Check Out Davyd Seekins’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Davyd Seekins

Hi Davyd, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
My journey really started my senior year in high school. I was a basketball player my whole life but that year I had gotten a camera and started just messing around, taking photos of friends and making little YouTube videos. It wasn’t until I left for college down in San Diego that I had a severe wrist injury, requiring surgery and not allowing me to basically play basketball or lift anything more than a few pounds. It was then that I took more time just getting creative, keeping myself busy learning photoshop, and trying to take on more shoots, just to work on my skills because it kept me busy, especially mentally. Early on I had a lot of fun, especially working with one of my closest friends, Curraun, who’s now a full time model at Ford, so having that access to experiment with shoots of all kinds with someone who also wanted to take their craft more seriously was a huge blessing. My big break came however when a high school friend and teammate Jaime Jaquez Jr calls me late. like 1 am while I’m out and away on a vacation. He proceeds to tell me about how he has this Drew League game coming up tomorrow morning and he heard I did photos now, if he could get hooked up with some photos. I blindly agree’d and left my vacation a day early (to my ex girlfriend’s dismay) and drive down to the Drew to flick him up, and he ever so kindly drops 50 points that day. Because of that, the photos and video I made for him blew up, and started to get me some attention in the space I never had. From there, a photographer friend I had made that day, Nico Alba, texts me asking if I can take a job with Hezi God that he can’t attend to. I agree and this starts my career in photography. I then get hired by the Veniceball league full time a little over a month later, So I quit my current job at t-mobile and take the risk fully fledged and haven’t looked back. Now I’m the Head photographer of the league itself and an editor at Some Company Inc, and I have worked with clients all the way from Panda Express and Uprisers, Devinthelab, Vanilla Ice, the NBPA, Kid ink and more. It’s a lot of blessings to have kept me full time in this creative space honestly.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Oh hell no, talk about a road full of potholes haha. I think early on the struggle was growing up in a smaller town, Camarillo, CA, that we didn’t have real great access to creatives like they do in LA or NYC, let alone most people in my town really viewing any kind of creative job as Viable. Also early on, it’s the money really. Photography, and especially videography are extremely expensive to get into, so buying more lenses, better gear or lights, even paying for adobe early on is really taxing. There was a time when I didn’t understand the ebbs and flows of freelance business as well, getting down to my last $20 and just getting by from little side hustles until the next gig came in. It’s all these struggles though that when I look back were probably necessary, I wouldn’t have the wisdom I do now about the industry and operating on a personal and financial level if it wasn’t hard or I wasn’t making mistakes early on.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I definitely specialize in portrait and sports photography! I love shooting people, I think there’s just an energy you capture in the photos that you don’t get in other kinds of photography. I think I’m more known for my editing style, just very clean, crisp photos, with more usage of wide lenses to capture everything for basketball, and when it comes to black and white VERY contrasty, deep blacks and bright highlights. I do shoot a lot of film, I give a lot of credit to my friend Gala for putting me on to more kinds of film, techniques all that. Usually I’ll shoot on a roll of film and the second it’s developed send it to her for critique.

I think the thing that sets me apart is my adaptability for various styles of shooting. I definitely have more of an affinity towards certain styles and edits, but there is a wide range of styles I’ve posted, edited, all that. I also think that I view a photography session, or photographs in general as more than just a picture. Each photo carries energy, it carries a different kind of weight to it, that I think its the photographers job to curate and make that energy come to life in that photo.

How do you think about luck?
I don’t know if I could call it luck, but it’s something there for sure. I have the tendency to say that there’s been a lot of divine intervention when it’s come to parts of my career. Right place right time, especially early on when it came to meeting some of my earliest photography friends, to somehow getting hired for a gig that would keep me going just another week, there’s just too many “Hmm, how perfect did that work out” situations that have happened that I couldn’t be here without. I can’t say that bad luck is in play here too. I think whatever is supposed to happened, especially on the bad end of things, is meant to be a teaching point. I’ve had a lot of failures, in managing my money, marketing myself, not living up to a client expectations, formatting an SD card on accident, its happened. I’d love to say It didn’t but its what has made me the photographer and person I am today, and I hope that it keeps happening to I can always be improving myself and my craft.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Davyds.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/d.avyds

Image Credits
Androu De Vera, Jordan Hill