How I got started in travel photography

Scott in Colombia (via Australia) posted a question on the Flickr group asking if I could do a post on how I got started doing this.

I'm going to preface this post by saying that this is how I stumbled into this profession. Will what I did help you if you do the same thing? I don't know. I kind of doubt it and at the end of the post I'll tell you why.

I sold my first ever photograph in 1998. But by that time I'd already been to about 45 different countries. So I guess my first piece of advice is if you want to be a travel photographer you have to be a traveller first. You have to love travel almost more than you love photography, but at least equally as much.

Anyway back to the beginning of the career. I was trekking in Nepal with my wife. We were coming to the end of a year traipsing around SE Asia, India and Nepal and were spending about a month or so trekking in the Himalayas. Needless to say I was carrying my camera gear and a lot of Velvia slide film.

On our second day we ran into a dutch couple - Toine and Elsa, and we spent the next month or so walking together. We had dinner together every night, hung out, walked, trekked. It was a good time. Coincidentally Toine was a journalist for Holland's largest newspaper, the deVolkskrant, and when he got back home he wrote an article on the damage tourism is doing to Nepal's environment. He wanted a photo to go with it and I got the sale!

But I don't count that as my entree into the world of professional travel photography. That was a lucky break from a good friend and you'd need a lot of those to build a career. Here in Australia to break into the world of travel photography you need to be a writer as well. I figured that out pretty quickly and set to the task of learning to write travel articles. I submitted an article idea - Trekking in Nepal - to the official magazine of the Youth Hostels Australia. Most of the books I had read suggested you send a one page query letter and wait till you get a yay or nay. I wrote the whole article and sent a sheet of duplicate slides.

A couple of months went by and I heard nothing and then one evening I got a phone call - right in the middle of a cyclone! (That's a hurricane for you folks in the northern hemisphere :) ) Outside there were trees flying through the air, the guttering on my carport was banging against the roof where it had come loose in the wind and the phone rings. It was the editor of the magazine. She loved the article and wanted to commission me to write a second piece for the same edition - this one on travel photography.

I didn't have the heart to tell her that there was a cyclone outside and could she possibly call back in a couple of days if the house hadn't blown away. (Did I ever tell you that Janet?) Anyway that began one of the most enjoyable working relationships and we still keep in contact regularly and I've been on many a great assignment with them.

Since that time I've written numerous articles for various magazines here and overseas. Sounds like a perfect way to make a living but here's the problem. It doesn't pay. Well not very well as many travel writers will tell you. The pay rates at most magazines have't gone up in the past 20 years - I kid you not! Publishing travel articles is a great way to break into things but you're not going to be able to pay the mortgage with it. That combined with the fact that some magazines are turning to cheaper stock photo options (iStock, Shutterstock etc) instead of sourcing their pictures from the writer, or getting their pictures for free from the tourism bureaus, means that this market is rapidly disappearing.

So you need something to supplement that income. Many travel photographers turn to stock photography - mainly representation through an agency. I am represented by Lonely Planet Images and also have images on Alamy. Again it's income that you need to think of as a bonus. It's not dependable because you have no control over how much or how little is sold. Because you don't deal directly with a client you have no idea whether any of your pictures are being considered for a project or how much they will be sold for. You just get your quarterly pay cheque and hope that it's not too bad.

But the problem with agencies is that more and more they take very little of what you submit. Some photographers report only having 10% of their submitted images accepted. So what do you do with the other 90%? More and more photographers are turning to companies such as Photoshelter to license their own work.

Personally I see this as the future of travel photography. I find that when I go somewhere for a short period of time and come back with say a few hundred nice images, then those will do well with a stock agency. But for the areas I specialise in, say my local area of far north Queensland or my wife's home stomping ground of Hokkaido, Japan, I actually do better marketing those images myself. And that's where I intend to head in the future.

And again to supplement that income you need to do things like teach photography courses, run weekend workshops and other stuff like that.

The travel photography marketplace is changing so rapidly it's really hard to know where it's headed or whether there will be a viable future for it in the future. We're being pressed on all sides. More and more print magazines are folding. Everything is headed online but nobody is prepared to pay. So yes you can probably get your pictures in an online magazine somewhere but a credit line isn't going to pay the mortgage.

As more and more aspiring professionals get duped into this dream that they can make money off of microstock the quality of images will go up and many markets for traditional travel photographers will dry up. I already see it on a daily basis as traditional clients of mine turn to microstock to save money. And why not? It's business after all. I don't blame the publishers. They'll save heaps of money, the microstock companies themselves will make lots of money and the poor ol' photographers will get their 20c share of the $1 downloads. It'll take a while to make your fortune doing that.

