The Traveling Image Makers

Clint Burkinshaw, a Travel Photographer from South Australia, grew up spending most of his time engrossed in sport and the beach. That was until he started looking elsewhere to expand his mind further from the life that he knew and was content with, and turned to a map of the world. He was not a hundred percent sure yet of what he was to get from it, but in 2005 he tested the waters by taking off for several months and headed towards Europe where he hit the road and backpacked through well over a dozen countries before returning home. Little did he know, this was just the tip of the iceberg and just a taste of what was in store for him.

In the following years, Clint spent many months on the road, visiting South America, Africa, the Middle East and Europe numerous times. The year 2016 sees him and his wife cycling across Europe one more time, from St. Petersburg to the Baltics, Poland, Slovakia, Austria, Switzerland and France.

I have been following this trip for a while, waiting for Clint to settle down for a few days and to get an opportunity to interview him. This finally happened when he was taking a few days' rest in Zakopane, Poland, and this episode is the outcome of that conversation. If you want to learn what pushes Clint to travel, have a listen!

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Some people explore the world right and left, north and south. Others, like my guest for this episode, Erin Babnik, prefer to explore it by going up and down and by climbing the peaks of the Alps or of the Californian Sierras to capture some amazing photographs of the high mountains.

Erin is a full-time landscape photographer, writer, and educator based out of California and Slovenia. She teaches photography workshops worldwide and shares her ideas about photography through articles for popular photography publications and through public speaking engagements. Her dedication to the medium of photography evolved out of her years working as an art historian, photographing at archaeological sites and in museums throughout Europe and the Middle East for the purposes of teaching and research. She subsequently spent years producing photographs on assignment and for licensing, all the while expanding her personal photographic excursions to increasingly remote outdoor locations. Erin draws upon her background in art history in bringing a deep knowledge of aesthetics, visual communication, and cultural relevancy to her own photographic work and to her writing. Her photographs have appeared in well over a hundred publications, including books, travel guides, magazines, newspapers, and television shows. Erin is also a member of the illustrious nature photography team Photo Cascadia.

We discussed with Erin what is important when considering mountain photography and what are the similarities and differences between the mountain regions of the New and of the Old World.

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My guest for this episode of the podcast is my long time friend Andy Bitterer. Me and Andy have a lot in common, but one thing that truly sets us apart from many other travel photographers is that we both still have a full-time job–doing stuff other than photography–that keeps our families well fed. We take photos in our spare time, but photography is our true passion and our side job, so we try to practice it as much as possible. That often means exploiting every business trip we take for opportunities to visit new places and create new images.

Andy Bitterer is an award-winning freelance photographer from Hamburg, Germany. As a frequent traveller around the world, Andy focuses mostly on travel and nature photography, but his interests also include event, portrait, architecture, and fine art photography. His work has appeared online and in print, from news websites and corporate intranets to book and music CD covers, magazines, and various marketing collateral.

I have been wanting to interview Andy for a long time, to ask him how he manages to make work, photography, and family travel coexist peacefully and productively. Of course, with him being a very busy guy who is often on the road, it took some time before we could find the time to record an interview, but we finally succeeded. If you too are doing photography as a side job, you might be interested in listening to this episode.

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My guest for this episode of the podcast, Robert Van Koesveld, is a passionate travel photographer from Australia who has a deep knowledge of the culture and traditions of the geikos and maikos of Kyoto. By striving to really getting to know those women and developing an intimate connection with them, he has managed to capture some sublime images that go beyond the surface to reveal their inner world.

We discussed at length about what is necessary to approach those communities and how much work and patience it took Robert to produce the images that are contained in his beautiful book, Geiko and Maiko of Kyoto. We also briefly talked about that other place that is reputed to be quite inaccessible by many, the Kingdom of Bhutan.

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Many people dream of quitting their day jobs, leaving everything behind and living a nomadic life of full-time travel. Very few people actually resolve to do it.

My guest for this episode of the podcast, Flemming Bo Jensen, is one of the few who did.

Flemming Bo is an official Fujifilm X-photographer from Denmark who only comes out at night. He is a music photographer and all his work is done in dark clubs and venues. Music, especially electronic music, is a big part of what makes his heart beat, and being able to combine music and photography is a dream come true to him.

Since November 2009 he has lived as a nomad. He was the former Head of IT in a Danish Government agency, but wanted to see new horizons and left Copenhagen and his job in 2009.

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Patagonia, the southernmost portion of the American continent, is a land of stunning beauty, unspoilt wilderness and extreme weather. As of recent, it has also become one of the most sought-after destinations for landscape photographers. Having recently read Sean Bagshaw's article about his trip to Patagonia, I wanted to know more, so I asked him to be my guest on the show and to tell us about that remote land.

Sean is an outdoor photographer, digital image developing enthusiast and photography educator based in Ashland, Oregon, where he resides with his wife and two sons. In the 1980s and 1990s he did some rock climbing and mountaineering and enjoyed being expedition photographer because it allowed him to present slide shows to anyone he could corner in a dark room with a projector. Over time he moved away from documentary images and became immersed in the art of photography. Now he photographs mountains instead of climbing them. He spends about a quarter of each year sleeping in his truck or on the ground, stumbling around in the dark, eating bad food and avoiding showers. Twice since 2008 his images have been exhibited in the Smithsonian as winners in the Nature's Best Windland Smith Rice International Awards. His previous career as a science teacher makes photography education a good fit. Sean teams up with fellow Photo Cascadia members leading workshops. He also teaches digital image developing classes, lectures and offers a series of Photoshop video tutorials.

