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I'm leaving... + 10k subs giveaway!
🎉🔗GIVEAWAY FORM - Contest closed! Thanks for joining!
Thank you to everyone who allowed me to reach 10k subscribers on YouTube! ❤️To give back, I will be giving away a new Google Pixel 4a to one of my subscribers 😄 See the form above for terms & conditions.
▶️👇Videos mentioned
- The Reunion https://youtu.be/x7FivjzH0Ak
- First time skiing at Whistler https://youtu.be/nG2SJnDwlUs
- Road Trip to Tofino https://youtu.be/q9hWIuUUW_w
- HDR Tutorial (while hiking Garibaldi) https://youtu.be/h4eagz6Y07o
- US West Coast Road Trip https://youtu.be/iteIhE7SASE
- DJI Osmo Pocket Review https://youtu.be/jx6I8kxApqU
- Google Pixel 4a Review https://youtu.be/7wNDXsDKoCg
- Insta360 One X2 Review https://youtu.be/R-7B_LBvGjE
- Photo Critique & Editing Breakdown https://youtu.be/Rbv_OD3_t4E
- 10 honest truths about starting a YT Channel https://youtu.be/ialdZd6sQLA
- Thanks a 1000 times! https://youtu.be/dpoV10hjtOE
#giveaway #roadto10k #leavinghome
✋ COME SAY HI!! ✋
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford (http://bit.ly/lba_instagram)
- TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@loic.bellemare.alford
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/loic294
- Facebook: https://fb.com/lbaphotographie
📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Introduction
01:17 - My journey on YouTube
06:34 - My favorite videos
10:34 - What is changing in my life?
12:43 - Conclusion
🖼 SHOP FOR PRINTS 🖼
- My online store: https://store.lbaphotographie.ca
🎶 MY MUSIC 🎶
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound: https://www.epidemicsound.com/referral/iu5gau/
📸 GEAR I USE ON YOUTUBE 📸
https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo https://geni.us/dji-pocket-2-combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card https://geni.us/sandisk-extreme-128gb
- Canon 6D Mk https://geni.us/canon-6d-mkii
- Google Pixel 4a https://geni.us/google-pixel-4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM https://geni.us/canon-lens-24-105
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens https://geni.us/canon-lens-16-35
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens https://geni.us/canon-lens-70-200
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD https://geni.us/vanguard-veo-265cb
- DJI MAVIC AIR https://geni.us/lba-dji-mavic-air
🌍 MY PERSONAL WEBSITE 🌍
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CONTEST (“CONTEST”) ADMINISTERED BY Loïc Bellemare-Alford. (“ADMINISTRATOR”). CONTEST BEGINS ON 08/14/2021 AT 10:00am EST AND ENDS ON 09/20/2021 AT 10:00pm EST. (“CONTEST PERIOD”). NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. ONLY AN EMAIL ADDRESS and subscription to my YouTube channel (Loïc Bellemare-Alford) is required. By participating, entrants agree to be bound by these Official Rules and the decisions of the Administrator. Void where prohibited by law.Contest is open to legal residents of Canada, United States, Europe and India who have reached the age of majority in their respective province or territory of residence at the time of entry. 1 winner will be chosen at random using a the random function in Google Sheet. The odds of winning will depend on the number of entries received. The winner will be sent an email and will have forty-eight hours to respond. If no response is received within forty-eight hours, another winner will be chosen. Administrators are not responsible for prize fulfillment nor for any technical failures. Winning entry will be verified. A list of winners will be displayed on the giveaway widget on the original contest post. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and/or Google are in no way associated with this giveaway. A reply to the winning email is required within 48 hours before a new winner is chosen. The winner’s entries will be verified. Administrators and sponsors reserve the right to publish winner’s first name and last initial. Images included in the giveaway post may not depict the exact prize, and are for illustrative purposes only. Please contact loic @ lbacreations.com for any questions.
