Those damn Mums with a camera - oops I'm one of them!

This is me in the east African country of Burundi. I'm at an orphanage for gorillas and chimpanzees. As a travel photographer and writer you get to do some pretty damn amazing things. It really is a dream lifestyle that, while not always being the most profitable venture around, is always full of adventure and excitement.

And then marriage and kids happen. And things change - sometimes dramatically. A colleague of mine, Daniel Scott, has a new blog over at Daddy Travel Writer. He's only just started but I'm sure he's going to regale us with tales of what it's like to balance being a travel writer traipsing around the globe with trying to raise a couple of kids.

But that's the viewpoint of someone who's still working. What happens when you put the cameras down for a bit and put all your effort into raising the little beasties? Well here's my big secret - that's what I've been doing for the last two and a half years. As you can tell I haven't given up work completely but I am a full-time Dad to my two little boys - 7 and 5 (as of next week!)

This all came about when, after over 10 years of working as a professional travel photographer and visiting more than 55 countries, my wife got an opportunity to work for an airline. As in flying overseas up to five times a month. As in away for six months of the year. Hmmm. So do you stick your heels in and say, "Hang on a minute. I've got the best job in the world. Why on earth would I give that up?" Or do you say, "Go for it honey. I've had a good run and you need to follow your dreams as well'.

I chose the latter. And boy did the shit hit the fan! I had no idea what I was in for. In the blink of an eye I was a DWAC - Dad with a camera. The object of all that hatred on various forums around the world wide web. And I've never really read anything about what it's like to suddenly go from being a busy creative artist to a multi-tasking nappy changer. So here's the reality.

It's really hard. And I don't mean the looking after the kids from 6 in the morning till 8 at night, cleaning the house, cooking all the meals and being tied to a little person 24/7 every day of the year. It goes without saying that that is so hard it's not funny. There are a million books about that. What you don't find written about much is the sudden drop into non-creativity.

Photography is a passion, and when it's your job as well it really is a vocation and can become an obsession. I didn't realise how much photography dominated every aspect of my life until I gave a big chunk of it away. One of the biggest shocks I found was the loss of self-identity that you have as a creative professional. You become your job. You're known as the travel photographer and that's who you are - until you just become so-and-so's Dad.

It's really difficult to give up checking your emails to see what work requests are coming in. To keep up with what's going on on Twitter. To keep tabs on how the industry is changing. But I came to the conclusion that if I kept on looking at my computer/laptop/iPod Touch to check in during the day - well every minute I was doing that was a minute I was ignoring my sons. So, as hard as it was, and believe me it is still incredibly hard, I have to let it go until the kids have gone to bed.

The other hard part is not resenting your kids or wife when an editor calls you up and wants to send you to Tibet for a couple of weeks. Or to Japan for a week-long hot springs tour. To remember that it's no longer about me, me, me but them, them, them and us, us, us.

What I've found really important to me is to stay creative in some manner. It's not like an office job where you can take a few years off and then slide back in again with a bit of re-training. Our creativity needs to be constantly nurtured and used. Our skills need to be honed and improved upon. We need to keep that creative spark alive lest we lose it.

So I write (this blog as well as personal writing every morning), I play music, I read and I caption and edit metadata for my more than 7000 images of the local area. Anything to keep that inner artist active. And I photograph as much as time will allow me. And I've found that the more that I listen to my inner artist the more I am honing in on how I want my photography career to develop. Because things will change. That is inevitable. Next year both boys will be in school and I will be free during the weekdays.

And whilst I won't be jetting off to outer Mongolia in a hurry I will definitely be looking for local stories and people that interest me and photographing them. And I'll continue to photograph this amazing part of the country in a way that satisfies my need to have a camera in my hand. Because I'm not the sole breadwinner any more I'll basically be listening to my heart to judge what projects to work on. I don't need to take the big, well paying commercial jobs if they don't interest me spiritually. I can really concentrate on the work that will keep my inner artist happily fed. But it's still going to be really hard to balance that constant desire to photograph but keep it on the back burner while trying to be a good father and husband.

