Photography is life. Photography is my passion.

Greetings, fellow Fuji friends and fans. I am honored to be here, telling you my story as a creator and as a photographer, and I’m especially honored you’ve taken the time to slow down and read my writing.
My name is Tommy Christie, and I am a Denver, Colorado (USA) based travel photographer. I work in Sales at an Educational Technology company to pay the bills and use my Fujifilm X-T5 and X-T2 to fuel my passion for travel and photography.

I fell in love with travel at age 6 on a trip to Great Britain with my parents. Ever since that trip, I have been absolutely obsessed with maps, globes, and geography. I can remember standing with my parents at an interactive “talking globe” at Harrod’s department store in London for two hours straight, utterly fascinated by the planet we live on, represented to me by this plastic, electronic “toy.”

My passion for travel and geography has waxed and waned over the years, but the fire is burning brighter than ever now. I spend far too much time (or too little?) on Google Earth scouting amazing places to check out.

I studied Philosophy and, surprise, surprise, Geography as a University student (Virginia Tech in the USA) and feel that these two domains inspire my creative vision as a photographer.

I am in love with our beautiful planet and all of the humans and creatures that inhabit and occupy it.

It’s a remarkable miracle to be a living, conscious being and I try to use my lenses to capture this feeling of wonder, timelessness and expansion that we all felt as young children.

When I have a camera on me, I’m well equipped to capture slices of reality that speak to my soul and, hopefully, the souls of others.

The photos that I take are slices of my unique reality: my travels, my experiences, my relationships, my philosophies, the books that I’ve read, the movies that I’ve watched, the people I’ve talked with and broken bread with, etc.

The more I improve at this beautiful art and craft, the more the world around me opens up and bubbles with divergent possibilities.

I am most fascinated and drawn to landscapes and cityscapes, as well as people and animals. When I travel and create, it’s my goal to capture the essence and soul of a particular place, and accurately reflect the locale as I see it.

When I’m not traveling with my trusted cameras, I’m a dedicated reader, hiker, and weightlifter.

I am a voracious reader and spend my reading hours absorbing the most elevating ideas that I can. I’m mainly inspired by Philosophy, Anthropology, and History, and I’m currently immersed in the work of Rick Rubin, Anthony Bourdain, Will Durant’s “Story of Philosophy,” and Herman Hesse’s “Steppenwolf.”

My photography journey started 6 years ago with an iPhone hiking up the majestic, idyllic trails of summer time Colorado. I started posting photos of my high alpine hikes and they were greeted with mostly warm feedback, so I thought, why not invest in some better gear and water the seeds of a budding creative endeavor?

My first camera was a Ricoh GR-II, a gem of a little street camera. It’s awesome.

It fits into your pocket, has a fixed 28mm lens equivalent, and is discrete as anything. It doesn’t shine in low light environments, but it’s incredibly fun and easy to use during the day.

When I purchased that bad boy, I had absolutely NO idea what I was doing and now completely cringe at the images I created at this stage of my photography journey. Despite my lackluster skills, I continued to create and experiment.

The Ricoh is an awesome little camera, because it’s small and discrete enough to take everywhere. They say the best camera is the one you have on you, and that one was easy to have on you.

The more my passion for photography grew, the more I realized I needed a higher powered kit with a wider variety of lenses to keep pace with my widening creative as well as my expanding visual language and technical skills.

I researched several brands, but Fujifilm reigned supreme in my search. The aesthetics, the affordability and value, the user experience, and search for magic and fun with a camera led me to the Fujifilm X-T2.

The X-T2 was and, still is, a dream. It’s light weight, highly powered, user friendly, and has access to the entire line of brilliant Fujifilm brand glass. It was the perfect starter camera and, to this day, remains my back up camera body. I recommend it often to those looking to get into photography on a budget.

The X-T2 proved to be the ultimate training tool for me. I took it on every trip and would even practice street photography on my work breaks in downtown Denver, Colorado.

A couple of years of steady shooting with the X-T2 confirmed my loyalty to the Fujifilm brand, and to the Fujifilm X line of camera bodies. The creative experience with my X-T2 was too immaculate and pure to give up on.

I launched my photography business in late 2021 (I mainly shoot portraits and sell landscape prints). At the beginning of 2022, I upgraded to the X-T4, which was a more capable overall camera that would help me serve my clients in a much more effective way.

It was love at first sight with the X-T4. I have taken the X-T4 to Guatemala, Mexico (twice), North Carolina, and many places around the American West including White Sands National Park, Great Sand Dunes National Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, Devil’s Tower National Monument, and several other beautiful Western locations.

The X-T4 is a stunning camera, but it only lasted one year around my neck and in my camera bag, as I could not resist the urge to upgrade to the more powerful 40MP sensor X-T5. For reference, the X-T4 sensor is 26.1 megapixels, so this upgrade represented a 153.8% increase in pixel density which would allow me to create higher quality, more impactful images.

I did my best to wait for the X-T5 to drop in price, but I simply could not resist the siren’s call of this lighter, sharper, and more powerful camera body. The sharper my skills and the better my eye becomes, the more my hunger for good equipment becomes. However, you don’t need top of the line gear to create top of the line images, but it sure does not hurt.

I am not a “technical” photographer. It’s my intuition and heart that drives the images I create. Sure, I am decently well versed in the technical specs of the camera, lenses and editing tools that you need to create great images, but I never want to fall prey to creating stale, robotic images that I see in the landscape and travel world.

There are so many images that I see, that are technically perfect and well composed, but simply lack a deeper symbolic and emotional message that my soul craves for.

I’m also very excited by the innovations within AI in the past few years. I’ve been learning about the prominent visual and language models that can hopefully augment my output as a visual artist.

Photography has given me so, so much. At this point, its lessons have been almost entirely spiritual and internal.

Photography has taught me to pay attention to the world around me in a deeper way.

Photography is a way for me to transmute travel and life into art.

Photography is a way for me to pay attention to the world around me and to embrace the experience more fully of being human.

Photography is a way to track the various visual and spiritual patterns in my life.

Photography is life.

Photography is my passion.