(gentle music) - So it's pretty crazy. We just arrived yesterday in Vancouver and we are already here at Whistler. Good morning, everybody. Hey everyone. Good morning, everyone. Good evening, everyone. Hello everyone. Good morning everyone. Good morning, everyone. Hello everyone. Good morning, everyone. Hello, everyone. Good morning, everyone. Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. Good morning, everyone. (fireworks banging) Hello, everyone, just a year ago, I never would have expected that my channel would reach 10,000 subscribers, but here we are. And I'm super grateful for every single one of you that subscribed to the channel. I think a lot of you either know me from my Google Pixel 4a videos or my DJI Pocket 2 videos. So I wanna make it a little bit different video and share with you some of the key moments and some of my favorite videos I created in the last few years. It's also one of the last videos I'll be filming in this beautiful environment. So I'm gonna share with you what is happening with the channel and what is happening just in general with my life that will completely change for the next coming upcoming videos. Oh, and there's also a giveaway for Google Pixel 4a, so definitely listen to this video, to know how to enter the contest. (water running and birds chirping) For those of you new into this channel, I'm Loïc Bellemare-Alford, a young photographer and filmmaker on a journey to become better at this art. You might not know, but I published my first video on YouTube almost 11 years ago. At the time I created most of the videos just for fun or for school. One of those short films I created for school was called "The Reunion." I have some very good memories creating this film, and I really liked the first shot inside of the film where we're going around all kinds of things. And it was a really hard shot to create. There wasn't any autofocus at the time, and there's also some VFX that I created inside of it. And I think it turned out pretty well overall. The rest of the film is not that good when you look at it today, but it was still a lot of fun to create. And it's really important that when you're making a video, you have fun while creating them. We actually got kicked out twice while filming this video, which are still pretty good memories. Even if it's the one thing that we learned that we cannot be filming some things anywhere we want. At the end of 2018, I bought my DJI Osmo Pocket because I was leaving for Vancouver and wanted to document my time over there. The first day I arrived a friend wrote to me and asked me if I wanted to go skiing at Whistler. So I definitely accepted the offer and went over there, thinking it would create my first vlog. It came out as a pretty nice video, but it wasn't a vlog in the end because I just didn't have anything to say. And didn't film enough of talking shots to be able to make a vlog out of it. During my time over there in 2019, I tried filming a few other vlogs, but none of them really turned out to be that good. And most of them, I didn't even publish them. I did publish my trip to Tofino with my sister that ended up more being a travel video than anything else because of a lot of parts were not really good in the end. But it was still a really great experience and I learned a lot, especially that when you create a vlog, it's important to have a plan about what you're gonna be filming and what are you gonna talk about inside of that vlog. It's also around that time that I created my first tutorial and the first tutorial I ever created on YouTube is how to take some HDR photos. So this was a really cool experience because we went up a crazy mountain with some crazy views, but we also had all kinds of adventures inside of it, we didn't have enough food, we were really tired when we ended the day and I captured all of this inside of the videos. It's not only a tutorial, but it's also a really nice memory for myself and my friends with who I went on this little trip. When I came back in August, 2019, I had a lot of footage that I filmed while I was in Vancouver and especially of my trip on the West Coast with my friend, Nicholas, but I didn't have time to edit it while I was over there, so I started editing the videos here in Montreal, but it's also the moment where I realized that I really didn't really have the footage I wanted to create a nice cool travel video, like I wanted to create. So I still created a video even though it didn't have the footage I wanted or didn't get the result I really wanted, but it's still something that's pretty nice because it's a really cool memory of my time over there. Now this brings me to January, 2020, where I decided to create my first ever camera review of the DJI Osmo Pocket. I remember putting so much work inside of this video passing at least three days to film some content and passing weeks to create the edit afterwards. I think it came out pretty well, and it's one of my first video that started getting a little bit of attraction on YouTube. During the following months, I did create a few videos, but then I didn't really have time to work on many of them because of school, and also my internship during the summer time. Now this brings me at the end of August, 2020, where I decided to get a lot more serious about my YouTube videos and created a plan to be able to create a video at least every two weeks. At that time I only had 250 subscribers and I got most of them from either family and friends or from my video about the DJI Osmo Pocket. That's around the time where the Google Pixel 4a came out and I bought this phone knowing it would be really good for photography. That's also when I decided to create a review of the Google