The Traveling Image Makers

Sherry Ott is a long-term traveler, blogger, and photographer with one goal in mind - to make you wish you were somewhere else. She writes about her travel lifestyle and around the world adventures on Ottsworld.com and her social media channels.

On the About Page of her website, Sherry very prominently quotes author John Le Carre. He said, “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” We love it, and Sherry lives it.

In this episode, Sherry Ott tells us the story of how she transitioned from a corporate job in IT, sitting behind a desk, to traveling the world for more than 10 years as a digital nomad.

Sherry recently decided to come off the road full time, and now has a “real” home in Denver that she visits once in a while (once a world traveler, always a world traveler!). We talk about what brought her to that decision when it always seems digital nomads are living the life most people can only dream about. Why the change?

We also talk about how, like most digital nomads, Sherry makes a living from quite a few different sources. She barters, trades and sells her expertise, whether it be photography, social media consulting, writing, volunteering, housesitting and more, for all the elements of travel, from accommodations to meals to experiences and such. We’ll hear all about that and more in this episode.

Sherry has lived in Vietnam, hiked the Annapurna Circuit with her father, drove 10,000 miles from London to Mongolia in the Mongol Rally, walked across Spain on the Camino de Santiago, kayaked in Antarctica, and driven an auto-rickshaw across India for charity. She continues to seek out epic adventures to intriguing places in order to challenge herself and inspire people to overcome their fears and reap the benefits of travel.

Duration 51m 20s.

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

• Website
• Instagram – @Ottsworld
• Facebook
• Twitter – @Ottsworld
• Pinterest – @Ottsworld
• eBooks (created by Hecktic Travels) about photographing Medieval towns
• Speaking at TBEX Finger Lakes in September
• Ottsworld Ireland Tour

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This week, we welcome back to the show Marc Silber, who was already a guest on episode TTIM 95 – Marc Silber, Advancing Your Photography. Marc just published a new book on composition, so we we're excited to have him talk about this essential photography skill.

Marc is an author, photographer, filmmaker, and producer of the very popular YouTube series Advancing Your Photography, where he has interviewed scores of some of the biggest names in photography. 

He started out learning darkroom skills and the basics of photography at the legendary Peninsula School in Menlo Park, CA, in the '60s, and moved on to hone his skills to professional standards at the famed San Francisco Art Institute. Marc moved into teaching photography in workshops all over the country, he became renowned as an engaging and helpful speaker and coach, as his greatest joy comes from helping others. 

He loves adventure and you'll find him out backpacking surfing or snowboarding, or maybe just chilling, taking a walk through Carmel with his wife and Golden Retriever.

• Silber Studios
• Portfolio
• “Advancing Your Photography” YouTube channel
• The Secrets to Creating Amazing Photos: 83 Composition Tools from the Masters
• Facebook
• Instagram

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In this special episode of the podcast, Ralph talks with Ugo about his latest trip to that wonderful country, Morocco.

You can follow Ralph along his itinerary, from Casablanca to Marrakech, as we describe some of the best spots the country has to offer, including Chefchaouen, Fes, the Erg Chebbi desert, Aït Ben-Haddou, and the Atlas mountains.

Listen closely if you want to get the best tips about touring and photographing this fascinating destination.

• Mystical Morocco – Photo Enrichment Adventures
• Urban Morocco: Rabat, Fez, Meknes and Chefchaouen – Ugo Cei Photography

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Björn Moerman is often referred to as “the flying photographer”; combining his passion for aviation with a photography hobby that got out of hand. 

As an airline captain for a large Middle Eastern airline, he visited over 85 of the worlds countries so far and always comes home with exciting stories and freshly taken images from around the world. Bjorn is from Belgium but has been living in Dubai for the last 16 years. 

Today he mainly shoots Aviation and Travel photography but rediscovered the world of street photography when he picked up his first FUJIFILM camera in 2012. A year later, he switched 100% mirrorless and became an official X-photographer for FUJIFILM Middle East in 2014. Whenever he is not traveling, he can be found skimming the markets and streets of Dubai, looking to capture those fleeting moments of life. 

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Kai is an author and photographer from Germany. Born 1977 in Hamburg, he started out studying political science in Berlin (FU Berlin) and Helsinki (Helsingin Yliopisto), obtaining his master degree in 2004. He then set out to work as a freelance writer, spending most of his time living in South America.

Always passionate about photography, he studied professional image-making in Buenos Aires (Universidad de Palermo) to combine both text and photographs in his work. On the streets of Argentina’s buzzing capital, he discovered his passion for street photography.

Roaming around with his camera and getting lost in the city is a meditative experience for him as well as a mean to make sense of the world.

Besides capturing urban life in all its facets, he teaches photo workshops and curates the online magazine “The Art of Creative Photography”.

In his podcast-show “Gate7” he talks about travel and photography as a ticket to explore foreign cultures and connect with people.

In his quest to visually explore the world focusing on the power of the human spirit and social issues he has widely travelled to countries including Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, Bolivia and USA.

