Saturday, October 2, 2010

Calling all travel writers! Wanna collaborate?


For more than a decade I worked as both a travel photographer and writer. And thoroughly enjoyed it. But during that time I also worked on many projects where I just photographed, often working in collaboration with a writer.

And I always really enjoyed those assignments because they took me out of my comfort zone and let me work with interesting people, and often in areas that I wouldn't think of writing about myself.

The photograph here is one example. I worked with a young writer in Sweden of all places. She had been out here to Cairns and worked on a banana farm in a little town called Tully, a couple of hours south. Anyway she'd written an article about the experience and needed some images to go with her piece. So I drove down to Tully and spent a day photographing the workers and the farm in her article.

Collaborations like this work really well in situations where the writer really doesn't enjoy photographing, or doesn't feel they have the skill to do the job justice. Or in cases where the weather doesn't co-operate and they need better pictures. Sure there's plenty of free offerings from tourism boards and other sources, but often they are generic pictures that don't really fit with the story in a neat package.

So here is my call out to all my readers there in cyberspace. Have you ever been, or know anybody who's ever been to far north Queensland - that's ranging from Townsville in the South up to Cape York in the north? Do you know somebody who wants to write an article on the experience - doesn't have to be travel related mind you, I do all sorts of editorial work - but needs photos to go along with it? Would you be interested in collaborating?

I bring to the table a deep collection of stock images from this part of the world and an ability to do assignments locally, and hopefully what you bring to the table is a knowledge of the markets where you live and an idea of where you could publish your piece. I've never tried something like this before, and honestly have no idea if it will work. But I'd like to give it a try. We live in a global community and I'd like to tap into that a bit more and thought this is one way I could do it.

So put your thinking caps on and if you come up with anybody please let them know. Or if you yourself are interested please let me know. Far North Queensland is my main specialty, with my sub-specialty being Hokkaido, Japan. If you want to write a story on either or those places and are looking for images not found anywhere else please let me know. You can comment here on the blog or send me an email at info at dymond dot com dot au.

I look forward to seeing how this little experiment goes! Here's to producing some wonderful collaborative art. Please feel free to pass this on to all your social networks via the Retweet button above or any other way you think might help.

2 comments:

PhilCrean said...

Great idea Paul. Hope someone picks up on it.
Hope you don't mind if I pinch it and offer similar from the Canary Islands?
Good luck
Phil Crean

Unknown said...

Thanks Phil,

no worries at all. And good luck with it too. I think it's a novel idea and one I hope really takes off. It would be great to work with some writers from various places around the world.

cheers

Paul