Pixel 4a and also comparison with my DSLR, not knowing at all that the algorithm would pick both of these videos. This is really the moment where my channel started growing really, really fast. And I can show you what I recorded at the time about the growth of my channel. I was so excited about this unexpected growth for my channel. I just refreshed my YouTube analytics page and. It's crazy just a few seconds ago, my channel passed a thousand subscribers and I really didn't see this coming as fast as it arrived. I got a pretty nice surprise this morning, I woke up and got an email saying that I was accepted inside of the YouTube Partner Program. And most people online said it took for a few weeks to a few months to get approval from the YouTube process. So I was really surprised to get something this quickly because I applied not even 24 hours ago. And I think it's maybe because my channel used to be monetized before they changed the rule. So that's maybe why I got the approval so fast compared to most people that seem to have to wait quite a long time to get it. With the channel growing at a crazy speed and I planned to create a video every single two weeks, I decided to go even faster and start producing a video every single week, even though I was still full-time at school at that time. With my channel growing like crazy, I decided it was finally time to niche down a little bit and decided to concentrate on creating some content about mobile photography. And it's also about the time where I bought my DJI Pocket too, and created some content about that. They both really performed well, so I decided that would be part of main subjects of my channel, at least for now. Now, let's talk about some of my favorite videos that I filmed in the last few months. The first one I have here is my review of the Insta360. This was really exciting because it was a camera that I had on my camera list. So when Insta360 contacted me to offer me to review the Insta360 One X2, I was super excited to make that review. I remember that while filming it, it was really hard because I didn't have much time to film it in time, and it was really terrible conditions outside. It was snowing, but it was a nice snow, it was snow that was becoming wet when it was falling on me and even started raining in the middle of filming the video At a point I was going to abandon filming the video because the conditions were just terrible. It just stopped raining, stopped snowing and I was able to resume and finish filming that video. But all of this was totally worth it because when I came back and started reviewing the footage for the first time, I was amazed by the results they can get out of this small little camera. So even though the conditions were terrible while filming the camera, the experience was pretty amazing in the end, realizing the results we could get out of it. My next video is my full critique and editing breakdown of my six favorite images that I took in the last year. This was a review that I was really excited to create because I always liked analyzing my own pictures and also the ones of other people, because I think it's one of the best ways to learn how to take some better images. It's not a video that really performed well, so this was a little bit disappointing because I understand it's not one of my most entertaining videos, but it's definitely one where you can learn a lot inside of it. And I had a lot of fun going through all of my images and trying to find the best ones and understanding why these pictures are good or not. My next video on the list is my video about the 10 truths about becoming a YouTuber in 2021. I understand it's not one that it performed well because it's probably not the one that most people on my channel wanted to see, but it's one that I had a lot of fun to make, because it's really something I was passionate about and wanted to talk about. Creating a channel in 2021 really isn't an easy task, so I wanted to help others understand what are the challenges when you're starting out in 2021, what are the good parts and what are the bad parts of creating a YouTube channel. So I really had a lot of fun creating that video, but it's a little bit sad it didn't perform in the end, but that's just the life of being on YouTube. If you want to learn more about my journey on photography and filmmaking, you should definitely go check out my video of when I reached 5,000 subscribers, because I talk more about it there. And (indistinct) the first pictures and first videos I created and took were just not good. Just like anybody, I started being pretty bad and then learned over the years. I don't say that I finished learning, I still have so much to learn about photographing and filmmaking. And I'll be super happy to share that with everybody inside of this community on YouTube. Now let's talk about the giveaway. I'm holding my promise of giving away something when reaching 10,000 subscribers and I decided to give away a brand new Google Pixel 4a. I decided to give away this device because it's by far the one I probably talked to most about inside of my video and allow to reach so many peoples and create this amazing community. I never would have expected to get 10,000 subscribers so fast, so thank you again to all of you to join this community. There are a few conditions and rules that you have to respect to be able to participate inside of this contest. So first of all, the Google Pixel 4a needs to be available in your country, because we don't have any troubles trying to ship it internationally. The second thing is that have a (indistinct) task to ask you, and this one is to comment down below your three favorite videos that I created on my