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.

How can you envision photographic respect?

In my last post I talked about showing your photographic subjects respect. And I wrote a bit about tuning in to your own feelings about a photographic subject to help you determine how to show not only your subject respect, but also your own feelings. I thought I should add a little postcript because a lot of talk about photographic vision concentrates on finding your own personal inner way of seeing. By necessity the way you envision a photograph will come from within you and help set you apart from other photographers. We're all individuals and obviously see the world in different ways.

But a lot of those theories don't really point to what I was alluding to - which is that the subject of your photographs deserve just as much respect as your inner vision. After all you could find yourself in some tropical paradise and take a whole bunch of abstract pictures of grains of sand, overexposed pictures of cocktail glasses and landscapes with tilted horizons (because you couldn't think of any other way to make the picture interesting!). And all those would be valid interpretations of how you felt. But would they be showing respect to your subject?

I would err on the side of saying no. That they would appeal as fine art to people who shared your sensibilities, but that true respect for your photographic subject involves thinking about how other people interpret the pictures as well. And by other people I don't necessarily mean photographers.

I live a cloistered life. The vast majority of my friends are photographers. All of them are passionate, some of them pros, some of them amateurs. They all love their photography. And they love their tech-speak and gadgets. But only a very few of them would I trust to a conversation about the merits of a picture in terms of respecting the subject. They can all point to the fact that I should have had more depth of field in this picture, or avoided the lamp post coming out of the subject's head in that one. But sometimes they miss the mark when it comes to talking about the impact of the subject itself. For those opinions I tend to prefer people who have no interest in photography whatsoever.

Because those people wouldn't know an f-stop from a bus stop they can only focus on what's in the picture itself. And they're a great guage for telling you whether your images are hitting the mark or not. So keeping them in mind is one of the first things you can think about when you're trying to show respect to your subject. Would a non-photographer find this an interesting image? Would they be more interested in the subject of the picture or the how (or why) I took it?

Another way of getting that inspiration is to think less about yourself and more about the legacy your pictures will leave. With travel photography one of the first inspirations is 'I will never be in this place again so I'd better take a lovely shot'. That might be all the motivation you need to get up before dawn to capture a landscape in beautiful light. But if it isn't take the focus away from you for a minute.

Imagine that the landscape you want to photograph is due to be strip-mined. Turned into a quarry for the minerals beneath it. And you will be the last photographer ever to capture it. Indeed, depending on the ability of your pictures to move people you might even be able to save it from the mining. Now would that be inspiration enough for you to do more than show up at midday and grab a quick snap? You see how taking the emphasis away from you and putting it on the subject helps provide you with inspiration?

Imagine a beautiful building is about to be demolished. You're there in the afternoon and it's facing east. If you knew that in a couple of days it would be rubble would you be more inclined to come back in the morning when the first rays of sunrise hit it?

With travel portrait photography one of my greatest sources of inspiration is imagining the look on the subject's face when I show them the picture. Do you think they'll be happy with a high-contrast snapshot taken out in the midday sun showing all their wrinkles? Do you think they'd be thrilled if you take the time to move them into softer light and really create a beautiful portrait?

Imagine how happy they'll be when they see the LCD. Imagine how thrilled they'll be if you send them a print. Imagine that it might be the only photograph of themselves that they will ever own. That their children will ever have to remember them by when they're gone. Their one legacy to the world after they depart. In many parts of the world this is by no means a stretch of the imagination.

Don't you think that in all of the above cases you owe it to your subjects to be the best photographer you can be? Without a doubt photographic vision is hugely important. It's the reason we spend so much time concentrating on it and refining it in an effort to remain true to ourselves and (if professional) differentiate ourselves from our colleagues. But just as important in what we do as travel and nature photographers is to consider the importance of paying respect to our subjects. For without them we're just overexposed pictures of blurry grains of sand on a beach. We might appeal to the artsy set and satisfying our inner vision but are we paying enough attention to what our subjects would want?

How can you show your subject respect?

A lot of travel photography is shot in an editorial, documentary style. We travel to places both near and far and attempt to capture with our cameras what it is we experienced. But just showing what we saw isn't enough to move our viewers. We need show what it is we felt, or what we thought about our experiences. And we owe it to our subjects to do it truthfully.

When I say truthfully however, I don't mean truthfully according to other people's opinions. I mean how you as the photographer truthfully felt. Which is always going to be subjective. No matter what you think of how an individual's opinions shouldn't shape a documentary image, the truth of the matter is that in travel photography our opinions will always shape our images.

