the benefit to having camera. In design school there was often a use for having your own photographs for projects. Back then, the stock photography market was pretty small and students were forced into using sub-par stock photo sites with very few photo offerings if they didn't have a camera of their own. I went through my first two years of studies trying to make it work, not having any plan to purchase a camera of my own.

Then came my third and final year in college where two influential things happened. Each set me on the path that I'm on now. I can't recall which moment came first, but they both happened in that final year.

Photos of Winnipeg's Exchange District. None of which were taken during college, though.

One moment was that we received a very brief lesson or two on cameras and photography. The lessons were only a few hours in length and I found it kind of interesting, but even still, I wasn't really feeling that connected to photography. After the lessons, we were provided cameras to explore Winnipeg's Exchange District and experiment with the cameras with the expectation that we'd later get together as a group and critique those photos.

We had to share the cameras, because the students outnumbered the gear, so we'd hand off every now and again. I took a couple handfuls of photographs that class, but I took one photograph in particular, that really stuck with me. I captured one photo of the sign outside of the Mondragon Cafe in the Exchange District and I really liked the appearance of it. If I remember correctly, I liked the way the light was hitting the sign. In all honesty, it was probably a very mediocre photo, but as someone with no experience, I loved it. For whatever reason, it resonated with me. It was that very photo that changed things for me in a major way. It was then that I really began to see the benefit of having my own camera to accompany my design work. Over the next week or two, I put some serious thought into whether or not I should actually buy my own camera.

I decided I'd do it. I went out and bought my own entry level Canon DSLR, the Canon Rebel T2i. Surprisingly, it's the same camera I'm still using to this day. While there are much better cameras out there now, this one's still chugging along and has the ability to produce some great results. I've purchased a new camera body since writing this blog post, but it still hasn't arrived. Once again, it didn't seem like that big a deal when I bought it. I saw it as a fun piece of equipment that I could use for school projects, but it evolved into much more than that.

My school project about my collections, titled "Collecting on the Brain."

The other third year moment in school that influenced my path is that we were taught how to use a website called Blurb to print a one-off photo book. We were taught how to do this, because our next school project was to design a book about any subject of our choosing. I have a propensity to collect things, so that's what my book was about; all of the things that I've collected over the years. Like other moments, I didn't see any possibilities at the time for where this skill could take me, but learning how to make a book did have a big impact. 

A lot of companies offer printing services for one-off books now, but at the time I don't think it was very common to do that. Blurb provided a plug-in for Adobe InDesign, which is one piece of software used heavily in the design world. That allowed us to make books that could be uploaded to the Blurb site. From there, Blurb would print it and deliver it to each student. I enjoyed making that book enough that I continued to create a polished book to use as my photography portfolio a few years after college. Then in subsequent years, I made books as yearly photo albums. The long and short of it is that this process made me accustomed to making books. Not only accustomed to the technical side of designing a book, but this is the first time I saw my photos in printed form.

Photos of the book that I published in 2025, titled "Hidden in Plain Sight, Wildlife of Manitoba."

If I hadn't been taught that skill in that class, I don't know if I would have had any desire to publish a book. Fast forward to 2025 and I've published a book that's being sold in a couple of stores. I never would have guessed that back in 2012. Like I say, had I not been making my own books at home all those years, I might not have had the confidence to go for it.

That leads me to the next influential point in my career that seemed insignificant at the time. Some time between 2012 and 2025, I was visiting one of my favourite stores, Chapters.

I walked into the store and I did what I always do and walked straight towards the photography section, because I was obsessed. I went there specifically to view the photo books and I found one consisting of landscape photos taken in various locations in Canada. It consisted of mostly photographs, but I think it contained stories and written descriptions as well. I looked at the book and I thought it was beautiful. After leafing through the book and viewing the photos, I looked at the back of the book, and I read a line stating, "Over a million copies sold." I then thought to myself, "I could make a book like this." Obviously I didn't have expectations of selling a million copies, but it gave me something big to strive for. At the very least, I could physically make a similar book. I just needed to figure out the publishing part of it and getting it into stores. I sat with that thought for many, many years but the timing simply wasn't right.

As I developed my graphic design skills in the field, I was simultaneously doing the same with photography. I was becoming more confident as a photographer, exploring many different genres, and I was receiving good enough feedback that I decided to pursue photography as a profession alongside my full-time job.

In doing so, I've put together a website, made products like prints, calendars, greeting cards, and a book. I've also attended markets as a vendor to promote and sell my products, I've been putting myself out there more on social media, studying marketing, and I've been working on getting my book into more stores. At this point of the story, I've basically caught up to current day and while I have changed jobs in the last couple years which is significant and great, however, I can't pinpoint any influential, but seemingly insignificant moments that got me there. Only a few blatantly obvious ones. ;) Maybe I'm just too close to things and not enough time has passed for me to truly recognize any additional hidden moments.

I feel like I'm at a stage where I don't know when the next big shift in my career will happen and I'm wondering if one of those influential moments in disguise has already happened and I'll see where it takes me soon.

Thanks a lot for reading!

Dale