Here in Australia many, many magazines use a lot of free images from tourism boards. Again why not? Those that want to differentiate themselves in the marketplace will continue to use assignment photographers but for many publishers access to free pictures is too tempting. There is a push by the professional group of photographers ACMP to get the federal government to prevent these images being used for free by large corporations who could afford to pay for them, but where this will lead only time will tell.

So where is it all headed? I think for many people it will be best to keep it as a hobby. For those of you, like me, who have it in their blood and can't imagine doing anything else the trick will be to stay afloat and see where the market goes when things settle down. People will always want to travel, and they will always want to see great travel imagery. The question will be whether those images will come from professional photographers, amateurs hoping to make a few extra pennies to support their hobby or tourism boards. Those of you who do this for a living where do you see things going?

Fill the frame

This is one of those pictures that breaks all the rules of composition and as a result is worse for it. The rock wallaby is smack bang in the middle of the frame, no part of it is on one of the intersecting thirds and it's not looking at the camera.

In other words it's a snapshot. There's a bit of environment around it but certainly not enough so that I would call it an environmental portrait.

In other words it's a ho-hum record shot of the profile of a Mareeba rock wallaby.

I'm just not close enough for it to be an effective portrait, but at the same time I haven't got enough of the surrounding rocks for it to put the animal in perspective with its surroundings. That's what makes it so wishy-washy. So here are a couple of the alternatives.

Now the first alternative is to fill the frame with the little furry critter. Now we're nice and close and we can actually see how cute these little guys are. The side lighting has brought out the texture in the fur and there's a nice shady background so the wallaby sticks out.

And you'll notice here that the perspective has changed. I'm using a longer telephoto lens to really zoom in on the little guy (or is it a girl?). What that does is really blur the background, giving me a nice narrow depth of field which really helps the wallaby stick out even more.

Going back to our rule of thirds you'll see that the wallaby's eye is pretty much at the junction of the top and right hand third. Sure I've cut off his tail but that doesn't matter too much because the aim was to capture his (her?) face.



But the thing with this image is that we've lost all sense of where the wallaby lives. To understand that we need to fit more in.

There were a couple of ways I could have fit more of the environment in. One of them would have been to get up really, really close with a wide-angle lens. The wallabies weren't too nervous around people so I probably could have gone that way.

The problem with wide-angle lenses though is that they make big things look really small when they're a long way away from the camera. So my (close-up) wallaby would have looked really big and the huge boulders all around me would have looked really small. So I needed to use the telephoto.

Which meant I had to look out for wallabies that were a long way away. Like this little fella sitting on the rocks. But you say, you said to fill the frame but the wallaby's really small. Yes it is but what I have filled the frame with is that giant set of rocks. And one tiny little wallaby which gives a portrait of the environment that the wallaby lives in, while at the same time showing how small they actually are. The big rocks highlights their tiny size even more.

So that's 3 pictures of the same animals all done differently. One pretty ho-hum and a couple which I really like. The first one fills nothing, the second two fill the frame with stuff that contributes to the photo and the viewer's impression of the animal.

Leading lines

Firstly let me start by saying that I don't tend to use leading lines a hell of a lot in my own compositions. At least not obvious ones. I find that often they can look a bit too deliberate for my taste.

But when you find ones that are subtle and have the same effect then they're a wonderful tool to lead the viewer's eye to where you want it to go.

A bit of background behind the thought process of this picture. It was taken up on Cape York, which for those of you who don't know is a remote place up the very northern tip of Australia. It really is the middle of nowhere. So I wanted to show that in this composition. So a wide-angle lens to give me a big sky, a lot of beach and make the car look small and insignificant in this vast landscape.

Secondly we were on a beach that stretched off forever. And that's where the leading lines come into it. Can you see them? There's a few. The first one is the line of the beach itself where it meets the water, heading off back down the beach. Then there's the car tracks, which mostly lead back along the beach, again off into the distance. And then just to reinforce the feeling that everything leads back down that long beach you have the streaks of clouds in the sky which point back down the beach. So three sets of subtle leading lines that lead the eye back down the beach behind the car.

Now often we're told that leading lines need to have something at the end of them, or else the viewer feels kind of cheated. 'How dare you have me follow this line and not give me a pot of gold at the end of it!' In this case the lines are actually leading to something - but that something is a great nothingness. Vast open space.