Firstly we decide where to travel to. That's a subjective decision based on where we think looks interesting. Travel photography by its very nature tends to be of places that the photographer has travelled to because they wanted to. So our subjectivity leads to our first showing of our respect for our subject - we're interested enough in it to shell out dollars to visit. The second way we show respect is by finding out as much about our subject in advance so that we can capture it in the best possible light.

Let's say you'd always wanted to visit the Taj Mahal - a lifelong dream. You get there and discover that it is just as beautiful as you'd ever imagined. To truly respect not only the Taj but your own feelings about it you're not going to photograph it in the middle of the day with its harsh light, millions of tourists and a total lack of emotion. That would be showing a lack of respect for not only your subject but your feelings about it. So you'd come at sunrise or sunset when there are hardly any people around and the light is beautiful. You'd look for different angles to show the beauty that captivated you. You would treat it with as much photographic reverence as the architect who built it. To do anything less would be disrespectful.

But let's say you had the opposite reaction. You were annoyed at all the millions of other tourists, the fact you had to leave your tripod outside. You were disappointed by the greying marble caused by the smog of India's notorious traffic. Basically it wasn't anything like you expected. Whether these opinions could be called petty or not they are yours. Own them. Be true to yourself. In this case I would argue that it would be more respectful to show all the things about the Taj Mahal that annoyed you. Just because you started off with the intention of showing the beautiful doesn't mean you have to let it cloud your photographic judgement. If you chose to ignore what you were feeling you might still come away with 'beautiful' pictures but they wouldn't be yours - they would be facsimiles of other people's cliched expectations.

Who knows, by the time you've photographically worked your annoyances out of your system you might be able to finally appreciate the beauty and think about coming back at sunrise. Or you might not. Either which way both photographic interpretations would be correct because they're both being true to yourself.

The same goes for people as well. I often think that photographers are nervous about approaching strangers to photograph because they're not treating it as a way of showing respect. Sure you might not know anything about the individual you'd like to photograph, but if you've shown respect then you'll know something about their culture. You'll have learnt a couple of greetings in the local language. You'll be able to show that you're interested in them as something more than just a pretty picture, and that you respect them.

Not only that but you'll see the portrait as a gift from them to you (by posing for you) and as a gift from you to them (by capturing the best possible portrait of them). So you won't photograph them in harsh light but will move them into the shade to avoid creating harsh shadows and emphasising wrinkles. You'll attempt to make some sort of human connection so that you can capture an image that captures their spirit. You won't snap and run but will take them time to have some sort of limited interaction - no matter how short or limited. The more you get to know them the more respectful and insightful your portrait will be and the more respectful the interaction will be.

In other words, as a travel photographer to differentiate yourself from the millions of tourist photographers you need to show respect. For not only your subjects, but for yourself and your individual feelings about what it is you've chosen to photograph from the millions of subjects around the globe. The more opinionated you are the more those opinions will shine through in your images and the more they will resonate with others. Don't be afraid to be yourself.

Changing direction in uncertain times

Hi there loyal readers, for those of you who stuck around while I was away thank you. It really does mean a lot to me to know that I can produce something that is helpful to people, and that you appreciate. There's a couple of reasons for my absence.

One is that I've just been plain flat out busy. Like full-on crazy get up at half past five in the morning and get to bed at half past nine at night kind of busy. I wish I could tell you that I've been traipsing around the world on some glamorous assignments for travel magazines but, as we all know, not too many of those jobs are floating around these days!

What I have been doing is looking after my kids, writing a lot and reading a lot. I've mentioned it a few times on the blog before but I've been working through The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. I first heard of this book from my personal goddess Selina Maitreya. It's a 12 week course on re-discovering your creativity. Not that I think my creativity had ever disappeared but it was probably a bit jaded, and I was intrigued.

Anyway a big part of the course is something Ms Cameron calls the Morning Pages. It basically means that when you get up in the morning you write three pages of stream-of-consciousness thought. Whatever pops into your head you write it down. That means everything - warts and all. It's the one place to totally get to be yourself. No place for political correctness or worrying about hurting people's feelings. Just write down whatever you think.

It's supposed to help you connect with your inner artist and inspire creative thoughts to pop into your head. And I found it incredibly helpful. I admit to being skeptical at the start but, now that I've finished the course, I'm a total convert and get up at half past five to write every morning. I've come up with thoughts and ideas that really have me excited. I've re-discovered my passion for photography, and many other artistic pursuits that I enjoyed when I was younger but sort of fell by the wayside over the years.