So spare a thought for those damn Mums (and Dads) with a camera. We're photographers just like any other. Only we've decided to make a huge personal sacrifice and donate a large part of our entire being to help raise our children and let our partners follow their dreams.

And remember that what we're doing is really spiritually and creatively draining. NOT photographing for those who love it is a damn site harder than photographing. Not having a camera in your hands all day every day is a lot harder than it sounds when you're obsessed. And that's something the manual doesn't tell you.

Oh, and I do solemnly promise that I won't dress my kids up in fancy clothes and photograph them any time in the next million years, but I will consent to recording their scootering exploits with a camera every so often. And sharing them on the blog once in a blue moon, with your permission. :) Just to keep that inner artist happy.

Fantastic FNQ photo Friday

Mapoon Turtle Rescue Project - Cape York Photos - Images by Paul Dymond

A while ago I had the rare and privileged opportunity to take part in a conservation project up on the western side of Cape York, near the very tip of Australia. Just outside the small town of Mapoon, a dedicated band of workers tries to save endangered wild turtles from predation by wild pigs, dogs and human pollution. Volunteer ecotourists can take part in this worthwhile programme, and spend a few days combing the beach for washed up nets, monitor turtle nests and help young hatchlings break out, as well as see mother turtles come ashore to lay their eggs. It is a life-changing experience and will reaffirm your belief in the benefits of eco-travel and the things we can do to give back in some small way to the environment. For further information you can find their website here.

Many of these photographs were taken in the dark of night. Some of them were taken at around midnight under a full moon with high ISO and pretty short shutter speeds considering the conditions. I hope you enjoy these images and if you're looking for a place to take your next holiday that's pretty special definitely consider this part of the world.

Your photos are worth nothing...

This little old lady knows the value of her eggs. She sits down at the foot of this sulphur-belching volcano in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido and sells her wares. She knows how much each egg costs her to buy. She also knows it doesn't cost anything but time to boil them because she just sticks them in the volcano.

Oh and she charges an extra premium because these are special eggs. Each one will increase your life by 5 years! At least that's what she swore and who am I to argue? She looked like she'd eaten a few.

But here's the thing. Her eggs have a certain monetary value because they cost her money to buy. Our photos are kind of the same, and kind of not. It costs us money indirectly to take photos. We need to buy camera equipment, computers, storage hard drives etc. So in that sense our photos have some kind of value. But if you were to lose your pictures in a house fire, accidentally deleted a hard drive or some other mistake there wouldn't be an insurance company in the world who would give you a red cent for each and every photo lost. They would only pay you to replace your computers and hard drives. So while they might be really precious and priceless in terms of their value to you, monetarily speaking our pictures are worth nothing.

Until somebody wants to use them. Photographs, and all other kind of intellectual property where the copyright lies with the creator, obtain their value when other people deem them good enough to use. And the way in which they use them will determine the value. So for example a small 1/4 page picture in your local newspaper might only get you fifty bucks but the same picture used in a huge advertising campaign might get you tens of thousands of dollars. The actual value of the picture itself hasn't changed - it's the same picture! The value attributed to it based on how somebody wants to use it has changed.

And this is where I personally think Microstock and Royal Free pricing, and subscription based pricing for that matter, get it all wrong. They act as if photographs are widgets. Something that can be created on a conveyor belt and pumped out day after day. And they place their value on the actual image itself. And, as we all know, they don't place much of a value on even that. Which is fair enough, as I've said I don't think pictures have monetary value themselves either.

But what they've then done is taken away the value of the usage. If you can use a picture as many times as you like, in pretty much any medium, for as long as you like then the only thing you're paying for is the picture. How you use it is deemed irrelevant. So in micro-uses, like blogs, personal (non-commercial websites), school projects etc, those small prices might be the right price to pay, and there's obviously a big wide world of people who are prepared to pay small amounts to license pictures for those kind of uses.

Where I think we get into trouble is when we want to use the photographs in situations where the usage is very extensive. In those cases the photographer should be making more money because they're helping the client make money. Quid pro quo. If I produced an image good enough to help you sell lots of your product I deserve a fair share of the pie.The more money you stand to make the more the photographer should get. Hell even the egg lady would get more for her eggs if they helped her clients live an extra 20 years or so!