You can see I've kind of stuck to the rule of thirds with the horizon. My car isn't at one of the points of thirds because it is in the MIDDLE of nowhere. I took another shot with the car in the far right hand side of the frame and it had nowhere near the same impact.

Oh and please ignore the wonky horizon - it's another Paul Dymond trademark! :)

Never put the horizon in the middle

Oh why can't I learn to follow the rules? I'm such a law abiding citizen in every other aspect of my life. :)

Actually this is a pretty good rule to follow and I mostly do. It is sort of connected to the rule of thirds. By having your horizon line at either the top or bottom third of the picture you take a lot of the stability out of an image. You don't want stability because it stops the viewer's eye from moving around the frame and looking at everything there.

If you have a really interesting sky you would put the horizon on the bottom third line, if you have a more interesting foreground then you would put the horizon at the top third.

But as you can see here I've got it right in the middle of the picture. Because with reflections it actually looks best to put the horizon in the middle of the picture - that way you can't tell which way is up!

Of course there's not much of a reflection here. This was taken in the Okavango Delta in Botswana from a sitting position in a wooden mokoro (dugout canoe). The reason I put the horizon in the middle was that I wanted to show that this part of the world is half water half blue sky. So when you know why a rule exists you can also think about when it needs to be broken. I promise not to tell the photo police if you don't.

The rule of thirds, or fourths, or fifths even!

Whenever my wife sees a picture like this of mine she always has some comment to make. Usually it's something along the lines of "That is such a typical you composition".

Up until a couple of years ago I used to run photography tours at a lovely luxury resort up in Port Douglas called Thala Beach Lodge.

One day I had a gentleman from the US on tour who was very disconcerted that I never seemed to use the rule of thirds but always what he called the rule of fifths.

In other words I tend to stick things way off at the edge of the frame.

You see the rule of thirds says that when we compose our pictures we should mentally divide our frame up like a noughts and crosses (or tick tack toe depending on where you live) board. Where the vertical and horizontal lines intersect is supposed to be the most interesting part of the frame, and that's where you should stick something of interest.

Only somewhere along the lines (no pun intended!) I must have got confused about how to divide up the viewfinder. Because I always seem to be sticking things way off towards the far edge of the frame - much farther than is recommended in the rule book. :)

I guess if there's something to take away from this it is that by keeping your subject out of the middle of the frame you encourage the eye to look around the rest of the frame, so it's often a good idea to keep your subject out of the middle of the picture.


Which is why this picture should be a big no-no. I have the subject right smack bang in the middle of the picture.

And yet, for some inexplicable reason, your eye still looks around the rest of the frame. Because of the contrast of the red in the middle of all that yellow your eye goes straight there. But then because we crave that contrast we look around the rest of the picture to see if there's any more red.

So as a rule I tend to leave things out of the middle of the frame but every so often I stick it there when I think the image calls for it. The first image was taken in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, the second image was taken in the little town of Tokachigawa in Hokkaido, Japan.

Have Camera Will Travel as a photography resource

Hi there everybody,

One of the things I've been meaning to get around to is editing down the list of keywords attached to posts. I want you all to be able to go back to previous posts and use the site as a resource for tips on travel photography, as opposed to just reading new posts every day. So blogger introduced this new facility to have the keywords as a Cloud. If you scroll down you can find it on the right hand side just under the Subscription buttons. There's still a few more to whittle down into a more comprehensive list but I would love it if you could go and take a look and just click on a few links to keywords that tickle your fancy. There's tips of professional travel photography, telephoto lenses, wide-angle lenses, people photography. Have a look around and I'm sure you'll come up with some long-forgotten gem. And if you want to post any comments or questions on any of them I'd be happy to answer.

Monday's Photography Links

Kirk Tuck has a great blog post on photographers' needs to constantly upgrade to the latest and greatest without any real thought for whether they need it or not. Every so often I get a call to shoot some medium format print film for a magazine that I sometimes do work for. And I remember what a joy it is to hear the whir of the film winding on to the next frame. And the mechanical clunk of the shutter. And the fact that what I'm seeing through the viewfinder is so much more important than the camera I'm using.

In the same vein, David duChemin has a new ebook for sale called 10: Ten Ways to Improve Your Craft. None of Them Involve Buying Gear. What a great title and if David's book Within the Frame is any indication this will be a fantastic resource for both budding and more advanced travel photographers.

So by the look of these link you can guess that I'm not going to post anything about gear this week. :) After last week's exploratory post I'm going to try and post some images that highlight different styles (rules? guidelines?) of composition. At least the way I tend to compose pictures anyway.

Stay tuned.