Again, I don't think I ever lost my love for holding a camera and capturing images of the world. But. to be totally honest, the business side of things was wearing me down. I live in a town where a lot of the other photographers don't really understand copyright or usage (or maybe they do but just prefer to ignore it for simplicity's sake). As a result mention 'usage' to a local client and they tend to look at you very suspiciously as if you've just invented a new way to rip them off royally.

Add to that the increasing number of magazines that either don't want to pay for photos, or if they do the rates are so low and they want to take your first born kid and house as well (just kidding but it's not far off) and I was feeling pretty down about the commerce side of things. So you know what I did? I went and did something for somebody for free!

Now any of my colleagues will tell you that I'm the original copyright hard case. I defend my images to the death and demand respect for my work and my copyright. But going through the Artist's Way and writing my morning pages made me realize a few things. One of those was that I'm a generous person by nature. I love to think of really worthwhile gifts for people and I love to see the expression on their faces. I remember when I was in Uni there was a wondeful friend of mine who loved elephants. So I sponsored an orphaned elephant baby in Kenya for her as a birthday present. Needless to say she was pretty stoked.

Anyway I digress. I haven't suddenly decided that there's no money to be made in photography so I'm going to go out and undercut the entire market by shooting everything for free. But I did decide that there were some local groups who are entirely staffed by volunteers, rely 100% on donations to continue their great work and just really need a break. And I figured I didn't have lots of money lying around to donate so maybe I could donate some of my expertise.

So I rang up the people at the Frog Decline Reversal Project. I'd read about them in the local paper over the years and I knew that this was the kind of group that did really great work researching various diseases in frogs and I wanted to help. You know what. They don't really need any photography! Well the kind they do need I wasn't really qualified for - they wanted close-up pictures of very specific species of frogs. But they did need their website images watermarked because they've been getting pics stolen left right and centre.

So this last week I've spent hours individually watermarking, adding copyright metadata and attaching colour profiles to pictures of diseased frogs. Not the most glamorous of work but something that has made me feel more proud of what I'm doing than anything else I've done in quite a while.

And just doing this has gotten me thinking about lots of other possibilities for both donated and paid work. You see I don't want to go down with the sinking ship if the travel photography industry continues to dive. It may come back up again, maybe it won't. Either which way I don't want to be so attached to one photographic subject that prohibits me from pursuing other rewarding projects.

So I'm getting back to basics. Trying to re-discover what I fell in love with before I started taking money to do this. And I'm loving it. I've discovered that I want to be a story teller again. To photograph real people and real places and show people the beauty that exists all around us. And some of that will be travel related and some won't. And I'm cool with that. For somebody who's spent the last 13 years or so saying, "Hi I'm Paul Dymond, I'm a travel photographer" that's a big step. But it's an exciting one.

So, as this blog is my gift to all of you (plus it's cheaper than a shrink!) I want to thank you for sticking with me and I hope to continue to regale you with anecdotes, tips and general claptrap of this individual photographer.

The death of professional travel photography?

There's been a bit of flutter lately on the blogosphere about the death of travel photography. First it was mentioned on Andrea Pistolesi's blog - a great post entitled A Requiem for Travel Photography. Then it was picked up by my colleague Bob Krist on his post entitled Is Travel Photography Dead?

Well I don't know if it's dead, and I'm sure the situation varies from country to country, but is is definitely changing and not what it used to be. There's been a lot of talk about the demise of magazines and how they're losing ground to the internet. The younger generation wants everything on their iPad.

I don't know about you but I still prefer to see beautiful photos blown up as double page spreads in glossy pages. But the emphasis has to be on the 'beautiful' part. In this country I see too much mediocre stuff being printed simply because it's available. Rather than sending a talented photographer out on assignment to capture unique, one-off images, the bean counters at newspapers and magazines demand that their editors source free pictures from the tourism bureaus.

Or they publish the images that travel writers submit, not really caring if those are the best possible pictures they can publish, but rather grabbing what is the most convenient. As somebody who has written their fair share of word/photo packages I'm here to tell you that the travel writer's schedule isn't always conducive to great travel photography. You get what you can and submit it. And it gets published. And I don't know about you but I (the travel magazine reading I, not the travel photographer I) feel ripped off.

Why should I spend good money on a publication that doesn't consider me valuable enough to provide me with the best possible content. If I can see better quality images online, pictures that take my breath away, why would I pay good money to look at the same photograph I've seen in a hundred other magazines with articles on the same area?

Personally I think that if the same bean counters are in charge of everything at the (sure to be coming soon) online versions of these magazines and newspapers then we're going to be in for the same problem. How to get people to pay to view images that don't blow them away. How do you compete with the millions of fantastic pictures found on the net if you grab the cheapest, most convenient, least differentiating picture you can? The answer, I think, is you can't. At least not photographically speaking.

