EP139 Fine Art Landscape and Wildlife Photography with Matthew Trabold

[00:00:11] Speaker A: Snapping frames chasing light Shadows dance day to night Lens sharp, soul in sight the camera whispers, hold it tight Click, click moments freeze time captured in the breath the camera light the flash ignite frame the world see it right the camera light. [00:00:36] Speaker B: You're the light. [00:00:40] Speaker B: I told you it was a good song. [00:00:43] Speaker A: That's impressive. [00:00:44] Speaker B: It's. AI is a crazy thing. We. Yeah, we threw a funny prompt in and that spat out, and we've been rolling with it. [00:00:53] Speaker B: Good morning. Good morning, everybody. This is the Camera Life podcast, episode 139 with Matthew Trabal Traybold. I almost got it wrong again. [00:01:03] Speaker A: It's okay. [00:01:05] Speaker B: How you doing? [00:01:06] Speaker A: Good, how are you? [00:01:07] Speaker B: I'm great. I'm great. It's 9am I've got my coffee. I'm ready to roll. It's gonna be a big day. [00:01:15] Speaker A: Sweet. [00:01:16] Speaker B: I had shoots yesterday. I got shoots this afternoon. It's a busy week. [00:01:19] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:01:20] Speaker B: How's your week shaping up? [00:01:22] Speaker A: Mine's been pretty chill. I actually. I got hired to go shoot some wildlife next week, so that'll be a big adventure. [00:01:34] Speaker A: I just came back from Utah and this is like my week gap before I go down to the coast of Texas to film some whooping cranes. [00:01:45] Speaker B: Really? [00:01:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:01:47] Speaker B: And. Okay. And you got hired to do that? [00:01:49] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is like, crazy. [00:01:53] Speaker B: Okay, we're gonna. We'll talk about that in just a second. [00:01:55] Speaker A: I wanna. [00:01:56] Speaker B: I wanna find out how that. That stuff happens. Okay, so first of all, Matthew Tribald, landscape photographer, wildlife photographer. Like fine art. [00:02:08] Speaker B: What else do I know about you? You've recently been to Queensland here in Australia and all over a little bit. We'll talk about that later in the show. What else did I find out when I was doing some digging? You shoot with two camera systems. We'll talk about that. [00:02:23] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:02:25] Speaker B: And I don't know, what have I missed? Give me. Give me the 60 seconds. [00:02:30] Speaker A: Pretty good. Yeah. So I'm a wildlife and landscape photographer. Pivoted more towards wildlife lately. [00:02:40] Speaker A: That really picked up. Maybe a year ago, I went to Svalbard with a friend of mine, Benjamin Hardman, and we. That's the first time I saw polar bears. And so I lost my mind photographing them, then came back stateside. Have always kind of spent some time in the Arctic. This photo behind me is from Iceland. [00:03:07] Speaker A: And so then did some research, see how I could get more into wildlife and found a couple guides here stateside that photograph bears. So their names are Claire and Arthur or Brooke and Arthur. And so Brooke and Arthur and I have been photographing bears, I think I've gone out with them five times this year. Photographed various things in Yellowstone and all over. So, yeah, more into wildlife now and. [00:03:40] Speaker A: As I mentioned, going to film some wildlife next week. And then landscape photography is one of those things that can just kind of be done at any moment where you are. If you're somewhere with crazy animals, there's probably crazy landscapes as well. So. That's true. They kind of work together pretty well. [00:03:59] Speaker B: Get one with the animal and then wait for it to walk off and then get one. You've got wildlife and landscape. Yeah, it's perfect. [00:04:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:04:07] Speaker B: That is awesome. I, I think I, that's might be actually how I came across you for the first time was. [00:04:16] Speaker B: Maybe the Petapixel article about you photographing bears. I think. [00:04:21] Speaker B: When you come across my radar. Yeah. And I think I saw that and I put put you on. On our list because those photos were crazy. [00:04:28] Speaker A: Thank you. [00:04:29] Speaker B: It was, yeah. I was just looking at him thinking how, how did you not get eaten? [00:04:36] Speaker B: Okay, so quickly, let's just say hello to the chat before we get into this job you've got coming up next week. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. Philip Johnson. Oh, our names are all messed up again. [00:04:49] Speaker B: Good morning. Rodney Nicholson. Stuart Lyle. Felicity. Good morning, Paul. Lisa Leach, Digifrog day from Tasmania. And Bruce Moyle. Good morning. Good to see you all. Throw in the chat. Well, sorry, yeah, no Greg this morning. He's fine. He had a street photography incident and he's resting up, but he's okay. And his cameras are also okay. [00:05:14] Speaker B: So no Greg, just me and Matthew, but we'll hold down the fort. But if you guys have any questions for Matthew or comments, just sing out. Throw it in the chat. Good morning, ltk. Okay, so you've been hired for a job on the coast of Texas. How does that, how does that happen? Do they come across you through like social media website, that kind of thing? Or is it other channels? [00:05:39] Speaker A: It's actually a friend of mine, a friend of my sisters, they went to high school together and he works for a production company here in Austin called Finn and Fur Films. And I met with him at the beginning of this year expressing interest in getting into wildlife videography. And, and at the time I only did photography and so I was just kind of brainstorming how can I, you know, break into that world? Because my other friend, Benjamin Hardman, who's based out of Iceland, he does a lot of filmmaking in the natural history space. And so his advice to me was, you know, when you're going out to photograph Wildlife, do your best to capture them in their element on video. You know, put together a couple clips, say what you can do. And, you know, just by chance, I was driving out to Utah and he gave me a call and said, you know, we're at the tail end of our next film and we're missing some footage of, you know, whooping cranes. Do you have time in your schedule to go down south and film them? And so I was like, yeah, why not? This sounds sick. And. [00:06:57] Speaker A: Yeah, so it's gonna be quite the adventure. I. I've tried filming. I mean, I have filmed successfully various animals. But I think as an individual, what I've always studied or struggled with on the video side is. [00:07:15] Speaker A: Video is, you know, has to tell a story at all times, and it requires a lot of thought to go from beginning to end and get all the shots needed to make the story that's in your head. Whereas photography, you're just trying to capture moments in time, and they don't necessarily. Your photos don't need to be connected with each other. I mean, a cool picture is a cool picture. Unless you're trying to present a body of work or something. The cohesive. The cohesiveness of it is kind of not necessarily relevant. I mean, animals are animals. Landscapes or landscapes. Of course, if you specialize in a certain region or a certain type of animal, maybe you're all bear focus, maybe you're all lions. You know, whatever it may be, that's how. Where people can, like, hone in. But myself, I've kind of dabbled in. Man, it feels like almost every kind of photography at this point. And it's only been in those last year that I've really honed in on wildlife being my focus. And then just by chance, bears have been the subset of that. But then, as you said, I've come out to Queensland randomly, and that was like, animals I never thought I'd see in my life. I don't know what a tree kangaroo is, but. [00:08:40] Speaker A: I do now. But I did it when I signed up. [00:08:45] Speaker B: Crazy. Oh, yeah. [00:08:48] Speaker B: Right. So before we talk about Queensland, what. Tell me about, like, when did you start. [00:08:55] Speaker B: Implementing video? Do you have a background in video at all, or are you. Full photography background and you're trying to learn that sort of. [00:09:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:09:02] Speaker B: Implement it. [00:09:03] Speaker A: Yeah. Full photography background, trying to implement video. [00:09:09] Speaker A: I think I first started trying to implement video in 2020 when everyone was in lockdown. Here I was like, I spent months in my apartment just banging my head against the wall trying to convince myself to do YouTube and do like this talking head thing that we're doing right now. Oh, it was brutal. So it never really took off. I was just like, this is not my gig. I have done a couple YouTube videos here and there. It does not have my head in the frame. But I do enjoy the educational side of photography, for sure. Especially, I mean, editing and those kinds of things I really enjoy nerding out about. And so I think while things are slow here, you know, in January, I may do some more of that. But otherwise, yeah, the video side I've seen grow more and more in our space, and it almost seems like it's a requirement if you want to make a living as a photographer, you've got to have some ability to shoot video thrown in there. And, yeah, so I've been making the push for that. My best video probably comes from drones. Like, drones, I think, are amazing. [00:10:31] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:10:33] Speaker B: That was another thing that I sort of spotted quickly after when I was doing some research on you was the Iceland volcano eruption. [00:10:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:10:41] Speaker B: 2023 that you shot. [00:10:43] Speaker A: Crazy. [00:10:44] Speaker B: That is crazy. Was that. Was that just right place, right time, or did you go there specifically to shoot that? [00:10:51] Speaker A: At the time, I was photographing motorsports. So I go back and forth from Texas to Europe about once or twice a month. And. [00:11:04] Speaker A: As I was boarding my plane here in Austin, I saw that there was a volcano likely to erupt again in Iceland. I had been the year before trying to film or photograph the same volcano and missed it. So when I got there, it was more or less dormant. I could fly over the top, but, like, there wasn't much going on anymore. So I think I was in Italy at the time. And then it finally erupted, and I was like, all right, I'm not going back to Austin. I'm going to book a flight to Iceland for three days, and I'm going to go out to. This volcano ended up being, like, the craziest death march of my life because I went into town, I bought the newest drone because I was like, I need a drone, and I don't have one right now. [00:11:50] Speaker B: Hang on. What? You didn't. You didn't have the drone? [00:11:53] Speaker A: I didn't have it when I went. So I went into town, I was like, hey, what do you guys have? Because they have a DJI store in Reykjavik. And they're like, we've got this. You know, I was like, all right, I'll take that. And then I was like, and can you tell me where the volcano is? And the guy's like, yeah, you know, go over there. You'll See a parking lot, and then you just follow everyone else. And I was like, all right, sounds good. So I get the drone, charge the batteries, pack it up, had him flown one in a hot minute. And the hike ended up being like four hours in one direction. And, like, it was just so long. I didn't bring any snacks or anything. I show up at this, I almost gave up because I was like, this is brutal. And I came around the corner, I could see the emergency vehicles. I come around the corner, and right there in front of me was the volcano. Like just neon orange lava exploding out of the earth. And yeah, that's what it looks like when I was walking home. [00:12:56] Speaker B: Just gonna play a little bit of this with. Without sound while you're talking about it. [00:13:00] Speaker A: So that's crazy. So, yeah, basically you walk that path down there in the bottom of the frame all the way around this mountain. And once you come behind it, you've got that right in front of you. And. [00:13:13] Speaker A: This is the first time I've flown this drone. Actually, my first