Of course it doesn't worry the agency. They make their money up on volume. If they have millions of their pictures downloaded every day that's a lot of money in the bank. But how does the poor ol' photographer do if that money is split over a large number of photographers? And how much better would they do if their pictures were actually priced according to the usage? Well the cat's out of the bag so I guess a lot of photographers will never know. But just think about it next time you're wondering which stock agency to place your pictures with.

Will they place the monetary value on the image itself, or on how the client wants to use it?

Finding the creative

 Maybe there are artists out there who have creativity just flow through them twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. If there are I've never met one.

For most of us, both professional and amateur, finding inspiration can be both an exciting and a frustrating experience. On the days when you're on the ball great ideas seem to come to you in unbounded succession.

On other days you really have to struggle to produce great work. Good work is a walk in the park. The professional photographer needs to be able to produce a publishable image every single time. No excuses, no failures. That's our job.

But producing work that sings to our own souls is a harder task. And sometimes the muse can leave you and you seem to hit a brick wall. I can't say that's ever really happened to me in a serious way but I am always searching for new ways and ideas to keep the muse happy and make sure she visits me with lots of inspiration.

So just before I went away on my last trip to Japan I bought a book called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron (Disclaimer - I get a couple of pennies if you buy the book with this link. :)) . I figured it would just be another one of those self-help, arty-farty type books that I could quickly flick through in my time over there. But after reading the Introduction I realised that it wasn't going to be such light going and it certainly wasn't something I could do in my spare time on holiday! So I waited until I got back home to dive in.

The book is actually a 12 week course designed to re-ignite your creativity, and show you ways in which you can continue to ignite that creativity long after you've finished the 12 weeks. So here I find myself in Week 4 and it's been quite an eye opener I have to say.

I don't know that I'm a total skeptic in general, but I usually have to be shown pretty good evidence of something before I tend to really believe it. And one of the main premises of the book had my skeptic antenna up from the get go. The author calls it the 'morning pages' and it involves writing 3 pages of long-hand, stream of consciousness writing every morning. The theory being that by this outpouring of thought you get to dump all the stuff that stops you being creative during the day and put it aside so you can get on with creating.

Now firstly for me to take half an hour to write 3 pages of stuff every morning requires me getting up in the pitch dark so that I can do it before my two young boys get up to start their day. Getting up that early is hard for photographers if we haven't got a sunrise shoot planned! But I've been religious about it and have written it every day for the past 3 and a bit weeks. And has it made a difference? I have to say yes.

By writing down all my fears, doubts, things that make me happy and basically anything that comes into my mind it's actually made me more creative. I've come up with some great ideas for the blog, ideas for self-assignments I'd really like to work on. I've also started buying CD's of music that inspired me when I was younger. I somehow feel lighter of heart. I find myself singing out loud in the strangest of places! Not that I was a depressed person before at all but I somehow feel more content.

And strange as it sounds I really do feel like it's this writing that is bringing about this change. And although there are some mornings where I do write about photography and my job, many mornings it's just writing about my life in general. Often it can be positive, but also negative. The key seems to be that as long as you're honest with yourself and write what you're really thinking and feeling then it works.

So wish me luck as I work through the coming 8 weeks or so. Who knows I could be dancing around in my underwear by the end of it! But so far I'm really enjoying the process and the book. Anything I can do to help me stay creative and inspired I figure has got to be good for my photography, and that means good for my clients as well. So if you come across this book in your local book shop or library I would definitely recommend taking a look.

Fantastic FNQ photo Friday

Daintree National Park Photos - Images by Paul Dymond

One of the most beautiful parts of far north Queensland is our tropical rainforests. And the king of those rainforests is the Daintree. It can be quite a challenge to photograph in this part of the world. It's dark meaning slow shutter speeds. There's a lot of reflections off the surfaces of the large tropical leaves, meaning you need a polariser to cut down those reflections and bring colour back to your image (slower shutter speeds again!) and the damp and humidity plays hell with electronics. Not to mention fungus in your lenses.

