Thomas Heaton

Thomas Heaton is a British landscape photographer, and a popular YouTuber.

He has 554K subscribers on his eponymous YouTube channel.

Introduction-

Thomas Heaton was born in April 1984 into a middle-class family; he hails from Northumberland, England.

His father used to work as a bus driver.

Thomas’s grandmother was a skilled artist.

Even though he loved art classes at school and wanted to become a good artist, he couldn’t become good at art and this greatly disappointed him.

Thomas studied for a media degree.

Love for photography-

At 16, in college, as a part of the course, he got introduced to photography in the darkroom and as soon as he held a camera and learnt to use it and develop the film, he fell in love with photography and never looked back.

Prior to this, photography for Thomas was just limited to the holiday snaps, and he didn’t use it as a creative tool.

From 2000 to 2003, he shot film and learnt developing in the darkroom.

At 16, thanks to his love for outdoors, Thomas got into landscape photography; he started exploring places and capturing them in his camera.

His first landscape photo was of Blackpool Beach; the photo was overexposed and wasn’t up to the par.

Photography gave Thomas a purpose to travel.

He has been inspired by Ranulph Fiennes, a British explorer.

Career-

After graduating from the university, Thomas started working as a Video Technician for a large events company.

His job involved video production, editing, photography, and travelling across Europe.

After working for four years in the corporate events industry, Thomas felt his job to be a dead-end job, so in early 2011, he quit his job.

And started working as a freelance camera operator and photographer.

Then, Thomas started working as a professional wedding photographer.

In 2011, as he didn’t have enough money, he settled for a Canon 7D camera and Canon 50mm f/1.4 and Sigma 10-20mm lenses for wedding photography.

At that time, his back-up camera was a Canon 350D (EOS Digital Rebel XT); this was the first digital camera that he ever bought in 2006.

Eventually, as Thomas worked for more weddings, he saved up enough and bought an 85mm f/1.8 lens, and a 24-70mm F/2.8L lens; then he bought a Canon EOS-1D Mark III and Canon EOS 5D Mark III cameras.

After photographing around a hundred weddings, he noticed that he wasn’t getting creative with the wedding photography and wasn’t enjoying it.

Also, Thomas developed anxiety because in wedding photography there were many things outside his control.

So, he pulled the plug and quit working as a wedding photographer.

At that time, even though Thomas enjoyed landscape photography, he considered it only as a hobby and felt it not to be a tangible career option.

At the time, he had no knowledge of earning from landscape photography.

Then, Thomas started his studio, ‘ProCap’; even though he was earning handsomely with studio work, it wasn’t always enjoyable as it sometimes felt tedious.

Previously, he used to upload his images to stock sites and give them to the photography agents who used to sell them, and he used to earn a commission of 50-60%.

YouTube-

Once, Thomas bought a new bike and watched mountain biking YouTube videos to learn biking tricks and jumps.

Then, he wondered whether there were any good photography YouTube channels and stumbled upon a couple of landscape photography channels, Ben Horne, and Nick Carver.

Thomas was impressed by their videos and was inspired to start his own YouTube channel.

So, on 25 November 2014, he started his eponymous YouTube channel; a day later, he published his first video, ‘Landscape Photography on Location – Lake District, Great Gable. UK.’

At that time, unlike Ben and Nick, Thomas wasn’t producing cinematic quality videos but started producing normal vlogs with just his iPhone; he taped his phone to a stick to shoot; he was influenced by Casey Neistat, a popular American vlogger.

Even though the production quality wasn’t great, his videos started becoming popular, thanks to his storytelling.

After working on his channel for a couple of years, he gained sizeable followers, and started earning more from his YouTube channel than his studio.

This was a blessing for Thomas as he was following his passion of landscape photography and earning by sharing it on YouTube.

As he loved landscape photography more than working in the studio, he prioritised former over latter and became a full-time landscape photographer.

Thomas’s main video camera is a Fujifilm X-T4.

Becoming successful-

As of January 2024, he has 554K subscribers on his YouTube channel, and 247K followers on Instagram.

In one of his YouTube videos, Thomas stated that one of the reasons for his success was entering into YouTube when there wasn’t much competition.

He earns from a variety of sources like advertisements on YouTube, affiliate marketing, and sponsorships.

Thomas also earns from public speaking, lectures, workshops, selling prints, calendars, merchandise, and books.

He sells merchandise through his company, ‘Outdoor Publishing Ltd.’

Thomas published three volumes of his book, ‘Landscape Photography On Location’.

Thomas has a website.

A globetrotter-

He has been travelling around the world for shoots.

Most of his trips are inspired by other people’s work; when he notices amazing location photos of travelers, he sets on trips.

Thomas finds locations by using Google Earth, Flickr, and hashtags in Instagram and X.

He travelled to Death Valley to shoot; his most memorable shoot location is Zion National Park, Utah.

Thomas loves using filters; most of the time, he uses a polarizing filter to reduce glare and reflection and improve the contrast and saturation of images.

He also uses ND filters and occasionally, ND grad filters.

Personal life-

Thomas is married to Charlotte.

He is an introvert and is passionate about rock climbing, mountain biking, fishing, camping, hiking and running.

He lives in Whitley Bay, England.

So, how are you inspired by the success story of Thomas Heaton?

Share with me in the comment section below.