So what is the answer? How do we, the consumers, get to see great travel photography whilst supporting the work of great travel photographers? And how do we travel photographers get to have our work published and make a living?

To tell you the truth I don't think anybody has it figured out yet. But I can tell you this, as long as the major publishers continue to run their current course the answer isn't going to lie with them.

For all you budding travel photographers I can give this bit of advice. Unless you want to write articles to accompany your photos the answer is not going to be to travel to as many places as possible and have a small number of images of each place. That's a rapidly dwindling market. As more and more people travel to the far reaches of the globe and capture it on their prosumer digital cameras your chances of selling an odd picture here and there of somewhere you visited for a brief stopover is rapidly dwindling.

No the answer, until somebody comes up with a way of convincing the traditional publishers to go for quality rather than convenience, is to specialise. Know a place, subject, people so intimately and deeply that you will be the only person to go to for photographs in that area.

Use your unique photographic skills and ways of seeing the world to transition across into other areas. Environmental photography. Conservation photography. Cultural photography. Get back to your storyteller vision and jettison the desire to create stand-alone beautiful images. Create a body of pictures that will tell the story of your particular place of expertise.

Find commercial travel clients who love the way you see the world. Hold exhibitions. Think outside the box. Just don't think that you're going to make a living shooting for travel magazines any time soon. Advertising may come back, readership might go up, the web might be the saviour for the publishing companies but if the bean counters still tell their editors to 'get it cheap, take all rights, it's good enough' then we're all doomed to mediocrity.

Just as a little aside before I wrap this rant er...post up. Before everybody emails me and lets me know that there are some great travel publications out there who support excellent travel photographers - I know. And I also know that there are fantastic travel and photo editors who do their damndest to get great photography published and for them I am truly grateful. And that it's not in any way the fault of the frontline editorial staff doing their best to put out a magazine within budget constraints.

I'm speaking in generalisations about an entire industry here. Do yourself a favour, grab your favourite travel magazine or in-flight magazine (or general magazine or newspaper which features travel) and look at the proportion of really fantastic photographs provided by an individual photographer (or stock library) compared to the number of obviously free, cheap or mediocre/convenient pictures. And honestly evaluate whether you think that magazine has done its best to provide you, the reader, with the best possible pictures you've paid for. And then imagine whether that will change when the magazine goes online and whether you'd want to pay for that or not. Yes there are some shining examples of great publications and I wish them all the success in the world because they're the ones holding the beacons out for all of us. But there are also a lot who don't look to be trying to raise the bar very much and I don't like their future behind the coming paywalls.

Photographing stage shows

One of my favourite things to photograph on my trips are stage shows. Yes they can sometimes be a bit corny and obviously put on for the tourists, but they're usually colourful and vibrant and very welcoming of photographers.

If the stage show is happening at night then it's most likely going to be under tungsten lighting - which shows up as quite orange on daylight white balance. If you put your camera on to its automatic white balance or even the Tungsten setting you will get a more neutral, blueish colour.

In situations like these, even if you're regularly a Jpeg shooter, I recommend that you shoot Raw. The reason for this is that, like many things in this art, white balance is a subjective decision. The colours that you capture are supposed to represent how you felt, not necessarily a strict recording of exactly how it was.

Tungsten lighting is the perfect example of this. Here you can see the look I got with a daylight setting (only in this case it was daylight balanced film). It has quite an orange glow to it but you know what? I like it. I think it gives a sense of welcome and friendliness. It adds a nice warm glow to the faces of the children and looks inviting. A 'correct' white balance with tungsten can often look cold and clinical. Anything but inviting. But sometimes the daylight setting can be just too orange. So if you shoot Raw you can look at the images later and decide on a colour temperature setting that you find visually appealing.

If you're like me you'll probably find that you use different white balance settings for different images depending on the look you want. For close-up portraits where skin colour is more of an issue you might prefer a slightly more natural look, whereas for wide-angle shots of the whole stage you might prefer that warmer, orangey glow. At least when you shoot Raw you can pick and choose what tickles your fancy.

Fantastic FNQ photo Friday

Far North Queensland Green - Images by Paul Dymond

Need a bit of green in your life? Well we've got in in spades. If you had to pick a colour to describe far north Queensland then it would have to be green. From the golf courses of Port Douglas to the wetlands of Mareeba. From the parks of Townsville to the thick, tropical rainforests of the Daintree. Throw in some Cooktown mangroves, Port Douglas pizza parlours and Yungaburra markets and you have a world of green. If your day is feeling a bit drab and concrete-like I hope this cheers you up.