YouTube channel and why these videos are your favorite ones. I would also really appreciate if you can tell me one video idea you have, that you would like me to make in the future. The second thing is that you have to be subscribed to the channel. And if you follow me on Twitter and Instagram, you're also gonna get some extra entries inside of the contest. You also have to fill out a form that has the link down in the description below, and this is simply to be able to check out your information and be sure that you're a valid person, not a bot trying to participate inside of the contest. Finally, I'm gonna put on the screen the last day you can participate to this contest. I've been talking for a little while that I have some news to announce that will change a lot of things inside of my life, but also for this YouTube channel. So it's finally time to talk about it, but first let me change shirts. The big news I have to share is that just in one week, I'm leaving my hometown of Montreal to move to Seattle, to work for my dream company, Microsoft. This is super exciting news, but it's also a little bit sad because I won't be able to film as much in nature like I really like doing. I know a lot of you thought that this was my main house, but actually I don't live here that much. This is our cottage where I pass it of time during the pandemic, but I usually live in the city of Montreal. Now I'm gonna be moving from one city on the east coast, to another city 5,000 kilometers away, Seattle, on the west coast. So this is a huge new chapter in my life that is gonna be beginning just in a week. It also means that for the first time, I'm gonna be getting my own apartment, where I'm gonna be able to really create my own space. And this is gonna be very benefic for this YouTube channel. The big question is how is this gonna affect my YouTube channel. You can expect a lot more vlog content in the coming weeks because I definitely want to share this new journey with you. I'm gonna be furnishing completely my apartment, creating a small YouTube studio, creating multiple space in my apartment to be able to film more videos. So I'm gonna share all of this process with you. There's also gonna be a lot more videos that are filmed inside, even though I prefer filming videos outside, but this is to be able to still try and produce a video every single week. I might not be always possible to create a video every single week because of the job, but I'm still gonna do my best to continue producing videos like I do right now. Finally, I'm also planning to upgrade a lot of my gear really soon, so that means probably a new camera, a new computer and things like that. And this is to allow me to create videos faster and have a better video quality in the end and a better production value. I'm super excited about this new chapter in my life and if you wanna see more behind the scenes of what is gonna happen in the next few months, you should definitely go check out my Twitter and Instagram to follow along whatever I'm doing. This is the places where I'm gonna be sharing most insights and behind the scenes of what is happening in this big move from Montreal to Seattle. It's finally time to wrap this video. The next videos you're gonna see next week are about mobile photography for beginners. And this is a pretty exciting series that I really worked hard on. The next videos I'm gonna film are gonna be me moving over there, so this is some really exciting content that I'm super excited to share with you. If you enjoy this video, please let me know by hitting the like button below and definitely subscribe to the channel for all the upcoming stuff that is gonna happen. See you in the next one. Bye-bye. (gentle music)
Video Links
What is this video about?
I still can't quite believe it. Just over a year ago, I never would have imagined my channel reaching 10,000 subscribers. But here we are, and I'm genuinely grateful for every single one of you.
In this video, I wanted to take a step back and share some of my favorite moments from the last few years on YouTube. I talk about how it all started—my very first videos made for school (like "The Reunion"), my early attempts at vlogging in Vancouver, and those pivotal moments like when I bought my first DJI Osmo Pocket and later my Google Pixel 4a. Those phone reviews ended up changing everything for the channel's growth, which honestly shocked me at the time.
I also walk through some of my favorite videos I've made recently: the Insta360 One X2 review (shot in terrible snowy conditions), my photo critique and editing breakdown, and my thoughts on the honest truths of starting a YouTube channel in 2021. Some of these videos didn't perform as well as others, but they all taught me something valuable. And I think that's what really matters—the learning process, the memories, and having fun while creating.
But the bigger news in this video is the announcement that's changing everything for me. In just one week, I'm leaving my hometown of Montreal to move to Seattle to work for Microsoft—my dream company. This is both exciting and a little surreal. It means I won't have as much easy access to nature for filming, but it also opens up a whole new chapter. I'll be getting my own apartment, building a small YouTube studio, and shifting toward more vlog content as I document this move and settle into my new life on the West Coast.
To thank you all for reaching this milestone, I'm also running a giveaway for a Google Pixel 4a. I chose this device because it's honestly what helped bring so many of you to this channel. Details are in the description, and I'd love to hear which three of my videos are your favorites and what you'd like to see next.