Crafting your life-style as a journey photographer
A jet setting life-style, visiting new locations every week and photographing for quite a few publications and purchasers sounds fantastic doesn’t? For a few of us, sure, however really, I do know {that a} full-time life-style of journey additionally doesn’t enchantment to everybody.
I’ve seen that the older I get, the extra I wish to expertise a vacation spot for an extended time period, to cut back journey days and lengthy haul journeys and actually take in the cultures, landscapes and locations moderately than soar about everywhere in the world!
The excellent news is, you don’t must journey all yr spherical to work as a journey photographer, there are a lot of different methods to construct your profession and mix it together with your present life-style or commitments.
Working as a contract journey photographer doesn’t must imply packing up your belongings and minimizing your life right into a backpack (+ digital camera bag after all). It may be so simple as sharing/promoting work out of your previous travels or pitching an article or challenge concept for future travels.
You may suit your work as a journey photographer into your present life-style by growing your portfolio as you journey regionally on weekends, on longer worldwide journeys a couple of instances a yr or by specializing in a particular area of interest throughout the trade.
Maybe wellness tourism is your desire, this might imply specializing in native choices like yoga retreats, wilderness lodges and scenic landscapes when you construct up your picture portfolio and showcase your inventive strengths. When you’re assured in delivering a constant high quality of images, the subsequent step may very well be pitching to wellness manufacturers and companies to seize a group of photos for his or her advertising use or capturing pictures to pitch for publication in a related journal.
Which of the beneath describes greatest the way you see your self working as a journey photographer?
- Photographing locations to pitch + publish each your phrases and pictures
- Creating picture libraries and content material collections for manufacturers and tourism companies
- Photographing luxurious accommodations and experiences in lovely locations
- Preserving it native and showcasing tourism choices for guests in native guides, newspapers, magazines and dealing together with your regional tourism board
- Pairing photographing vacation spot weddings with panorama work in tropical and unique places
- Researching and writing articles on forgotten cultures and offbeat locations + telling tales together with your pictures.
- Working with non-profit organisations to doc charities, environmental initiatives, and sustainable tourism ventures.
- Collaborating with manufacturers and companies to make a dream journey images challenge come to life.
- Travelling to {photograph} locations with the intention of promoting prints and dealing with galleries, inventory libraries and even maybe your individual retailer?
- All the above!
I’ll cease earlier than I get too overexcited, I simply love dreaming up the probabilities for my very own profession, however particularly different photographers who’re simply getting began! There are such a lot of potential avenues to enterprise down as a journey photographer and I can’t specific how thrilling it’s whenever you get your first consumer, have your first photos revealed or make a dream marketing campaign a actuality.
01 – Take into account the way you see your self working as a journey photographer. Are you open to a life on the street, or would you like a mixture of stability and smaller scale adventures? There’s no improper reply right here, you’ll simply be making it simpler by narrowing down your focus and life-style objectives.
02 – Curate your present portfolio or photos from earlier journeys. Are there any areas you have to work on to create consistency inside your images? How would you describe your work to an editor or why ought to a model work with you? These solutions will change into clearer in case you’re taking part within the course, nevertheless it helps to start out desirous about your inventive imaginative and prescient, your strengths and how one can seize a vacation spot in another way.
03 – Do you’ve gotten a web site or PDF portfolio that isn’t Instagram? Creating your individual house on-line is important to showcasing your work as soon as you start pitching and dealing with purchasers. It merely lets you management how your work is displayed, what photos a possible consumer sees first and means you’ll be able to steer outcomes by crafting a portfolio that meets the purchasers wants and makes for a simple sure. Once more, this isn’t important instantly, however ought to be a part of the thought course of as you’re employed in direction of your first pitch or challenge as a journey photographer.
That’s all for now, I simply needed to share this perception as typically the time period ‘journey photographer’ can conjure up visions of a life on the street with no base or house, nevertheless it’s completely attainable to create your individual life-style and revel in a contract profession. My very own profession has shifted over time and has seen some years after I’m on the street for 10+ months of the yr, others after I’m based mostly completely overseas, and a few years after I’m spending extra time at house writing about previous journeys, creating content material for native purchasers or planning for the yr forward.
Journey and panorama photographer from Australia who is much extra snug in a pair of flippers than heels! Having labored for publications corresponding to Lonely Planet, Wanderlust and the Sunday Instances, Lisa based The Wandering Lens to share vacation spot guides to the worlds most photogenic locations and out of doors experiences.