An Interview with Heidi
Greetings JJers! It’s your host Arashrimus (@arashrimus, @jj_editor_arashrimus_) and I’d like to sincerely welcome you to year 2017!
Just like any other year we still don’t know how the next 365 days of our lives are going to shape up, thus we can only hope for a year full of health, prosperity, peace and memorable times ahead! But aside from the usual hopes, let’s wish each and every photo-enthusiast a fantastic year filled with great memories captured through their photographs!
Speaking of Social Photography stuff, JJ Community is already working on a bunch of new surprises throughout 2017! As @joshjohnson has already stated, he will bring a brand new set of sponsors to the JJ Community, therefore a whole new set of opportunities and recognitions are waiting for the JJers to be bestowed!
Before we begin this month’s exclusive JJ Editor Interview, let me refresh your memory about the latest “JJ Editor Recruitment” session as well, on the last days of year 2016 @kevinkuster invited a new generation of JJ Editors for further variety to the ever-growing team of JJ Editors! Do kindly follow the latest generation of Aspiring JJ Editors as they need your continues Support to bring you delightful features along the way!
Ok! It’s now the time to unravel the story of yet another renowned JJ Editor, as a clue let me tell you that she’s super famous for her immaculate Monochrome and Kids portrait features! Yup… You guessed it right! We have Heidi Kesteloot (@heidikesteloot / @jj_editor_heidi) on our Hot-Seat for this month’s Interview!
So who is Heidi Kesteloot? To get the answer we had to virtually travel to Belgium to find Heidi’s story to be revealed to the JJers for the first time ever!
Heidi lives in the Flanders region of Belgium and is a proud Dutch Speaker. (Fun Fact: did you know Dutch language is the world’s easiest language to learn for the native English speakers?!)
After getting multiple recommendations from her friends, Heidi joined Instagram a few years ago and soon after she was introduced to the JJ Community by following JJ daily hashtags attached to her friends’ photos!
Heidi confesses viewing photographs of her friends on Instagram has always brought her the opportunity to train her eyes in order to capture better photographs by herself, all in all it was back in April 2015 that she finally made the choice on becoming a JJ Editor to bring her input on selecting features and to pass the sense of joy and happiness for the members of the JJ Community!
In course of nearly 1 and half years Heidi has tastefully selected over 2400 features, she confesses that she doesn’t have a specific number of features planned for the designated daily themes but instead she continues on selecting features to the point where she feels satisfied with the collection that she has gathered to corresponding themes. I personally think that is the reason why her features are having such obvious signature and taste attached to them, She clearly does the Editing duties by her heart; thus the outcome is always very tangible to the viewers’ eyes.
Heidi also happens to be quite active in “JJ Anarchy” field as well; she is the sole founder and the administrator of the renowned @JJ_Monochromekids! That infact is yet another indication showing Heidi’s importance within the integral of the JJ Community. If you aren’t already following her anarchy group I urge you to do it right away as she has gathered a fantastic feed showing the beauty of the kids portraits morphed in the nostalgic ambience of the Monochromic photographs!
As you have found out already, Photography plays a dominant role in Heidi’s life, therefore since 2015 she started taking photography courses to further enrich her knowledge on technical aspects of photography, but funnily enough she still confesses her best photographs are the ones that she captured them by putting her intuition and her soul through the camera’s visor! & speaking of Camera’s visor, Heidi uses a Nikon D7200 (equipped with a 16 / 300mm zoom lens) accompanied with her trusty iPhone 6 to capture her favorite scenes. She also edits her photographs with likes of VSCO and Mextures to touch them up in the most desired manner.
Now let’s distant ourselves from the Photography related stuff for a bit, and lets begin getting to know the private dimensions of Heidi’s life as well.
Heidi is the mother of 2 lovely daughters from her ex-husband and her new partner has brought in 2 daughters from his previous relationship, she’s also the biological mother to a 6 six year old little girl from her current relationship as well! All in all it reveals Heidi happens to be a hard working mother of 5 girls who still magically finds enough time to rock the JJ Community with her constant efforts!
Pets are also playing a huge role in Heidi’s daily life as well, she happens to have a “Berner Sennen” dog, a cat, two kittens and strangely enough there are also two Chickens running around in her garden as well! Now it baffles how on earth Heidi is taking care of all of these things at once! And it gets even weirder coming to understand Heidi is also working as a part-time designer of Websites and Promotional Catalogues too!
Some quick facts about Heidi
- Blue is Heidi’s favorite color.
- Births of her daughters are amongst the best memories that she can always refer to.
- Spring and fall are her favorites as she loves the nature during these seasons.
- She wishes there was a way to stop the Violence and destruction in our world.
- Her all-time favorite spots are Algarve in Portugal and Jordan in the Middle East.
- Deb (@jj_editor_debwazi ) and Heike ( @jj_editor_heike ) are her closest JJ Editor friends as she always feels inspired by their selections.
- She takes dance lessons and regularly does swimming in order to stay healthy and keep it fit!
- Heidi’s Motto in life happens to be “Never give up, unless you really NEED to”!
As for the last question, Heidi confesses there has been a couple of “JJ Daily Themes” that she didn’t initially liked to “Edit”, but in the long run she saw them all as opportunities to let her dive into the subjects that might have been not originally interesting to her taste! All in all she confirms being an Editor has brought her a wonderful chance to see thousands of pictures every day from each corner of the world to stay true the core concept of JJ’s “Create to Connect”!
And that leads us to the end of yet another Exclusive Interview! I Hope you enjoyed Heidi’s story as much as I did! Undoubtedly her presence and her priceless efforts are indeed precious to the continuation of the JJ Community!
Kindly Stay tune for even more Exclusive JJ Interviews coming to you very soon!
Yours Sincerely,
Arashrimus ( @arashrimus )