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José Manuel Santos lives and breathes Porto, the city where he was born sometime ago, in 1960. He has travelled up and down Portugal both by car and on a motorbike since 1980, always with his camera in the bag, and is a deep connoisseur of his country. He has so many stories to tell, surely many more than his age.

Portugal and Porto in particular run in his blood. His eyes shine when he tells us stories about his city, its people and its light so unique and so special.

He loves nothing more then to share his country and all that he has learned from the great masters of travel photography, Trey Ratcliff, Cradoc Bagshaw, Ralph Velasco and John Stanmeyer, to whom he introduced the city of Porto.

He is the founder and photo tour leader of Pictury Photo Tours in Portugal.

Duration 49m 14s.

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Ken Kaminesky is a veteran commercial travel photographer, Fujifilm Global Ambassador, writer, consultant, and entrepreneur with over twenty years of experience in the photography industry. His work has been featured worldwide in numerous commercial and editorial publications, including the New York Times and on the cover of National Geographic. His passion for travel and the incredible landscapes and people he encounters along the way are the inspiration for his popular blog, and the other publications he writes for.

Throughout his travels, Ken seeks to capture images and stories that will inspire and motivate people to step out their front door and embrace adventure. As one of the founders and tour leaders at Discovery Photo Tours, he gets the chance to share his love for travel and photography with avid photo enthusiasts from all over the world. Savouring art, food, history, and culture with tour groups in places like Africa, Jordan, Italy, and Iceland is one of the most rewarding aspects of his work.

His favourite place in the world is always his next destination. He believes that each place has a unique story that will inspire others, which he aims to capture in his images.

Ken was previously our guest on episode TTIM 56 – The Business Of Photography with Ken Kaminesky. Back then, our conversation was mostly about the business side of travel photography. This time, it was about more adventurous and romantic topics, including African wildlife and safaris.

Last year Ken went on a scouting trip to Tanzania. That trip resulted in his company, Discovery Photo Tours, offering a VIP photographic safari experience this coming August and September. You might want to check that out, if you are ever thought of being in the middle of one of the most exciting wildlife spectacles in the world: the Great Migration that every year compels millions of wildebeest and zebra to traverse the plains of the Serengeti, crossing the border from Tanzania into Kenya.

We talked with Ken about his memories of this experience and we picked his brains for tips on getting the most of such an experience, for choice of equipment to camera settings.

Duration: 53m 03s.

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As you might know, we are doing a bi-monthly photo contest on our Facebook group, The Traveling Image Makers’ Corner. We invite the group members to submit one of their best photographs and, at the end of the period, we pick two winners and invite them to come on the show and tell us about their winning images and their photography.

The winners for the month of March 2018, Michael Gerber and Alexia Cumin, submitted photos taken in Sofia, Bulgaria and Hong Kong, respectively. We thought those two stood above the rest, but it was a tough choice, since we got so many amazing submissions.

Would you like to be one of the next guests on the podcast? Head over to our Facebook group, ask to join (if you’re not already a member) and look for the post pinned to the top for instructions. The contest for the month of May 2018 is already open and we intend to do a new contest every two months. Let’s see your best travel images!

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Piet (pronounced as “Pete”) Van den Eynde is a Belgian freelance photographer, trainer and prolific author.

In 2009, he threw his camera, a flash and umbrella in his bicycle panniers and cycled for one year through Turkey, Iran, India and Indonesia.

He loves travel, photography and off-camera flash so his photographic work is often a combination of those three.

Together with travel photographer Matt Brandon, Piet organizes travel photography workshops in India and Mongolia.

Piet is also a Fujifilm X Photographer and a Fujifilm Ambassador for Fujifilm Belgium.

On April 1st, 2018, Piet released the updated and expanded second edition of his 15th eBook, Light It Up! Techniques for Dramatic Off-Camera Flash. In this 185 page PDF eBook, he introduces you to the concepts, techniques and gear that are required to create stunning photographs with flash. The eBook is the culmination of over 10 years of experience with real-life location flash in general and off-camera flash in particular.

In this episode of the podcast, we interviewed Pete about what it means to do flash photography when traveling. Piet also shared with us his experience of using the Fujifilm GFX-50S medium format camera around the world, another unusual choice for travel photographers, who usually like to travel nimble and with a lightweight bag of gear.

If you buy Light It Up! before April 10th 2018, by clicking here and using the TTIM20 discount code at checkout, you’ll not only get a 20% discount, but you’ll also lock in two valuable pieces of bonus content:

1. a set of three bonus videos totaling 45 minutes in which Piet explains even more about his flash workflow. In the first video, “For The Birds” you see him creating an iconic image of an Indian Sadhu on the Ganges, from capture to final edit in Photoshop. In the second video, “Layering Lights”, he builds upon the concepts that he explains in the postprocessing chapter of the eBook. Finally, in the last bonus video, “Creating Light”, he takes you through a number of his images and explains his reasoning and lighting setup.
2. a set of 5 Lightroom presets

Duration 43m 14s.

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