As a kid growing up in Arizona, I joined the Boy Scouts, eventually earning my Eagle award. All those hours traveling with the Scouts in the outdoors taught me to appreciate nature and helped develop my photographer eye. I also worked for my dad in his construction company which honed my attention to detail. In my 20s I became a science teacher (optics one of the subjects I taught) and a football, soccer and baseball coach. During this time I continued traveling in the outdoors, backpacking and rock climbing mostly, and even became a summer instructor at the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) in Lander, Wyoming. To document my experiences I started taking photographs, usually slides, sometimes sharing these shows with my science students and working them into the curriculum. That is when my love for photography began to blossom. During my 29-year, award-winning teaching career, I did have other interests and accomplishments: playing the lead in dinner theater comedy; two published novels, Adventures in Spacetime and Duck Egg Blue; hosting the premiere episode of Ultimate Reality on A&E in which I went cage diving with great white sharks; and travel, always travel, especially focused on nature and the outdoors and always captured in photos. Thanks to the advent of digital photography and my eventual retirement from teaching, I finally decided to turn my love for photography into something more and began selling my images at 5 different stock photography websites on the internet. To date, I now have close to 5000 digital photographs available online. I photograph anything and everything that is beautiful to me and my portfolio is eclectic. I mainly do travel (or street) photography, much of it editorial, and almost always use natural, ambient light. When shooting, I have one camera with a wide lens over one shoulder, and another camera with a zoom lens over the other. That is the way I roll!
Derrick Neill joined Pixels.com Licensing on May 11th, 2018.