But for those who persevere it really is one of the most magical places on the planet. I feel honoured to have it just up the road and even when I'm without my camera just love to go walking here and get back in touch with wilderness. Enjoy this gallery of Daintree photos and as always if you click on the slideshow above you'll be taken to my website where you can see the photos larger.

Is reading killing your photography?

Alright, at the risk of decreasing my blog readership by a huge amount here I'm going to go out on a limb here and try to turn you off reading - at least to the extent that it impacts your photography.

I'm as guilty of this as the next photographer. I mean my bookshelf is literally crammed with books on all aspects of photography - from the business side, to the Photoshop bit to the DAM bit and more. And that's not to mention the giant photo books from people such as Steve McCurry, Nomachi Kazuyoshi and other greats.

But in these days of instant access to so much information on this great art, do we spend too much time reading about it and not doing it?

Over 10 years ago now I spent 12 months traipsing around India, Nepal and SE Asia with my now wife. Half way through the trip we were in Agra, India - about 20 paces from the entrance to the Taj Mahal. We were having dinner in our guesthouse - because there was a new scam in town where local restaurants were in kahoots with the local doctors to poison their customers and get a kickback from the hospitals! But I digress. In the guestbook in the hotel there was an entry from a Japanese guy saying that he'd done his Dive Master training in a tiny little town in the Philippines with a Japanese instructor.

So next thing we're hopping a plane to the island of Cebu, then a tiny bus to the even tinier town of Moalboal so my wife could get her Dive Master qualifications. And what was I doing? Well apart from getting dengue fever and spending a week in hospital, I was reading a book on the business of photography .John Shaw's Business of Nature Photography to be exact. (And by way of full disclosure apparently if you click on the link and buy the book then I get a little bit of change but I would recommend it wholeheartedly anyway!)

As I've mentioned before this book changed my life and I read it over and over again the whole month I was in the Philippines. But looking back at it now, I really don't have many photographs from that month. I was too busy reading to take pictures. I will probably never be there again and I don't have much to show I was there even once. No incisive portraits, no stunning sunrises. Not even a shot of my wonderful hospital bed with its cable Aussie TV! My wife took more pictures than me and she spent most of her day underwater - and no she doesn't have an underwater camera.

The amount of time we spend each day reading about some new technique or piece of software or equipment. And let's not even talk about the number of times we read (yet again) about the basics even though we know them like the back of our hand. Wouldn't that time be much more productive spent working on our art?

So in order to get ourselves away from having our noses stuck in a book (or looking at a screen) and back to a viewfinder I think we should all make a promise. We should all vow to spend less time reading about photography and more time doing it. To limit our reading to the stuff that really helps us right now - not at some imaginary point in the future.

So if you're really into off-camera flash at the moment by all means spend a couple of hours on Strobist - but back that time up by going and spending a couple of hours practicing what you learnt about. And even if you think the Strobist stuff is interesting, if you haven't got the gear or the inclination to follow that path at the moment then don't bother reading about it until you're ready to do it. Your time is better spent reading about what you want to do with your photography right now.

For every hour you spend reading about something, spend the same amount of time, if not more, putting that knowledge into practice. Because just reading about it isn't going to make you a better photographer. It's just going to make you a better read photographer. And goodness knows the world has enough of those already!

As for me - I promise not to read my photography books more than 50 times each. :)

Fantastic FNQ photo Friday

It must be that time of the week again. The time where I do my bit for tourism in far north Queensland and show you what an amazing place it is. This week I thought we'd head a bit south to Townsville.

An easy half day's drive from Cairns, Townsville is a world away. Boasting some great tourist attractions and a drier climate than its northerly neighbour, the city is a must-see if you come up this way.

In this gallery I've included some images from my favourite attractions - among them the Reef HQ Aquarium with the world's largest living coral reef exhibit. That's my little boy looking wide-eyed and amazed at the scuba diver cleaning the tank.

And the Museum of Tropical Queensland is another must-see attraction - the kids will love the entrance dinosaur breaking through the wall and the interactive exhibits are great for the whole family.

So enjoy the gallery and remember if you'd like to see any of the pictures larger just click on the slideshow above and it will take you to my home page.