About me - My life story

I was born in 2003 in La Serena, Chile.

I’ve always been interested in arts. It all started early on in my life, when I was eight years old and I received an acoustic guitar as a birthday present. I will never forget first touching that Ibanez nylon string guitar that clearly was too big for me, so everything I could do was play it horizontally. But despite that, I was happy to experiment with sounds. Notice the emphasis on experiment, because that was the key for me for developing a way to learn about things almost skipping the whole theory part.

Flash forward to 2018, because once again as a gift, I received my first digital camera (Lumix FZ80). Photography was kind of a hidden ability that I had because up to that moment, I didn’t realize that even before that I was already experimenting with my phone’s camera, taking decent pictures. And by decent I mean that there was a thought process behind every picture that I didn’t know it was happening. So, with the camera and now knowing that now I could take pictures with a meaning behind, it was time to learn the technical part of it.

And at the same time (2018) I became aware of another thing: astronomy. I don’t know why, but astronomy was never a thing that interested me too much, even with my dad literally living out of it. This sudden “discovery” was a product of one of hundreds trips to my grandmother’s house in Combarbalá, a small town located south in the Coquimbo region. Going there meant that there was no internet connection, so the only thing that I could do there was… exist (and eat). But that time, going there with my new camera gave me an idea. Due to the relative remoteness of Combarbalá, the sky was so much better for looking up to the night sky, and I decided to try taking a single picture with the camera zenith pointed. The result was underwhelming, but interesting nonetheless: stars. So, out of curiosity I installed a planetarium app in my smartphone and decided to start studying and matching the stars I could see both in the camera screen and in the sky, and that was how it all started astronomy wise.

The year is now 2019, and this was a crucial year for astronomy worldwide. We, in the Coquimbo region were extremely lucky to witness a total solar eclipse, and just a month earlier, the first ever image of a black hole was released by the Event Horizon Telescope (in which my dad was part of). But locally, the first made a huge impact for me, as I got the opportunity to observe and photograph my first total solar eclipse. This is the part of the story where my dad enters, as he made a “rediscoverery” of astrophotography due to him having to slowly “abandon” optical astronomy in the past when he started with radioastronomy. And with my “discovery” of astrophotography, we teamed up and began buying astrogear. But that’s the story of how I got into astrophotography, and that’s only half of what I’m doing nowadays.

The year is 2020, and with the “art bug” still going strong with me, the pandemic and lockdown arrived and suddenly, I had more than plenty of time for studying for school exams that will surely decide the future for me keep experimenting with photography and apparently, also music. That meant that little by little, I was realizing that indeed photography was there to stay with me forever.

And in 2021, the decision was made. I wanted to study something that allowed me to keep shooting with a camera. Oddly enough, I always thought that music was really my passion, but photography was really the one that was always there.

Sure enough, I discovered what I wanted to do the rest of my life but… I was pretty sure that a degree in Astronomical Photography with a mention in Musical Composition in Guitar in an university that was specifically located in my hometown… didn’t exist. So it was time for me to make important decisions. First, I had to find a career path that was realistic to my expectations and second, if I chose that, I’d have to move to Santiago de Chile, due to our “lovely centralized country”, said college career would most probably be located.

And was even after I took the PDT (university eligibility test at the time) that I made an unexpected decision. I wanted to have a degree in film. Why would an unexperienced kid that didn’t even like to watch movies or go to the cinema, suddenly wanted to specialize in a cinephile’s dream career without knowing apparently anything? That’s the fun part. My thought process was: I like photography and I like music/sound; what is the perfect mixture of both? Film.

So, here I am. Four (at the time of writing) short films released in midst of an unknown but exciting adventure so far, and I’m living the dream that I never knew I had.

Anyways, that’s a hell of a lot of text. But I think it summarizes exactly the way I wanted to describe my journey through the fascinating world of arts and science! And of course, 99.95% of everything that happened related to what I do today over the course of my life wouldn’t have been possible without the unconditional support of my mom, dad, brothers and friends. I’ll be forever thankful.

Last updated: July 2024