Let me tell you something about myself…
My name is Jonas Debraekeleer and I’m an aspiring photographer, graphic designer and writer based in Ghent, Belgium. I also ride a BMX bike, recently started surfing and play the bass-tuba in a small harmony orchestra. I really enjoy the occasional party or concert and I almost never leave the house without my iPod or pocket camera.
My parents have always pushed me and my brothers and sister to be creative. So from really early on I’ve been drawing, making music and building all kinds of stuff. Although l kept being creative all my life, until I was about sixteen years old I never thought about working in the creative industry.
I hadn’t been doing bad in school in general and I was pretty good at math and sciences so I had been focussing on those courses to probably become an engineer or something like that. I had started riding BMX a year or two earlier and being able to design and build bike parts and ramps and stuff sounded just awesome. Besides math and sciences though, I was also interested in all kinds of other stuff I wasn’t learning in school so in my spare time, when I wasn’t out riding, I was usually reading magazines and books or browsing the web in search of new things to learn. I could be fascinated for hours and hours and I actually learned lots from just going through magazines and the internet. It’s in fact also how I got into photography. Seeing all those awesome pictures floating around made me want to learn how to properly use a camera. I wanted to know how it all worked. Be able to make the images I saw all around me and capture those special moments exactly as I saw ‘em, like some of the professionals in the magazines could do so beautifully.
For about a year all my spare time I couldn’t spend riding, I was learning from books and the internet how I could shoot like a pro. I started saving up money to buy one of those fancy DSLRS, some nice lenses and a good flash and in the summer of 2008 I finally could afford ‘em. The journey began!
Aside to discovering this great new world of photography, school was getting harder and harder because of my ADD. I had been having problems processing the huge amounts of material in the often limited time we got to study for a test and during the tests I usually couldn’t finish in time because I couldn’t keep myself focused in the noisy classroom. My grades were dropping slowly but consistently every semester and I was starting to doubt if I was even getting into college at all like this. What if it didn’t work out as I imagined all these years?
Completely against all reason I found out that when I was out shooting pictures of my friends, my ADD didn’t bother me at all! Something like that definitely sets you off thinking in whole new directions. Being a BMX photographer out on the road with riders on Roadfools-style road-trips was starting to replace the dream of working in the engineering department of a major BMX company. I did realise, though, that making a living as a photographer wouldn’t be easy and probably impossible if I stayed within the small world of BMX, so was I being unrealistic? Because of my doubt and also because I was being heavily discouraged by everyone else I told my ideas, I stuck with my first plan… for a while.
After every bad test I got back in school, that idea of leaving it all for what it was worth came back up and eventually I started to work on it. I knew photography alone just wouldn’t cut it to make a living, not if I would only be shooting the things I want to shoot, so I started looking at some possible combinations. That ‘s when graphic design and eventually also writing came up. I had always been drawing, I had been playing around with websites and I had also been doing the posters and flyers for parties and concerts my friends and I set up occasionally. I was actually pretty amazed why I hadn’t been thinking about that before. Secondly I think I’m not that bad a writer, if I may say so myself, so maybe that’s worth a go to. On top of that, it could nicely complement my photography. After all I really enjoy shooting from a journalistic point of view and for a magazine or a website it would mean only one guy to deal with instead of two, so it could give me a pretty nice advantage over my competitors. At this point it just all started to make sense to me and after a whole lot of reasoning I could convince my parents too. I transferred to home-schooling and in 2010 I took my finals for photography.
In the meantime I moved to Ghent and I’m working in a RETIF-store to pay my rent and build a start-up fund. I definitely have a lot more work to do before I can strike out on my own, but I’m super motivated and I hope that in a few months I get it all up and running! Besides work and working on my business, I of course also try to simply enjoy life and spend some time on my bike or board or with friends. After all that’s why we work in the first place, right?
I’m chasing a dream and wonder where it’ll take me…
Jonas Debraekeleer