To record the interview, I had to wait for Sean's return from another faraway corner of the earth, Easter Island, so I asked him to give us his impressions of the land of the Moais as well. Double awesomeness!

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This podcast is all about travel, but sometimes people cannot travel. My old friend John Butterill, who I interviewed for this episode, founded Virtual Photo Walks a few years ago to act as the eyes and the cameras of people who can’t walk the walk because of their disabilities.

Virtual Photo Walks is a non-profit organization that uses smart phones and video conferencing to enable people isolated by illness or disability to travel the world in real time. Thanks to their technology partners and a group of dedicated virtual volunteer guides from all over the world, they are able to make the world bigger and brighter for a community of people with disabilities.

Using Virtual volunteer guides equipped with a smartphone, the disabled can participate in immersive, real-time experiences of places they will likely never see first-hand, an African safari, a war veterans’ reunion, a hike in the forest.

Virtual Photo Walks Inc is a 501c3 public charity in the USA IE 46-1674634 and welcomes your donations. Click here to donate.

Duration 39m 26s.

Music for this episode: “Zanzibar” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Watch the video below to learn more about Virtual Photo Walks.

Links

* Website

* Donations

* Twitter

* Facebook

* Google+

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I have to admit I’ve always been a big fan of my guest for this week’s episode of the podcast, Doug Kaye. I have been following Doug’s work since when he was an IT expert and author, a renowned podcaster, and as of late, an excellent photographer. So it was a great pleasure and honor for me to finally be able to talk to him personally.

Beginning his visual explorations in his father’s wet darkroom, Doug earned a degree in theatrical lighting design at U.C. Berkeley in the ’60s and studied cinematography at NYU’s Graduate Institute of Film and Television in the ’70s. In the ’80s he began a two-decade hiatus from photography, when he started a system-software company that he ran for 18 years. He sold that business in 1996 and decided to work his way down the corporate ladder, service as CTO of four dot-com startups in four years. He retired in 2000, wrote two technology books and started a non-profit podcasting network.

Doug got back into photography in 2008. A trip to Kenya convinced him nature photography wasn’t for him, and Iceland cured him of his interest in landscape. For the past two years, Doug has focused almost exclusively on street photography, even reverting to film on occasion. Doug teaches photography locally in San Francisco and online, and was chosen as an Inception Master in Trey Ratcliff’s “Arcanum.” He leads street-photography workshops locally and in Cuba, which he has visited five times. Doug is the co-host of the All About the Gear podcast on the TWiP network.

I have also been planning to visit Cuba for a long time, but for reasons that are too long to explain here, never made that particular trip. Now, after hearing about it from someone who is an expert about the island country and seeing his photographs of it, I am getting inspired again. I would certainly love to be on one of Doug’s workshops, when I go there.

Duration 26m 24s.

Music for this episode: “Zanzibar” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Links

* Website

* Workshops

* All About the Gear

* Twitter

* Instagram

* Facebook

Photos by Doug

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My guest for this episode of the podcast is Cherie McKay.

Melbournian to the heart, divorced mum of four boys, Cherie is an entrepreneur, photographer and writer. She ventured into photography after spending over ten years in the corporate sector but quickly realised the world didn’t need another portrait photographer – instead the world needed beautiful camera bags specifically designed for women.

Cherie went on and designed her own range of camera bags and founded the company SHUTTER|bag in 2009 and after establishing international distributors, Cherie sold SHUTTER|bag in 2013.

Cherie is currently working towards incorporating more travel and street photography into her life. As part of this, she decided to embark on what many would consider a crazy adventure: flying to the US, renting a campervan and driving coast-to-coast from Los Angeles to New York on her own.

I found Cherie’s story captivating and her sense of humor extremely entertaining. She has lots of funny anecdotes to share about her road trip.

Duration 35m 50s.

Music for this episode: “Zanzibar” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Links

* I Wanted To Be a Travel Photographer

* Street Focus 72: Cherie Does America

* Saint Francis Wolf Sanctuary

* Website

* Facebook

* Twitter

* Instagram

Photos by Cherie

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I think Lauren Bath's story is exemplar of how dedication, commitment, and maybe a bit of luck can turn a passion like travel photography into a six-figure business in the matter of a few year. As her bio says:

"Lauren Bath is a chef turned photographer thanks to her early success on top photo sharing site Instagram. Quitting her job in early 2013, Lauren launched full force into a career in the tourism industry, effectively becoming Australia’s first professional “instagrammer”!

Since then Lauren has diversified into other social media platforms, as well as travel writing, and has also become involved with project management and education. With a passion for tourism and a hands on approach to social media Lauren has grown her online community to upwards of three quarters of a million followers."

What I loved most about my conversation with Lauren is that, despite her huge success, she is still very much a down-to-earth person and I believe this comes through very clearly in the interview.

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