Biography 

I take my photographs where I live, in beautiful remote northeastern New Mexico. Growing up by the beach in southern California, I read my dad's photography magazines: he had a community college degree in photography but had to give up his career dreams to get a "real job" when I came along. At 13 and 14 I shot surfing with a friend's 35mm camera and 400mm lens on a tripod, developing and printing the shots in his darkroom. In high school I took a one-year photography course in the art department, where I learned composition and the mantra "simplicity is a virtue". 

I was a surfer; I competed in the first international skateboard championships at Anaheim. My grandparents were country people. They got me summer jobs on a huge ranch where my grandpa worked. Between that and Thoreau, then The Band and Merle Haggard, I became a country boy, moving from coastal southern California to the redwoods and wine country of Sonoma County, on to southern West Virginia, then back and forth between Texas and New Mexico a couple times each. I taught school in all four states, along with a few other odd jobs, some odder than others. 

I always enjoyed getting good photographs, but I never bought a camera: I used hand-me-downs. At the end of 2007 I dove into photography, buying the just-released Nikon D300 digital SLR camera and some great lenses. I’ve been immersed in making pictures ever since. By the following summer I couldn’t look at a magazine without studying the photographs accompanying articles. Many of them I admired and envied. Others, I thought, “I could do better than that.” That led me to looking for subjects for photo essays, writing my own articles to accompany them, submitting them to magazines.

My first attempt, on a local cattle drive, was published in Western Horseman magazine's January 2009 issue, with others following in the May and October issues; by 2010 I'd become a Contributing Writer with two features in the February 2010 issue and others followed. RANGE Magazine published a feature of mine in their Winter 2010 issue; by Winter 2011 two more had followed. New Mexico Magazine began publishing my work in May 2010; within a year they had published a pair of featurettes and a pair of full-length features. Enchantment published a pair of my profiles. My articles are always accompanied by my own photography. The New Mexico Vacation Guide has included many of my photographs in the 2010, 2011, and 2012 editions. Two of my photos were featured in the May-June 2011 issue of National Geographic Traveler. Ranch & Reata ("The Journal of the American West") featured my photography in a cover story titled "Tim Keller: On Telling Stories with a Camera." I recently gained my first corporate commission, resulting in a pair of my photos atop the company's website.

Although magazine work has become my focus (I love combining photography and writing, telling stories with my pictures), I also sometimes produce fine art photography for shows, galleries, and sales. In addition to selling fine art prints here through the website, I print, matte, and frame work for exhibition; a show of 28 of my framed works, "Tim Keller's New Mexico," is currently on display at Raton, New Mexico's Holiday Inn Express Hotel & Suites.

My wife, artist Christina Boyce, owns and runs Studio C in Des Moines, New Mexico, an art gallery, school, and store, while being a website developer and on-air personality (KRisTiNa!) for KRTN-FM Raton.