flight, I took off, I landed, and I broke one of the three cameras on it and. [00:13:23] Speaker B: Oh, really? [00:13:24] Speaker A: Yeah, because I was in a place where, like, the best I can describe, it's kind of like War of the Worlds. Like, when there's a volcano in Iceland, the amount of drones in the sky at one time is just like. If you take a moment to pause and look around, you've got all these drones just taking off and flying towards this insane looking volcano. There are people everywhere, you know, crawling, like, in the most dangerous places possible. And so it was like, okay, I don't want to disrupt the emergency services, of course. So I'm trying to find a place to take off and land. And there were all these little rocks that I took off from. And then when it landed, one of the props hit a rock, flipped the drone. And when that flipping, for some reason, one of the three cameras got a little messed up. And so I had a hard time focusing only on one of the three cameras. I think it was like the medium focal length, but it worked well enough for me to be able to do this. And I was like, I can't believe, like, first flight. But I did it once, went back to my hotel, looked at the footage, and was like, I can do better. I went back the next day and went at night that time bring. I got all these night shots and. [00:14:47] Speaker A: Then I left being like, all right, like, I think I've actually put together enough footage to really showcase the insanity of this place. And I. I mean, It's. It's definitely in the top five craziest things I've seen in my life. I mean, it's really hard to put into words the scale of it, because with technology now. [00:15:10] Speaker B: Are these the night shots? These the ones we're seeing at the moment? [00:15:13] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, these are the night shots. [00:15:15] Speaker B: Amazing. [00:15:17] Speaker A: And the lava is so bright. I mean, it makes it, like, helpful from the video perspective. [00:15:25] Speaker A: But, I mean, they had another volcano recently, and it's just. It wasn't one that you could get up close to. In fact, I left that one thinking you couldn't get close to it. And I think the hour. An hour later, they opened it up to the public and you could get close. [00:15:44] Speaker B: Oh, really? [00:15:45] Speaker A: Yeah. This year I pulled off the highway and fly a drone about. [00:15:52] Speaker A: I had the Mavic 4 Pro and I flew it about 2km. [00:16:00] Speaker A: Out from where I was standing. And just by chance, the wind was coming towards me. So when I'm flying out there, it's killing the battery. And then I would get past the smoke line and there was the lava, and then I could film for 5, 10 minutes and then the wind would blow it back to me. So, like, the range of the drone, it worked out perfectly. If it was the opposite, I don't think I would have made it. [00:16:26] Speaker A: So, yeah, that's like that. It's unbelievable. [00:16:30] Speaker B: That's crazy, those images. That footage is. [00:16:34] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:16:36] Speaker B: So how close. How close could you get to where? Like, could you. Did you have line of sight of your drone while you were filming that? [00:16:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, 100. How close? I mean, I didn't really know what I was getting into, so first time I hiked out there, I brought my, like, stills cameras being like, all right, I'll photograph it and I'll also do drone photography. The reality is, on the ground, it's not even worth trying to take a photo because the heat coming off of it is just like your picture is just going to be heat haze all day long. So you really do have to get up above the volcano to get any real kind of footage. I don't know. I mean, stills wise, of course, course people take stills of volcanoes, but I have not successfully done it yet. I know Hawaii is a popular spot for that kind of thing. [00:17:28] Speaker A: But. Yeah, and you could. Honestly, you could walk right down to the edge of the lava flow if you felt psycho enough. I mean, when I was there. Yeah, they shut it down the second night, like the site, because. [00:17:45] Speaker A: So let's say I'm like, on the side over here, and then you've got over the caldera, another valley in another area people could access. People on the far side were trying to climb up the side of the caldera and they'd have to get, you know, rescue crews out there to stop these people from. [00:18:05] Speaker A: I don't know, incinerating themselves. [00:18:07] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. [00:18:08] Speaker A: Melting, like, like I didn't know that was even a possibility. [00:18:12] Speaker B: But oh man, if that, if that happened in Australia, that, that you would not be able to get anywhere near. It would be. Yeah, there would be crews everywhere just turning people back. [00:18:24] Speaker A: So there's a, there's a definitely a grace period. You know, when they first start erupting, it's you know, cautious. We don't know what we're getting involved with here. And then once they're able to kind of set up the logistics to make it safe for the public, then people can get closer and actually kind of experience it. And in Iceland in particular, it's. It's kind of like a cultural gathering of everyone. A lot of people on the island, you know, because they don't have any of the. [00:18:56] Speaker A: None of their stratovolcanoes, I believe, which are the. More like explosive ones have gone off lately. They're more kind of these shield volcano, like chill, chill. Ish volcanoes. So you can get pretty close and know that you'll be all right. They're not just gonna just blow, blow up and go crazy. So yeah, it's pretty cool, man. [00:19:21] Speaker B: So you, you travel a lot. When did, when did travel start for you? [00:19:26] Speaker A: I really picked up with the motorsports that was like the. [00:19:31] Speaker B: Let's say we should, maybe we should go. We should. Let's, let's, let's go back to the start. [00:19:35] Speaker A: All right. [00:19:36] Speaker B: Because I want to find out how you ended up going from motorsports to like wildlife landscapes. Yeah, but I'm sure there's a story before that. Where did, where did photography start for you? [00:19:48] Speaker A: I started like first taking photos on a family trip. My family, we took before Lindblad Expeditions and National Geographic became one company. It used to just be Lindblad Expeditions. So we took. [00:20:08] Speaker A: Cruise to the Galapagos Islands when I was in fifth or sixth grade. [00:20:15] Speaker A: And my mom just, she was the photographer in our family at the time. And she gave me a camera to take some photos and just messing around. I knew nothing about it at the time. [00:20:30] Speaker A: She thought I had an eye for photography just based on that. And you know, through middle school I didn't do anything photography related. But then high school role rolled around. I enrolled in the photography program at my high school. And then. [00:20:46] Speaker A: She found me a one on one mentor here in Austin that his name was Rick and he. [00:20:55] Speaker A: Would one on one teach me outside of school all about the latest Photoshop. At the time HDR photography was really popular. So like, oh yeah. Wanted to learn that my high school could only afford to. [00:21:10] Speaker A: Really teach black and white photography on film, which at the time I wasn't into film photography. I'm quite a bit more into it now. But because we couldn't do color, I mean colors the bulk of my work, color photography. So black and white didn't appeal to me. So thankfully my mom put in a lot of effort to find me this mentor. And yeah, so we, you know, the four years of high school. [00:21:40] Speaker A: You know, I would sign up for workshops though at the time they shut down recently, unfortunately, Rocky Mountain School Photography was a program up in Missoula, Montana. And they would run, you know, like some of the original workshops here stateside before every photographer on earth started running their own workshops. And I'd go out with my mom or my dad to I think one of the first ones I did with them I went to Glacier National Park. Then there was one as day to night in Vegas and Zion national park and there's a night photography workshop and we learned light painting, how to photograph the stars, all these different things. [00:22:28] Speaker A: And that I got recognition for one of my photos in there. [00:22:35] Speaker A: To go to photo. Like there was some program they were running in conjunction with Photoshop World, which is some big convention here in the States and whoever took the best picture on the trip could go to this convention. I've still never been to the convention, but I got recognition for one of my photos. I just never worked. I don't know why. And. [00:22:55] Speaker A: Yeah, so then let's say fast forward a little bit. I went to a professional program with that school. I lived in Missoula my junior summer as a professional intensive program. At the time I was the youngest participant in the program. I was probably 17 at the time. And we, it was three months. Um, I lived in an apartment, family would come and visit. But. [00:23:25] Speaker A: Yeah, you'd wake up and basically from 8 in the morning till 5 o' clock at night do just every genre of photography possible in this intensive program. [00:23:37] Speaker A: And so I did. [00:23:38] Speaker B: That sounds amazing. [00:23:40] Speaker A: It was really cool. I mean it was insane. Especially at that age. I mean it was just like, yeah, you were living and breathing what you loved and you're surrounded by other creatives that are also into the same thing. And so I really, it really opened my, my eyes to the possibilities. I distinctly remember one guy came and visited us. He was a sports illustrator, photographer, and he had covered, you know, Olympics. Almost every professional sport had these incredible images. And I was like, how on earth do I get into that world? Um, so leaving high school, I went to the University of Miami down in Florida, and I photographed for their newspaper. And I don't think I did it. My freshman year, I want to say sophomore year, I finally signed up with them. I was like, all right, let's give the newspaper a go. And yeah, by chance, the first assignment they gave me was to photograph the diving team. They have a great diving program, swimming program. And. [00:24:46] Speaker A: I took this photo of a guy jumping off the high dive with these massive, you know, classic Florida clouds behind them. Sure. The same in Australia. Anytime you're on the coast, you get those, like, big nuclear looking clouds out on the horizon. And that ended up being like the COVID photo of the newspaper for that shoot. And then I also got recognized. At the time, National Geographic had a website called Nat Geo your shot. That's now been eliminated as a website and it's now an Instagram only thing. I have no idea how the Instagram part works, but at the time, you'd make a profile and you could send images on the website and. [00:25:30] Speaker A: That photo made it on their website. I have no idea how, like, it blew my mind. I was like, this is insane. So, so did that cover the sports for three years, I think I photographed the Miami Open, which had all the professional tennis players at the time. I got my editor to lie to the Miami Open and tell them that we make way more newspapers than we do. Because University of Miami, it's a school of 10,000 students. And the press really like, the press form was like, okay, you have to have a circulation of X amount. And so he does just basically filled it out saying that we met all the guidelines and they gave me a press pass for the professional tennis tournament. For the whole. It's like a two week long tournament. It landed right on my finals for school. So I only made it out there one day, but I remember sitting in the pit, eye level with Novak Djokovic playing. [00:26:30] Speaker A: Juan del Potro, I think. And I was just sitting there like, what? Like, what is going on? Like, how am I here right now? And it was insane. It was really cool. [00:26:44] Speaker B: So what were you studying? What were you studying at the time? What? [00:26:48] Speaker A: