Lucy Heald,
Thirteen Year Old Published Photographer and Writer
We want to share a guest post by Lucy Heald, a thirteen year old published photographer and writer from Flintshire, North Wales in the United Kingdom. Lucy recently launched her photography website and we wanted to help her get some exposure because we believe it’s great to see a smart young lady who’s one of our newest member of photography community.
From a very young age I have had an interest in photography and writing with my first photographs coming from my dads old mobile phone, my parents complimented me on the photographs I had been taking on the phone – which encouraged me to take more interesting photographs of my pets and local scenery. Over time I began writing articles to accompany my own photography work, and I was then fortunate to have been published into our local community quarterly circular, “The Five Villages Chronicle”; and still today I remain published seasonally within, “The Five Villages Chronicle”.
After starting my first year at St Richard Gwyn Catholic High School in September 2012 – I found I had to balance my photography interests with my school work and found weekends were the best for me to fulfill my hobby without interrupting my school work.
In late March of 2013 my school was closed for a day due to the unusual heavy snow that hit North Wales and the rest of the United Kingdom. On this free day from school and with the freak weather for March I was able to take many examples of the fantastic wintery scenery including photographs of my own pets playing in the snow in our garden. Shortly after, I decided to submit several of my photographs to big-name media companies nationally as I thought them to be very interesting and would like to share them, within a few hours I had my first photograph featured on the BBC – CBBC channel on the NewsRound programme. Within minutes of the live broadcast being aired, I had several of my school friends send me positive comments about how they saw my work on live television. This for me was a great incentive to create more exciting and interesting photographs that I could share with others. Since then I have had my work published in newspapers, magazines, and the R.S.P.C.A Animal Action magazine and numerous websites.
The positive support I receive on a daily basis from friends and family members, plus the great feedback daily from my website which contains many of my best and favorite photographs for general viewing. The support is overwhelming and most appreciated. You can visit my website and view my portfolio at lucyheald.com which I launched in August of 2014.
I view my website statistics showing page views, visitor numbers and search terms plus referring sites on a day to day basis; as well as reading any contact form submissions sent to me by my website visitors. I have many website hits daily from the United Kingdom; however the majority of views on my website are from international visitors to which I am astonished as this was completely unexpected. As of this article writing my most viewed page is my blog. My blog which contains news and information on my most recent photographs and publications receives more views by far than any other of my web pages; and that in itself encourages me to carry on writing blog posts for my website visitors.
For the future I intend to continue with my current photography work – and I have recently upgraded my camera equipment with the intent of going further with my current achievements. The possible career choices I have considered are photography and writing; as well as journalism and online blogging. I have already made enquires with several newspaper companies, hoping for the possibility of having my work experience week away from school with a professional reporter and photographer, hopefully this will give me a real insight into a photography and journalism career.
Finally thank you for taking the time to read my article and I hope you find the time to visit my website and blog page.