Marketing architecture and geographic information systems. [00:26:56] Speaker B: Hang on, is that. What is that one? That's the most specific. [00:26:59] Speaker A: Three separate. [00:27:00] Speaker B: Three. Yeah. [00:27:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:27:03] Speaker B: That is an odd Specific niche. [00:27:09] Speaker A: Why? [00:27:10] Speaker B: So what. [00:27:12] Speaker B: You went intensive into photography in high school. It sounds like you were, you know, at a level that would. That the average 17 year old, 18 year old isn't at, at that point, you were studying with people. You. Yeah. What. What stopped you from pursuing that further. [00:27:32] Speaker B: Straight in. Into school? [00:27:34] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:27:37] Speaker A: Yeah. I. My Rick had told me that, you know, the photography programs weren't really worth, like, if I'm gonna go to college, I need to spend that time getting a degree and a proper, like. [00:27:58] Speaker A: Profession. I guess, like, like, if you're gonna go to college, you might as well get that education. And we had decided that marketing would be the best route because, I mean, a lot of what we do is marketing. So. [00:28:13] Speaker B: Yeah, everything, every time. [00:28:15] Speaker A: So get the knowledge and marketing because you've got, you've got the access to the photography already. You've got the skill set that's more just like repetition. Putting yourself out there, getting the shots. The marketing and all this other stuff is something that you really. You need formal education on. And so that's why I spent the four years there doing that. [00:28:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. But you were still obviously pursuing photography at the same time. [00:28:43] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:28:44] Speaker B: School newspaper. Is that a paid thing in any way or is it literally just like a extracurricular. [00:28:50] Speaker A: Yeah, it was just a extracurricular thing. I think I ended up getting fired from it. Or maybe we mutually agreed to just part ways. But, like, I was really bad with the deadlines for it. I kept sending them, like, the stuff. To be fair, I didn't understand the process of a newspaper. So, like, I didn't understand, hey, you know, we've got this spread here that we've designed and we're missing photos to go with the story. And I'm like, yeah, they'll get there. Like, does it really need to be, you know, what's the time frame on this? I didn't appreciate the. The scale of what they were. [00:29:30] Speaker A: Yeah, the timing aspect was super whack. I, I basically gave them photos very last minute. I didn't fully appreciate that I was making their lives harder. And so there was a little back and forth about that. So we just agreed to. I was like, all right, you guys do your thing. I'm gonna. I was a little more stubborn back then. I was like, I'm gonna go do my own thing. [00:29:51] Speaker A: I was like, it's been fun. You go find someone else to do this. I'm tired. [00:29:56] Speaker A: So. [00:29:57] Speaker B: Okay, so. Because that's what I was gonna ask about, like, photojournalism. That wasn't ever on your radar in terms of being a career or after that experience, you weren't like this. I don't want to be in a newsroom, just like, cranking out pictures. [00:30:11] Speaker A: I think it would have been really cool. [00:30:14] Speaker A: Now, my experience, because I was on the field for every. I was on. I was courtside, and I was on the football, like, American football field, you know, every. [00:30:25] Speaker A: Every game. I didn't get to travel with them. I thought that would have been really fun. I did not in the basketball arena. I really wanted to try to put the strobes up in the band, like up in the top of the arena and try that whole thing. Didn't have the chance to do that. So it kind of had a ceiling to it. It was like, okay, I now want to. I'm with the newspaper. I'd love to work with, let's say, the career guys that work for the athletics department and see what, like, the. The job entails. And I never really got access to that because for anyone that's been in. Well, I mean, if you're a photographer, but particularly in sports, and then we can talk about motorsports in a second. But anyone that gets paid in those arenas are very protective of their jobs. So no one's really going to kind of just see you and be like, oh, yeah, come like, what, you're 20 years old. I'd love to give you my job. Like, nah, this guy's like 60 something. He's. His body's destroyed. He's still out here on the sidelines doing what he loves. But he's telling me, don't do this. You know, stay away. And then no one could give you advice on how to break into it. I think my. My thought at the time was that there's like, you know, an A. Clear, like, oh, do this. Then I'll go to here and here. And maybe back in the day, that's how it worked. But, like, there's no structure to what we do anymore. I mean, it's kind of a free for all. People find you, offer you jobs. It's very bizarre. So it's become much more ad hoc. Do what you want to do, do it well, hope that people see what you're doing. And then from there, you know, see. See where you can take that. [00:32:12] Speaker A: And so, yeah, a lot of the people that were on the field with me were like, you don't want to. Trust me, you don't want to be doing this. And I was like, I do, but you keep saying I don't. [00:32:24] Speaker A: It's Pretty cool. [00:32:25] Speaker B: I think that's definitely a. [00:32:29] Speaker B: I don't know, maybe it's an experience thing. As you get older, you have dealt with the negatives or maybe going through a period of the negatives. I get the same thing when we. So I shot weddings for about a decade. That's what I did when I. Yeah, yeah, that's what I did when I. When I left my full time job. [00:32:51] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:51] Speaker B: Started a camera strap business and a wedding photography business in. In the same year while working full time, and then booked enough weddings so that I knew coming into that summer I could basically quit. Like our summer is opposite to yours. So I quit my full time job, I think in October after shooting like two or three weddings in a row. [00:33:13] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:33:14] Speaker B: That I had like editing to do. So that's when I, you know, gave notice and sort of left so that I was at a full season of weddings already lined up as. [00:33:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:33:24] Speaker B: But at that point, like, I was reaching out to people asking for advice, stuff like that. And while there was. There was one or two people that were really helpful and nice. Let me second shoot and things like that. [00:33:36] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:33:37] Speaker B: In general, the, the vibe was. [00:33:41] Speaker B: You know, photography is not a career anymore. Everyone's got a camera. [00:33:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:33:46] Speaker B: Thinks they're a professional photographer. You won't be able to make any money doing this. [00:33:49] Speaker A: Crazy. [00:33:50] Speaker B: Yeah, that was the advice from. From the people that I looked up to that had been wedding photographers for, you know, the decade prior to that. [00:34:00] Speaker A: And we're successful, which is like a brutal. I mean, especially if they're people that you look up to. Like a brutal kind of awakening coming from, you know. Yeah. I, I had similar experiences and I just was like, all right, well, maybe they're at the tail end of what they're doing, but like, I'm obsessed, so I'm gonna keep pushing in whatever way I can. And here I am. [00:34:24] Speaker B: I love it. I love it. You push through. And I think it's important just because everyone. People giving you advice could be at any stage in their career or whatever. And it's important to listen to what they say, but then sort of know that it doesn't necessarily apply to your situation or you can always just push ahead anyway if it's something you really want to do. And that's what I did. And we. Yeah, we. I mean, so we. We built a business and then it ended up being Jim, who also comes on this podcast sometimes and myself, and he still shoots weddings and he's like, this is still going fine. It's like It's. Yeah, I only stopped just because I couldn't do the. The weekend commitments anymore. [00:35:03] Speaker A: Yeah, that's understandable. [00:35:05] Speaker B: Starting to. To kill my soul. [00:35:10] Speaker B: Okay, so how did you get into motorsport then? [00:35:15] Speaker A: So motorsports 2020. Well, so coming out of college, I graduated 2018. I spent a year and a half, kind of. I went back to school, got. I went to a web development boot camp. So, like, they give you a certificate saying, hey, you can now go get a job in tech, whatever. I really like designing websites and so I did that for about a year and a half. [00:35:42] Speaker A: Wanted to pull my hair out and I was like, look, what I really want to be doing with my life is photography. So I'm going to take whatever I've made from, you know, this and put it all into that. And so I quit. Started my company in the fall of 2019. So September, ish, August. And yeah, I was like, I'm done. I'm done in the office. This is killing me. And then Covid hit like, right, right as I made that decision and like, there was nothing to do. [00:36:15] Speaker A: How. [00:36:15] Speaker B: How was it for you guys? Like, you're in Austin. I don't know if you heard, but. [00:36:21] Speaker A: Yeah, you guys had like proper lockdown. [00:36:25] Speaker B: We had. We had rolling. Yeah, like lockdowns in and out for over two years. [00:36:32] Speaker A: Yeah, that was crazy. [00:36:33] Speaker B: It was crazy. Like, yeah. [00:36:37] Speaker B: At the time we were part owners of a gym, which was a very heavily, heavily throttled industry. And I think that gym was shut down for a total of 9 months. Completely shut down. And then when it wasn't shut down, it was operating under like, you can have six people in. [00:36:57] Speaker A: That's giant. [00:36:59] Speaker B: Or whatever. So, yeah, we. Anyway, the question was, so what, what was it like for you guys? Like, how long. How long could you not do anything? And how long did you have to, like. I don't know, you couldn't travel or anything like that or. [00:37:11] Speaker A: Yeah, so we never. I mean, it depends on where you wanted to travel. So let's say like inner us. [00:37:19] Speaker B: You could. [00:37:21] Speaker A: You could hop on planes. No one would be on them. The airports were like ghost towns. I mean, it was just a very bizarre time. [00:37:30] Speaker A: Everywhere. But my memory of it was like. [00:37:35] Speaker A: At the time I lived in my apartment. My office was my apartment. I'd set up a desk to make videos. Every day was just nerding out about learning some new thing about filmmaking making no progress, not caring that I made no progress. Because the reality was no one was doing anything at that time. So whatever little progress I made was acceptable because Everyone was depressed and indoors. [00:38:02] Speaker A: So yeah, I mean we, we went through a, a series of like restaurants only allowed takeout. Then they allowed you to sit outside. Then they. And then it kind of. I'm not sure. I mean man, sometimes people broad follow our politics more than we do at some point, you know, then it became a whole politicized open it up, you know, whatever. So then Texas being a fairly red Austin is a very blue city within a very red state. So. [00:38:38] Speaker A: We still had lockdown rules. But I mean compared to other places like you're saying in Australia it was like a non event. It was still disruptive. People still didn't go to work. People didn't really know what to do with themselves. That was like the first year 2021. I think that's when I started the motorsports. So there's a rally school here in Austin. I was just looking for something to do. My dad and I invited my dad out there and we went to race on dirt. And I met the guys out there and was like, you know, it's my dream. I've always been obsessed with cars. And I was like, I was a little. I don't want to race with you guys, but I would love to photograph you guys racing. And so they said okay, you know, you can come out to the rally ranch or whatever and photograph us. And I met one of the mechanics. His name is Jordan Wallace. He was an instructor and he was building his own car at the time. And we became great friends. And he was racing out at Circuit of the Americas doing like a janky little series. He built his own like early 90s Acura things. Engine blew up on lap one. He still finished the race. He had like no budget to keep it going. Like this is impressive. So we, we go that route a little bit. Then through some discussions we found a sponsor for him to. [00:40:15] Speaker A: To then evolve his racing. He went from blowing up an engine on lap one at this tiny race series. [00:40:22] Speaker A: Doing a series here in a Porsche race car. So he got thrown straight into that. I followed him through that. We then he then started training with a program in England. [00:40:37] Speaker A: They. [00:40:39] Speaker A: So he, he improved quite a lot. [00:40:42] Speaker A: We then got involved in a series called DTM over in Germany. It's their most popular race series. [00:40:49] Speaker A: So he was in the June, the DTM mat. I don't know if I'm gonna remember this. I think it's called DTM Masters, maybe DTM Trophy. And they were the junior program to the major dtm. And so he got a seat in that series. I believe if I'm remembering correctly, did that for a year. Then we went. So that's just like all racing all over Germany. Then we went into GT4 Europe, which is every country in Europe. All of Western Europe, I should say. So you're just bebopping between those. And so I followed him through that whole thing, so. [00:41:30] Speaker B: So who's paying for that? As in, like, flights, all that kind of stuff? [00:41:34] Speaker A: His sponsor funded it. So for me to come shoot and for, you know, him to race and. Yeah, so I just got incredibly lucky and got to meet all these insane people. And it was. I mean, it was like a roller coaster. Then the reason I stopped was because I had a really difficult time. I had no success breaking into other teams. Kind of. It was. Everyone and their mother wanted to shoot motorsports and still does. And so in order to. It's a weird space because you're working with the structure of a race team. Let's say you've got the team owner, then you've got the mechanics, and then you have the drivers. Now the drivers are all paying the team as like, let's say a subcontractor or. Yeah. So they're paying for their ride with a team. So the team agrees, yes, you can join us, but you're always paying a fee to then race with that team. So. [00:42:44] Speaker A: The budget of the team is funded by the drivers, and it's all going towards mechanical. The mechanical side keeping the car running. All that marketing is irrelevant to them. They've already got their money for the season. They can get the car running. So you as a photographer, coming to them and saying, hey, pay me to make you look better. It's pretty tough sell. They're already running the car. Why do they need to. Like, they don't need to market per se. They're already out there doing what they want to do. It's not going to elevate them to something else. So then you're going towards the drivers. Now, the drivers at that level are younger than I was at the time. They're probably in there. Some of them are in their. [00:43:27] Speaker A: Early 20s, younger than that. Some of them could be 16. I mean, like, we're talking straight up children. So now I'm going to the children's parents telling them, hey, I can take cool pictures of your kid. And they're like, why do I need that? So it was just layers and layers of who do I need to find to actually do this? And it just became so exhausting at the end of the day that I was like, I, you know, I this has been really cool. Three years. I've seen more than I ever thought I would. But like, this is not for me because kind of it felt like a circus. I felt like I was part of the circus and it just wasn't. [00:44:04] Speaker B: My gig is the circus side of it. Kind of the like traveling, set up, pack down, show kind of thing. Like it's such a huge production, everyone and it's just like everything pops up and then, yeah, leave. [00:44:18] Speaker A: It's like we're here on a Thursday, we practice on a Friday, we qualify on a Saturday, race on Sunday. Get out of here. And the timing in between those events is like, because you're not the, you're not the like premier program. You're. You're a, you're a lead up program to the big dogs. So, okay, race at practice at 8am, qualify at 4pm like each race is 45 minutes. In between that, it's just like, what am I doing? Yeah, you're sitting in the. It's in the summer too. So you just get a. Every heat wave, I think I've experienced every heat wave in Europe over that whole summer is getting cooked alive, like waiting for the cars. It's, I mean, it's really. I applaud career motorsport photographers or anyone that spends that much time outside covering that kind of thing because it is brutal on your body. And I'm sure wedding photography, I've heard the same. It's just like. [00:45:18] Speaker B: Same kind of thing. [00:45:19] Speaker A: Yeah, a lot goes into it. So. [00:45:22] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's just, it's just sort of. Yeah, it's constant. And that's the thing. It's. I love. I think we're kind of alike in that sense where it's like doing that for a few years would be so much fun. Doing it for a career. I don't know if I would do it for a career because it's. You get to that point where there's sort of like. There's only so many different ways you can try and shoot different places and things like that. And this isn't to take away because that's what makes the guys that do it for a Career career special. [00:45:49] Speaker A: It's amazing. Yeah. [00:45:51] Speaker B: They can keep pushing, they can keep like reinventing the way that they shoot and things like that. Whereas I'm more of like the. Yeah, it's like, it's really fun learning the first 90 and then the last. It's like, all right, maybe I'll try something else now. But that's true. [00:46:10] Speaker B: So there's a question here. [00:46:11] Speaker A: From. [00:46:12] Speaker B: From LTK Photography. [00:46:15] Speaker B: Which we've kind of danced around the answer to, but basically saying, yeah, as someone starting to do motorsports with smaller grassroots drift events, what advice do you have for someone getting into larger events and races? [00:46:28] Speaker A: Great question. Man, drifting is sick. I. [00:46:33] Speaker A: I mean, that was one of the most fun things I've shot. I did. I had some friends out in Los Angeles, so we were doing circuit racing out in Europe, and then they were like, hey, come to Los Angeles and we'll do some drifting. Or they just had friends that they're just tracks in LA where people go drifting like this guy's mentioning. And. [00:46:58] Speaker A: So I had a lot of fun experiences with that. I think the atmosphere at drifting is incredible. I know Aussies are so into their cars. [00:47:09] Speaker A: To move up to the next level. I think it's really about distinguishing your work. And then at those drift events. [00:47:19] Speaker A: I don't like using the term networking, but meeting the drivers. If any of the drivers have any, like, passion projects of their own, I'm imagining in the drifting scene, a lot of these guys modify their cars and. [00:47:35] Speaker A: You know, if you kind of go on the journalistic side of things and follow their passion projects and kind of become friends with the people in that scene. Grassroots is tricky because maybe they just like to do it for fun on the weekend or whatever, but, I mean, just by continuing to love the sport, continuing to show up and being a presence in the community, it'll kind of spider out from there into other avenues and potential bigger jobs. The traditional way of, like, I think we touched on this for a moment, but, like, working for a newspaper and then, oh, the newspaper filled out this thing and they got me. The gig is not as prevalent at all anymore. I mean, I've seen people at events with phones. Like, I don't know how they got there either, but they were there. [00:48:30] Speaker B: Yeah, if their media, you know, like, if they've got a. They might have a big social channel that does. Yeah, it just does, like, for that race thing. And they want them there to. To put out, like, quick news reels and things like that. [00:48:42] Speaker A: It's crazy. I've seen people just make up websites and companies and claim that they're media and you can do it that way. I mean, more power to you. Like, it's. It's kind of the wild west. And so I would honestly say, though, like, my. My path was I met a group of guys and then a guy within that that was very passionate about what he did. And then that kind of just us working together led from One thing to another. So that'd be my recommendation. Um, I would much rather shoot drifting. And I, I was in a. Yeah, I'll just leave it at that. I would much rather shoot drifting in Australia than the States. [00:49:23] Speaker A: It can get sketched. [00:49:25] Speaker B: Yeah, that. I guess. I mean that is one thing. We. [00:49:30] Speaker B: On the whole we're probably slightly less sketch than the US in certain situations. [00:49:37] Speaker B: Seen some stuff. Paul makes a good point here. Saying this is fascinating stuff. Illustrates just how important it is to understand everyone's motivations and interests if you are to succeed in a particular field. I think that that is really important. You sort of highlighted that when you, when you're following through, asking people like whether. Whether you can help them with photography and they kind of. Yeah, I don't really care, you know, like. [00:49:59] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:50:00] Speaker B: And it's figuring out who, who can benefit from what you do and can they afford your services and that kind of thing. And I think my advice would be. [00:50:11] Speaker B: And Lucinda was in the chat before. Yeah, Lucinda. Lucinda is a live music photographer. Same kind of thing where it's like everyone wants to do this. Every, every man and wants to photograph Metallica at a sold out stadium. It's just, it's, you know, so the key is, I think like Matthew said, like, like go to these events but then be as useful as you can possibly be to the people that you want to work with. And that might be, that might be learning video so that you can say hey, do you want me to make a YouTube video about your, your new car that you've just finished or whatever. Like, you know, even though you mainly want to shoot stills at drift events, maybe meeting up with them on a Wednesday morning and making a video where they just walk through the stuff they did to their car that they can put on their YouTube channel. Yeah, like, wow, that's awesome. Do you want to come to a event and you know, like it be, be useful to the people that you identify that you want to work with in the future. [00:51:10] Speaker A: 100. Yeah and I'd also say for the motorsports stuff, the three people that inspired me the most and I would say are worth following if you don't already. Amy. Amy Shore is a British photographer that has done I think incredible work of like capturing the human element of motorsports. Larry Chen is like probably the biggest motorsports photographer around but he did several talks during the pandemic virtually that I watched and I found his work to be very inspirational and also just he's really separate. Both those photographers have really separated themselves from the crowd. And then Drew Gibson is another British photographer that he. I feel like he makes motorsports just look incredibly cinematic. I'm not sure what it is about his shots, but I think if you wanted someone to follow, I'd say those three people are really unique. [00:52:09] Speaker B: Yeah, that's perfect. We're putting him on the guest. [00:52:11] Speaker A: Listen. Yeah, they're sick. [00:52:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. We've had a few. You've had a few people on. I think I'm on your website at the moment and. [00:52:24] Speaker B: I think this. Who did we have on that shot this? Goodwood Revival. I reckon I see on there that you shot that. The good. [00:52:31] Speaker A: I did. [00:52:32] Speaker B: Revival 2020. [00:52:34] Speaker A: Insane. [00:52:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I. Maybe it was Andrew hall. Someone. Yeah, he's a Fujifilm shooter. Does motorcycle. [00:52:44] Speaker A: Yeah, sick. [00:52:46] Speaker B: He actually works with Fujifilm a fair bit. But yeah, he somebody anyway. But yeah, that's a crazy, crazy festival. [00:52:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:52:53] Speaker B: Looks insane. [00:52:54] Speaker A: Amazing voice. [00:52:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I bet. Okay, so. [00:53:02] Speaker B: All right, so motorsports for three years, was that all you were doing? Basically. Basically a full time thing. [00:53:09] Speaker A: It was. And then I'd book into each trip. Like because I knew I was flying over to Europe. I would on my own dime, kind of booking the trips with some neighboring nature related thing. So I go. Because we were kind of, let's say in France, Italy, Germany, I would. Spain was thrown in there. I would kind of be bop between the French coast, the Dolomites. [00:53:41] Speaker A: Just whenever I had the time, I'd just go out hiking or driving or wherever I could to find something related to what's always been my passion, which is landscape photography. Yeah. So it was always intermixed there in the background. [00:53:58] Speaker B: Okay, so. So landscapes has always been on the cards. It's always been something that you've. [00:54:04] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:54:05] Speaker B: In between everything else. [00:54:07] Speaker A: When did it always been. [00:54:08] Speaker B: When, when did it take a turn? Like what happened when you decided motorsports was, you know, that's enough of that. [00:54:17] Speaker A: Then I was like, well, yeah, it kind of like took me like taking a step back and being like, okay, so if I'm not gonna do that, then what are the routes? I see people going in this space and there's the education side is a big one. [00:54:36] Speaker A: Selling prints is the other one. That's the path I'm on right now. It's got its pros and cons. I mean, everything in the space has its pros and cons. But selling prints was my other idea. [00:54:50] Speaker A: YouTube and then just kind of. [00:54:56] Speaker A: Being a travel photographer is kind of limited now. I mean, I don't think you can. It's tricky, I'll say that. Like being a Full blown. I'd say this whole space is tricky just because it felt like if you started doing what we're doing in 2014, it'd be entirely different than starting in 2025 because there are so many people in this space doing similar things. And so the ability to distinguish yourself. [00:55:27] Speaker A: Has changed quite a bit. I mean, I still struggle with that, but I love what I do and I don't see myself ever stopping. I'm absolutely addicted. But it's a lot of like, try something. Okay, that thing didn't work. Okay, try another thing that didn't work and just grinding it out. So yeah, I decided let's keep traveling. I really wanted to visit Iceland again. I wanted to see the Arctic. [00:55:58] Speaker A: More specifically Norway's Fallbard. That kind of plays Lofton Islands. I'd never been there. And then I set up my truck to go camping. So I chased the fall leaves in Colorado that year for the first time and that was insane. And yeah, just kind of doing more budget friendly, esque things stateside, you know, chasing what I could around here. And then yeah, through the selling of prints, I get random commercial jobs here and there where people have a space that they need quite a few prints for and it'll kind of like make my year just by chance, which is fantastic. And then I can take that money and keep traveling and chasing landscapes or what's not transition into wildlife, but wildlife's a bit more of a. Wildlife's more cost intensive. Because you more or less always need a professional guide that knows where the animals are. I think even people at the top level. I mean, my friends are photographers and their guides, which is like the best of both worlds. But I mean they're working full time as guides and then they're photographers as well. Yeah. So it's. There are lots of ways. [00:57:17] Speaker B: Okay, I'm gonna, I want to ask you about the guides because I've noticed a common theme with, with a lot of your trips has been with subject matter experts, location experts, guides, and, and I don't know if I see that as often with other photographers, whether they're not as, not as. [00:57:36] Speaker B: Free flowing with the information about who they use or whether they go by themselves or whatever? I do want to ask you about that, but first, so. [00:57:45] Speaker B: How much of, of your career progression of a, as a photographer has been around like trying to figure out how to make this thing work as a job, as a business, as a full time living? [00:57:57] Speaker A: That's like. Yeah, that's an everyday thing. [00:58:01] Speaker B: It's an everyday thing. So when you say that you saying as in it weighs on you every day in terms of like, how, how am I going to make this thing work for the long term? [00:58:10] Speaker A: Yeah, it's, it's. I mean it's requires like just blind persistence and you'll get, I mean there's just, you'll get a lot of feedback from the people around you about what you're doing, whether it's worth it. You know, you'll get a lot of commentary surrounding it. My recommendation for most people is like, keep whatever job you have up until, like you said, for your wedding photography. You booked enough gigs that you were then like, okay, I can now full on do this and leave the other thing behind. Like, that's the most natural transition people make and that's what I'd recommend for pretty much everyone. I just by chance had the resources to just be like, okay, I'm just gonna do all this right now and figure it out as I go. [00:59:00] Speaker B: Which, yeah, if you've built up a bit of a buffer, if you're, yeah. If you got a safety net, you're like, all right, I've got six months of Runway or whatever, whatever, yeah, yeah, I can give this a full swing. [00:59:09] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So. But yeah, no, I mean it's, it's such a. I mean, I'm sure you could speak to this. It's such an ever evolving space. I mean, for the first year this year, or for the first time this year, you know, I made calendars for people to buy around the holidays and that was like incredibly successful. That's not something I'd done before. [00:59:31] Speaker B: Okay, so it went well? [00:59:33] Speaker A: Yeah, it went great. I was at a show here in Austin. [00:59:38] Speaker A: And met a lot of great people and sold some prints, sold some calendars, like all these things. It's about like putting yourself out there. If there are local. Like I've, I've been told by my friend in Australia that the like kind of market culture for as like on the print side, you guys have a lot more just markets around Melbourne and stuff. [01:00:01] Speaker B: Yeah, we do. Even in my town, we've got a smaller, like a hundred thousand people in our town and this. Yeah, there's usually a market or two each week. Yeah, I don't know how successful print selling would be, but yeah, at least. [01:00:15] Speaker A: Just getting your name, like visibility is more important than anything at any stage. I mean, so I think that's a big part of it. But you know, the like Instagram, I've talked to guys that, you know, the reason they exploded was because they Worked with, let's say, a big name back in 2012, 2014, and Instagram used to show people who your friends started following. And so if you shot with a big name photographer and they started following you, that then told the million people that followed them about you. That's no longer a thing. So like it's crazy that that used to be a thing and how under you, like how little I utilize that kind of thing. But I wasn't, I was in high school at the time. I mean, how could I. So it's just little things like that. You know, the videos, like I've had reels. That's kind of like. [01:01:15] Speaker A: I think Instagram being a primary driver of marketing for our space has forced people into the video world. And so reels people are just addicted to short form, speedy things. And so like my volcano video that Justin pulled up and my subsequent volcano video from this last year, they got me a lot of eyeballs. And so it was, I'm just like, even if I don't do long form video content, if I see something crazy going on, you better believe I'm going to have a camera that can take a video of that thing just in case, you know, it becomes useful down the line. And so it's, it's such a crazy, it's like guerrilla warfare for creatives to try and. [01:02:04] Speaker B: Okay, so to try and make a living, you feel like you just constantly just gotta keep, just keep scrapping, keep fighting, finding the next thing. [01:02:11] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:02:12] Speaker B: So, okay, what about prints? [01:02:16] Speaker B: Where are you selling prints? Are they, are they being sold online or is it in person at things like markets and things like that? Do you, do you ever do like exhibitions or gallery spaces, things like that? [01:02:30] Speaker A: This coming year I'd like to do more exhibition gallery related things. It's going to require quite a bit of outreach to those spaces. But I mean, I think it'd be a lot of fun. This last show I did here in Austin was a citywide kind of art festival. And I found a space to present with a couple other artists doing their own creative thing. And. [01:02:53] Speaker A: That was really great experience I've done. And at least stateside, this is a very thing, like difficult thing to do. I'd never done it before, so I thought I'd give it a try. I did like three to four art fairs in the summer in Colorado where I got a trailer, tied it to my car, printed a bunch of stuff, went and did the circuit. And the difficulty with that is. [01:03:20] Speaker A: And people are just passing by, not necessarily looking to buy things and so at the time I only had giant prints like this behind me. So I'm asking like a random stranger on the street to spend like upwards of $2,000 or more on a print. And like, that's a pretty big ask for someone that just is out with their family wandering around. [01:03:44] Speaker A: So I've since learned that smaller form things that people can take home. It's probably better route on the market side of things. But I, I've had luck through family. [01:03:58] Speaker A: And then like one person removed from family really buying quite a lot of my work. And then, you know, once you have enough stuff in their spaces, then their friends come over, see their work, see my stuff get connected, and it just kind of like snowballs a little bit. From there. [01:04:19] Speaker A: It'S. [01:04:22] Speaker A: I mean, I could go down the rabbit hole of like landscapes versus wildlife. And why do people. [01:04:28] Speaker B: I was actually about to ask that and I was, I was wondering whether. [01:04:33] Speaker B: You guys have so many beautiful national parks and iconic wildlife and. Yeah, this is probably, this is one of those things where you can't see what's in your own backyard. Yeah. Because I, you know, I did it. I was about to say that I did three months. I did three months in the US and your national parks truly are something else. [01:04:52] Speaker A: That's insane. [01:04:53] Speaker B: The variety is, is insane. And then yeah, obviously the wildlife is just crazy. And I wondered whether maybe. [01:05:03] Speaker B: Putting a piece of that in your home is something people are willing to invest in. Whether they're connected to the landscape, a particular animal. Yeah. That they identify with. Do you see more of one or the other people gravitate towards? [01:05:18] Speaker A: In my experience, people connect more with animals than frozen wasteland. And a lot of my. [01:05:28] Speaker A: A lot of my portfolio is frozen wasteland. And a lot of people that I know have like ranches in Texas and they're like, do you have, you know, Texan things? And like he said, you don't even know what's in your own backyard. My answer is no, I don't. I've got, I've got cold places and like some Europe, like European things and then I like. And drawn to, let's say Utah. Like deserts, extreme desert environments. All my like landscape related things are extreme environments. Either super dry and hot, super cold and like middle of nowhere, arctic subarctic, all this kind of thing. And so the person that's sipping on whiskey on their ranch with their horses and their cattle don't want what's behind me over their fireplace. They want like, yeah, you know, longhorns or something. And so. [01:06:27] Speaker A: I've everyone Keeps telling me, like, we have a national park in Texas called Big Bend National Park. Everyone keeps telling me to go out there. I've still never been. [01:06:38] Speaker A: But then other people are like, that's like, you know, that's Utah, but like baby Utah. So why would you shoot that? And I'm like, well, because I have all these clients in Texas that keep begging for me to have Texas related things. And so I'm kind of. I'm considering going out of my way to spend some time photographing and making a portfolio of Texas stuff because that's where I live. I mean, it would only make sense. [01:07:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean, who knows? Maybe you'll fall in love with somewhere closer to home and. [01:07:09] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:07:10] Speaker B: You know, be a regular body of work that you add to. [01:07:13] Speaker A: For sure. [01:07:14] Speaker B: It's. Yeah. I don't know. [01:07:16] Speaker A: It's. It is. It's always tough animals always, though, like, start a conversation, you know. [01:07:22] Speaker B: Yes. [01:07:24] Speaker A: And that's. I've found as me. And especially the bears. [01:07:30] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:07:30] Speaker A: Like you said. How close are you to that thing? How'd you not die? I mean, that's always questions one and two. [01:07:36] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's. Well, this is what's interesting about Australia. Everyone talks about Australia like, oh, everything can kill you. [01:07:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:07:45] Speaker B: And it's like, not really like the spiders. The chance of dying from one of the spider bites is slim. Even the snake bite's very, very dangerous. Chance of dying is very, very slim. Crocodiles can definitely eat you, but not if you're not in the top end of Australia and not if you're far enough away from water. What's crazy about the US Is bears, obviously, and mountain lions. And it's like you hear about people getting snatched just on like a random. Like if I go mountain biking. [01:08:17] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:08:19] Speaker B: All I have to worry about is, is a snake. And even then, like, they're on the ground. I'm on the bike. [01:08:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:08:25] Speaker B: And kind of, you know, like, it's. They're not gonna. They don't chase me. I haven't yet, you know, but going mountain biking and worrying about bears and mountain lions. [01:08:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:08:34] Speaker B: Terrifying. [01:08:35] Speaker A: Oh, it's crazy. Yeah. You never go, like. Because, I mean, the East Coast, I think, has less wildlife, but I mean, we're talking like central US Rockies, that kind of thing where a lot of people go hiking and whatnot. Yeah. I mean, even if you go up to the Northwest, Washington state, Oregon. Yeah. Bears, moose. [01:08:59] Speaker A: Moose are more dangerous than bears. Like, they're much more unpredictable. Bears, though, like in a wooded area and you're not expecting it. Sketchy for sure. Bear with its baby. Mega sketch. Don't hang around. [01:09:18] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. It's weird. I mean, because if you go to shoot landscapes in northern Italy, Switzerland, there's. There are no animals. They're cows. Like someone's goat. I mean like that's a non issue. [01:09:34] Speaker A: So. Yeah, quite different. [01:09:36] Speaker B: I just kind of quickly check in with the chat. Felicity Johnson, local to us here in Vendigo, does a lot of markets and says, I agree, smaller items at market sell better and cool. Christmas markets are always the best. Yeah, she does, she does. Well, she puts the work in lots of like. Yes. Sort of smaller prints that you could just take in. Yeah. [01:09:58] Speaker B: Paul Henderson says magpies are the silent Australian killer. I don't know if you heard about magpies while you were over here, Matthew, but they, they swoop at a certain time of the year and they get quite aggressive. You'll find some. I'll send you some funny videos later. [01:10:12] Speaker A: Of people on their bikes. [01:10:13] Speaker B: It's great. You'll see, you'll see people with like eyes painted on the back of their helmets and like, like all these spikes coming off their helmets while they're riding to work. They're scared of the birds. [01:10:25] Speaker B: What else we got here? Drunk wedding photographer from California says, moshi moshi. Good to see you. Hope you're doing well. Hope you're not too drunk, depending on if you're shooting or not. And David Mascara who is from San Francisco, says a Texan who sounds like he's from California. I'll be doing the train ride from the Bay Area to San Anton this June, then down to Kingsville to visit family. Family documenting with film. [01:10:50] Speaker A: That's sick. [01:10:51] Speaker B: He. He's got a crazy collection of Nick on. We do, we do a second show every week on, on Monday evenings our time and people send in photos and stuff like that and we just go through other people's photos and just check it and. And David sends in these like street portraits and stuff from around San Francisco. [01:11:09] Speaker A: That's amazing. I would never take a train. [01:11:14] Speaker B: Why not? [01:11:16] Speaker A: A train in San Francisco in particular? I don't know. I. That sounds insane for street photography. It's got to be sick. [01:11:24] Speaker B: But his, his street portraits are. Yeah. So cool. [01:11:29] Speaker A: Really. [01:11:29] Speaker B: Very, very cool. [01:11:30] Speaker A: That is. [01:11:31] Speaker B: And yeah. [01:11:31] Speaker A: Been a struggle for me. Street photography is not my, not my. I'm. I'm too afraid of people. [01:11:39] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:11:40] Speaker B: It's a, it's a whole different thing. Yeah, it's a whole different thing. And then what do you guys have? Is It. Sixth street in Austin. [01:11:48] Speaker A: Yes. That is a party street. [01:11:50] Speaker B: Yeah. I don't know how street photography. I went there. I went there. It was okay. It was. [01:11:58] Speaker B: It was accurately described from what I've heard on the Internet, though, when I. When we went there, we were like, yep, We. We'll walk into town. Because we were. I'm trying to think of what directions things are in Austin. Yeah, we. We were. [01:12:15] Speaker B: I don't know. If you walk along 6th street, we're at an Airbnb. If you just, like, Keep walking along 6th street, it goes into a. More of a. [01:12:23] Speaker A: Residential. Yeah. Oh, no. [01:12:27] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:12:27] Speaker A: If you go east, like, it's developed more recently, so. I mean, past the. [01:12:33] Speaker B: Past the Whole Foods, like, if you just keep walking past. [01:12:36] Speaker A: That's, like, far west. Yeah. So that's, like, super chill. If you go east, it can get, like, shadier. But we didn't. [01:12:43] Speaker B: We didn't go east at all. We went. Yeah, sort of. We walked in from. From our Airbnb, which was in that west bit, and walked in. [01:12:50] Speaker A: It was totally fine. [01:12:51] Speaker B: But then we're like, we'll get it. We'll get a Uber home, I think. [01:12:54] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:12:54] Speaker B: Because it was like, I don't know, 11 or whatever. [01:12:57] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [01:12:58] Speaker B: It's a bit. [01:12:59] Speaker A: It's a bit like a good adventure. I mean, it's gotten. It's evolved quite a lot. You can do a lot of things around town, though. [01:13:05] Speaker B: We had a great time. The music in Austin is so good. Yeah, Anywhere. Anywhere with live music. We went straight in, and it was. It was. Each time I was like, this is the best band I've ever seen. [01:13:18] Speaker A: It's really fun. It's amazing in that way, for sure. [01:13:23] Speaker B: Crazy. [01:13:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:13:27] Speaker A: You can do anything you want here. Yeah. [01:13:29] Speaker B: Yeah, you can. I think in Texas, you can own a tiger. Pretty sure. I don't know if that's a rumor or not. [01:13:35] Speaker A: I wouldn't be surprised, honestly. I don't know anyone with a tiger, but if you have a ranch, I don't see what's stopping you from importing whatever animal you want to that ranch. [01:13:47] Speaker B: I. I had. I heard a rumor that it has, like, Texas private zoos. [01:13:51] Speaker A: When I started doing the filmmaking, I wanted to practice with some animals, just cows. And so I found a place an hour and a half, two hours away from me that was like an exotic wildlife ranch. And this will be great for the Aussies. But I show up, the guy leading me around is ex. An ex Marine, and they're like, okay, you've got to stay in your Room because we're. You know, when I talk to them on the phone, they're like, yeah, come out here. But we've got a sniper challenge this weekend that we'll be setting up for. I'm like, all right, sounds good. [01:14:28] Speaker B: Okay. [01:14:29] Speaker A: I come out there. He's like, yeah, just don't. You can drive around and look for animals, but don't go off road because we've got guys with sniper rifles setting up targets for this upcoming weekend. And I was like, all right, cool. And they had, like, a pen, a pretty big space, but they had camels, giraffes, zebras, deer, and. [01:14:58] Speaker A: No elephants. Just a random smattering of African wildlife with Texan wildlife. And I flew my drone over these animals. Oh, they had wildebeest. I don't know how or why. And since they're all grazing in one field together, you know, you're like doing an orbiting shot around a giraffe and then there's a camel behind it. And the guy's like, yeah, doesn't it. It like feels like Africa out here. I'm like, dude, this does not feel like these animals make no sense. And the giraffes home is in the background. [01:15:33] Speaker A: And so it was just such a bizarre. Everyone. So they told me like, 30, 40 ex military and current military were coming out to this ranch not to hunt wildlife, but to do drills. And they all have their own 50 cows that they own that they're bringing to then do like, squads of two, like, hotwire a Humvee, take the Humvee to this point, you know, whack your way through the bush, find this target, shoot the target, do this for two days. They all compete against each other. I was like, that has got to be the most American thing I've ever heard in my life. [01:16:14] Speaker B: I mean, it actually sounds pretty fun. I don't know about shooting a.50 cal. My arm would probably for. But just explode. But if you. If we swap the 50 cals out for just like, big, long lens photography. But we. We get to. We. We still get to hotwire the. The humvees and just get out there and. I mean, I would do that. [01:16:35] Speaker A: I mean. [01:16:38] Speaker B: Okay, where were we? Let's talk about Australia, because you were here. [01:16:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:16:41] Speaker B: And Bruce Moyle says you need to photograph drop bears and hoopsnakes. What? Bruce, what's a hoop snake? I don't even know what that is. [01:16:50] Speaker A: Drop bears. You have to remind me what that is. [01:16:53] Speaker B: It's a. It's like a. It's something parents tell their kids. It's like. Because we have. We have koalas. Did you see koala? [01:17:01] Speaker A: Well, yeah, yeah. [01:17:03] Speaker B: They just chill and eat leaves up in the trees. They're amazing. But drop bears are kind of like this. Let's see what the Internet tells me what a drop bear is. [01:17:12] Speaker A: They're like, mythical. [01:17:14] Speaker B: Mythical. [01:17:15] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:17:16] Speaker B: It's like an old. [01:17:19] Speaker B: Myth that parents tell their kids when you're camping, they're like, watch out for. For drop bears. So they're. They're supposed to be like a koala with teeth. [01:17:30] Speaker A: Okay. [01:17:31] Speaker B: An angry koala with teeth that drops out of the tree and lands on you, of course. [01:17:37] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:17:37] Speaker B: At night. So. Yeah. So you. You came over when, what, two or three months ago? Was it it? [01:17:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somewhere. What is it, November? I think September. Yeah. [01:17:53] Speaker B: How did that come about, that trip? [01:17:56] Speaker A: So in general, the way I've. Because you'd mentioned this briefly, that I'm always with, like, experts of some particular thing, so I like to. [01:18:07] Speaker A: Go on trips with other professional photographers. I do things on my own as well, but more often than not, I find the best use of my time if I'm gonna go after particular subject matter. Usually there's someone out there right now that's an expert in that thing, runs a trip surrounding that thing, and if I pay them, they'll take me to crazy thing. And, like, you know, it kind of cuts out the scouting and whatnot. Now it's. [01:18:40] Speaker A: I used to do it more, I do it less, but now that I've gotten into wildlife, I do it more again, because wildlife, you need a guide. And so it's either, let's say, this last trip in Australia. Well, your money compared to us money is like, not worth very much. So when I saw a photographer in Australia running a trip, I was like, sick. How much does it cost? I was like, oh, my God, that's like. Like a bargain. So other than the plane flight to get there, that was not a bargain, but it's. She specializes and her name's Kate Newman and she specializes in. [01:19:18] Speaker A: Queensland and Kenya and she does wildlife portraits. I saw her on Sony Alpha's channels and followed her for a little bit and then just saw that she had a trip opening when I was in Iceland, and I was like, this is crazy. I reached out to her, signed up for the trip. I showed up two, three days late on the trip because it. Just because I came from Toronto to Austin to Sydney to Queensland. It was probably the longest trip of my life. And anyways, it was insane. It was so cool. I saw so Many incredible things. You know, she's connected with a wildlife guide up in Queensland that's, you know, incredibly talented. She's incredibly talented photographer. I'm maybe at the beginning stages of wildlife photography. Although I've been doing it a lot this year and had great success, I haven't been doing it, you know, for many, many years like other people have. [01:20:20] Speaker A: That being said, another thing I was going to mention is in my dabbling in all these different kinds of photography, I think my approach to cars, wildlife, all this stuff, because landscape photography's been my baseline. I think my eye is more tuned in to avoiding distractions and what I photograph. I'm kind of bothered by how clinical my work is, but people really enjoy it. But, like, I really focus on minimizing distractions in my photography. Really drawing your eyes straight into what I want you to focus on. And that came through all my training in my younger years of like sitting in image critiques. That's another good. Like, if you guys can find any websites that have, like photo critiques or educational resources, I love that stuff because the most I ever grew was someone coming along and being like, that photo could be better for X, Y and Z. Reason that elevates it so much further than, I mean, you could watch YouTube videos all day and they're very helpful, don't get me wrong. But it's not until you put your own work out there and are willing to sit there and let someone at a level higher than you critique what you're doing, that's when you really are like pushed to the next level of your photography. And yeah, plug, quick plug. [01:21:48] Speaker B: Then number one, if you want to just have fun and not get a proper critique, send your images into us on our, on our Monday night show and we'll just chat about them and have fun. But if you want proper image critiques. Photokaizen.com that sounds photo kaizen. [01:22:07] Speaker B: Co. [01:22:10] Speaker B: Come on co photokaizen co. Matt Palmer, Alpine Light Gallery in Bright. He's a wonderful landscape photographer, has his own gallery with his partner, wife, Mika Boynton. But he's built this website, photokaizen Co. And it's like, it's essentially, you can pay to submit a photo for critique. So it's like paying to submit a photo to like a judged competition. But there's no competition and that money goes into Matt spending his time doing a. Because he is an accredited judge, lots of history. He's won a lot of awards, but also judged a lot of awards. He will give you a proper critique on that image yeah, with. No. No, there's no like, oh, did I win or not? Or how do I rank people? Takes all of that out of it. It's purely just about getting better. So if you've got an image that you're thinking or a few images you think of submitting to competitions and you want to, you know, check. Check what? What he thinks. The edit. Anything. [01:23:09] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:23:09] Speaker B: Photokaizen. Co. [01:23:12] Speaker A: Very cool. The two I use. [01:23:15] Speaker A: There'S one that's more British, it's 617 Club. And then another one. Yeah. Thomas Heaton started it. He's a big landscape photographer. And then Nature Photographers Network is another one that's more wildlife focused. That's really well done as well. [01:23:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:23:34] Speaker A: But, yeah, so, yeah, Australia. And so, sorry, I lost track. Yeah. [01:23:43] Speaker B: Critiques. [01:23:45] Speaker A: I was focusing on going with people that are specialists in their field or whatever it is. So, you know, I think it's also a great way to network with other professionals because if they're running a workshop, they've made it in a certain sense. Right. So I love to just join them on their trip, pick their brains about what's worked for them, what hasn't. And it's also helped me grow a large network of people that are passionate about the same thing as I am almost all over the world at this point. And so I'd say the other thing that I was afraid of for a long time, which I've shifted quite a bit in a Instagram for creatives, actually direct messaging people whose work that you're a fan of, people do answer and they do actually give great advice and they are really appreciative. I mean, it depends on, like, what level of famous we're talking about. But in general, when I reach out to photographers, they are incredibly kind. Will actually have conversations with me on Instagram and, like, I learn a lot from them. And so to whoever asked about the drifting before, I mean, I would recommend if you have a, you know, photographer that inspires you. I mean, they are willing to talk. I mean, at the end of the day, we're all just totally normal people and hanging out, nerding out about cameras and whatever genre of photography we enjoy. And so we love discussing whatever it is that we're into. And it's worth reaching out to people if you really admire their work. [01:25:23] Speaker B: Yeah, totally agree. People are. I mean, even. We've even found it with this podcast. It's crazy. Like, the people willing to. Yeah. Not just reply to the emails, but then like, yeah, yeah, I'll come on a podcast. Yeah, I wasn't do that, like, give up my time and do all that sort of stuff. People are. Yeah. Like you say, everyone's just people. We're all just. [01:25:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:25:42] Speaker B: Just out here doing our thing. Even the, even the people with huge. Oh my gosh. Benjamin Hardman's got a million followers. [01:25:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:25:52] Speaker B: That's crazy. How did he do that? [01:25:57] Speaker B: I was just bringing up some of the people that you've mentioned. [01:26:01] Speaker B: Yeah, like. And far, Far North Queensland. Far North Queensland Nature Tours, which is FNQ under Nature Tours. [01:26:11] Speaker B: But yeah, I didn't, I didn't. Benjamin. I had to do a double take on that one. [01:26:14] Speaker A: That's great. Yeah, it's crazy. [01:26:16] Speaker B: Okay, so you would say that, that like a hack that you have found is not a hack necessarily because it costs money to do these trips and that kind of stuff and work with people, but find someone that you want to learn from that can also deliver an experience and maybe even fast track you to that goal, whatever. Or that experience. [01:26:35] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a, it's a weird way of networking if you have the resources for it. I mean, you're kind of just directly, you're, you're supporting that photographer, which I always think is great. And then you're learning from them. And then also let's say you have a particular goal set in mind. Let's say I want to go, for instance, the Australian Wildlife. I don't know anything. I mean, when I saw that trip, I was like, where even is Queensland? It showed me Australia. I was like, all right, cool. Looks like I'm going to Australia, you know. [01:27:06] Speaker A: But I know then that I'll sell enough prints to make up for the cost of that trip. So to me it makes sense. Like, I'll go network, meet these people, they'll take me to these places, see this incredible stuff. We, you know, become friends, maybe not whatever, but you see all this amazing stuff. You meet all these incredible people. Everyone that signs up for a workshop and is spending that money on it, I guarantee, is as passionate about that subject matter as you are. And so it's just a great way to meet, make friends, meet like minded individuals. I mean, I think it is the coolest thing that has evolved over the years because when I started out as like a very structured. Here's a school that school runs these programs. Cool, you can do it. But now, I mean, pretty much any photographer that you see on the Internet has some form of educational materials or runs their own workshops about what they care about or they do. Like, we've got a Street photography thing here in Austin that does photo walks. It's grown to like, every time I go to a meet, we have over 150 people there. I mean, it's almost too many people to handle. Yeah, it's crazy. [01:28:19] Speaker B: How do you even navigate through a street? Like, what? [01:28:22] Speaker A: It's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. They're like, meet at this place and it's just like an amoeba, you know, like just so many people. Like, let's go around in a circle and introduce ourselves. I'm like, this is gonna take an hour. [01:28:36] Speaker B: You know what, it's actually going to spawn new groups. Outside of this big group. They'll be like a camera thief meetup and they'll meet up right near the amoeba and just start snatching all the good stuff. [01:28:52] Speaker B: David Mascara says this Texan must not be married. Yeah, I mean, that is probably a good point to. Going on all these trips costs a lot of money, takes a lot of time. Not everyone can, can make that happen. [01:29:07] Speaker B: A quick comment from Bruce. He says some people also feel less competition talking to someone potentially on the other side of the world. So it takes that out of the mix, which is a good point. Like it's, you know, it might sometimes can be better. Like if you're looking to do something, you know, maybe don't necessarily reach. Like, I think building, building relationships with people in your local area is a great idea for sure. If you're looking for maybe business advice, that kind of thing. Yeah, it might be better to reach out to someone that is nowhere near in your world. Yeah, so. So they're not feeling like, oh, if I tell this person my secrets, they might steal my part of my business or whatever, or my clients. [01:29:48] Speaker A: So yeah, and I'd say also, I mean, I've had experiences, so let's say in motorsports, I thought I mentioned Larry Chen and Drew Gibson. I met both of them in person. Both of them took the time in the middle of their job to step aside and have a conversation with me. And I thought that was the coolest thing on earth. Now I've met other people that at the time I thought were amazing. When I met them in person, they weren't so helpful. I don't deal with those guys anymore. Like they're not worth me putting my energy into promoting their work or whatever it is. Because if they can't give the time of day to a casual photographer and up and coming photographer to help educate them or you know, just be friendly and say hi, you know, we're all on this kind of ladder, trying to make it to whatever our vision of success is. And so if we're not all lifting each other up, I'm not sure, like, why are they doing it? It's kind of my thing, you know, I would. Yeah, I just. I think it's all about. It's a very communal activity, career, whatever you want to call it. And I think the more we all help each other out, the better for it, so. [01:31:03] Speaker B: For sure. Yeah, for sure. We're all. Even though. Yeah, we're all in the one team. Even though it can be kind of isolating sometimes because it's often just your business is often just you if you're a photographer. Yeah, most. Most photographers aren't part of a team or part of a larger business. [01:31:18] Speaker A: So true. [01:31:19] Speaker B: So, yeah, it's. Why wouldn't we all hang out and work together? Help each other keep doing this crazy thing? Yeah, okay. There's so much stuff I still want to talk about. We're an hour and a half in. I want to find out what I want to do at some point. We're going to look at your images. I don't know if we should do that first or. I really want to find out. [01:31:42] Speaker B: Let's start it off like this. Let's start it off like this. [01:31:47] Speaker B: Back here, Philip Johnson said, good collection of cameras behind. [01:31:51] Speaker A: I laid these out just for this. I was like, I can't have a pile of filth. [01:31:58] Speaker B: That's what this is. This is a pile of filth behind me. [01:32:01] Speaker A: It's just. [01:32:02] Speaker B: Yeah, it's just stuff. Let's talk cameras very quickly. I see. Is that a large format film camera? [01:32:08] Speaker A: It's never taken a single photo, but that is what that is. [01:32:11] Speaker B: It's never taken a photo. What is it? What is that thing? [01:32:14] Speaker A: Eight by ten? I mean, if. If your idea of fun is carrying furniture around to take photos, then that's. That's the camera for you. [01:32:25] Speaker B: And if your idea of fun is hearing about someone talk about carrying furniture around. Our guest next week is actually Nick Carver. And that. And that's. Yeah, yeah, he's on. He's on Thursday next week. And that is 100%. His jam is carrying furniture around to old, old strange buildings and deserts and things like that. [01:32:47] Speaker A: You know, Nick, I have. He got me really into 6x17 photography. And now that he's started a whole series of videos about why his 6x17 camera isn't as good as it could be. I stopped shooting with it because I'm so OCD that I'm like all the, all the home repair stuff he's done for his. I'm like, absolutely not. [01:33:10] Speaker B: You're not gonna do all that. [01:33:11] Speaker A: I got the pencils. I followed step by step, everything he's been going. I emailed him, I was like, please tell me he found the answer. [01:33:20] Speaker A: That's cool that it's on here. [01:33:21] Speaker B: I love that. Yeah, yeah. I'm super excited about it. It's. It's gonna be a fun. I've been doing, doing some more research. It's going to be. It's going to be a fun time. I've got so many questions. I'm actually, I've never shot large format or 6 by 17 or anything. And I've. I'm like, it's. I'm worried it's. I'm going to end up, um. [01:33:38] Speaker A: It's crazy. It's okay. So I just briefly say like the. My reason for getting into 4 by 5 of course is like, maybe not so obvious, but 4 by 5 to me is like clinical precision of photographing landscapes. Right? So everything's perfectly vertical, everything's perfectly flat. Now I have a field camera made by Shenhao, which is this Chinese company, but they make fantastic field cameras. And it's got two bubble levels. It's got a vertical and a horizontal so that, you know, when you set it up okay, you're perfectly. Everything's right. Now I also have an ARCA Swiss cube head that's got its own bubble levels made in Switzerland. Now I know that thing is laser accurate. When I level that, my 4x5 camera says it's not level. I still don't know why. I don't know if it's because the bubble levels on the view camera aren't level or it blows my mind. But I've only taken 10 photos with my 4x5 camera because I cannot handle the idea that I went through all this trouble loading seat film, getting the dark cloth, getting large format lenses to not get the benefit of clinically precise landscape photos at the end of the day. Because I don't know which bubble to trust on whether something is straight or not. It drives me insane. [01:35:00] Speaker B: I mean, could, couldn't you just test one? One where you trust the tripod, one where you trust the camera and just see well. [01:35:07] Speaker A: So like I was just in Utah doing the canyons and I even brought a Fuji like tilt shift lenses out. But I'm convinced the horizon line in the canyons is just naturally not straight. So in scenarios like that, I'm like, I don't know what to do with myself. Do I tilt it to what I think is straight? But what if the horizon's not actually straight? Oh, then we're screwed if I'm not on the ocean. [01:35:32] Speaker A: It's chaos. [01:35:34] Speaker B: It is chaos. [01:35:36] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. Yeah. What do you shoot with? [01:35:40] Speaker B: Well, I want to find out more about what you should be with. But firstly Canon. I'm using Canon gear. I just got the R6 Mark III, but I've got R5 Mark II and an R3 as well. I do. I shoot some sports. Still a lot of mountain biking. Hybrid, photo, video. So often. One backpack, lightweight because we're riding for a day. Having to swap between photo and video in the moment kind of thing. [01:36:08] Speaker A: Nice. [01:36:09] Speaker B: That kit's kind of optimized around that. [01:36:13] Speaker B: But mountain biking is so cool. It is really cool. It's fun. [01:36:19] Speaker B: Fun work to do. It's actually paid work. Not. Not highly paid work, but paid work, which is great because like shooting sports isn't an easy thing to. To get paid work in. No, it's brutal and it's very, it's very chill. It's very fun. And I got into that purely just through reaching out to someone offering to help. Found out the editor for a website was in my town and I was like, I'll come shoot if you. [01:36:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:36:47] Speaker B: About mountain bikes and just evolve from that. Yeah. [01:36:50] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:36:52] Speaker B: So is it true I read somewhere that you have two kits, two different digital kits, not including your film stuff. Is that true? [01:37:00] Speaker A: Yeah, if we want to get in the nuts and bolts of it. I've got four digital kits. Two of them don't really get touched. It's always. It's always evolving. So my primary gear is Sony and Fuji. When I decided to do large scale prints, Fuji was like. I mean the medium format systems out of this world. People say megapixels don't matter, but when you get to 102, this is pretty big difference. [01:37:31] Speaker A: So then they came out with which I actually have right in front of me, just by chance, this lens, which is their 428 equivalent. Now what I'll tell you, which I didn't believe at the time, but it'll give you like the sickest photos on earth. But the aperture does matter. Like this is a 5, 6. When the sun starts going down and there's an animal in front of me, this thing is useless. So it may look like a 402.8, but that 5.6 still matters and it still does not let in the light that A2A does. [01:38:06] Speaker B: Yeah. So, so essentially you're. You're having to shoot at, like, way higher isos. Like, way higher ISO. So. So if you were shooting at base on a Sony, you might be shooting at 400 or something on the Fuji, which is. [01:38:18] Speaker A: Fine. [01:38:19] Speaker B: Fine. But then if you're shooting it, say, 8. 800 on the Sony. Yeah. Or. Or. Or 1600 on the Sony, all of a sudden you're like, I don't really like this. [01:38:29] Speaker A: So I've been on expeditions, like in Canada, where I brought. I had this around my neck. And then. [01:38:38] Speaker A: Also all my stuff was really around me. This is my 428 from Sony, and this is what I had around my neck. And so when the sun was going down, I would switch from one camera to the next because I didn't know. Like, I didn't want the light to just be the reason my photos were jank. [01:38:58] Speaker B: Okay, so surely you're not taking both the Sony and the Fuji on every. What? [01:39:09] Speaker A: Yeah, both those lenses, at least. [01:39:13] Speaker B: Really? [01:39:14] Speaker A: Yeah. And then it's gotten even worse because the video side, like, I was like, okay, if I want to work in the documentary space, like, what's the baseline acceptable, you know, thing? And so it's like, okay, 4K. Everything can shoot 4K. But what, you know, diving deeper into that, what does that look like? So you've got, on the Sony side, FX3, FX6. But, you know, 428 doesn't take front filters. So then you've got no solution for neutral density. So then I was like, maybe I'll just sell, you know, all this film gear. I'll sell some film stuff and get an FX6 because it has an internal indie. So I got an FX6. But then that's like, okay, now you need a tripod. Now you need all the nuts and bolts that make the FX6 an actual camera. So then I have an FX6, 2, a 12, a GFX 102. At one point, I had a. I still have it. I need to sell it. I have a GH5 Mark 2, which is Panasonic's 4x33 camera. Because Panasonic, or I should say Olympus, makes a. [01:40:27] Speaker A: Like 300 to 1,000 equivalent, like, internal zoom lens that I was like, well, if this can mount onto the Panasonic, then that's crazy for wildlife. [01:40:37] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:40:38] Speaker A: And it was. But then when I was dealing with the front filters, I was like, well, maybe it'd be better if I got in the Sony world and go, Sigma makes a. [01:40:51] Speaker A: What is it? It's a 60 to 600. Now it's not internal zoom, so that throws the balance off quite a bit. But like that get takes you all the way from wide angle to telephoto. And for video, especially for wildlife, you want to be able to capture like where the animals are and then do the middle and then do the tight shot. So that lens accomplished all the above. So I was like, okay, now I'm back in the full frame world and it's just like an endless rabbit hole of I. That is my beef with video. I would have so much more money if I never got into it. Because the amount you to spend on gear to chase particular things is absurd. Is it? Yeah. [01:41:33] Speaker B: I'd be so interested to know Whether, whether an FX6, I mean for the ND, I guess that is ND with long lenses. That's the only. Because yeah, otherwise it's like. [01:41:45] Speaker B: Because you're not shooting. [01:41:48] Speaker B: You're not shooting like on location documentary with audio, etc. So it's not like you're or, or are you. Am I like rolling audio? [01:41:58] Speaker A: I'm trying. The audio is really hard. Um, so what I've learned in doing it is a lot of people are adding sound and post. So you've got it probably, I mean it depends on the budget of the film, but like probably have an audio guy out there with you doing just audio on its own and then you're adding it after the fact. But I've tried, I mean, my FX6 rig, I basically, I tried put a stereo Sennheiser mic on top to get the ambient sound. And then, you know, I've got the whole rig, but that's its own suitcase. When I came to Australia is actually a massive problem because you guys are absolute psychos with your regulations about baggage on airplanes. And I did not know that. [01:42:41] Speaker B: It's. It's a nightmare. [01:42:43] Speaker A: It's. [01:42:43] Speaker B: It's flying anywhere. You have to be like a spy, like a secret agent trying to take kilos or something. [01:42:50] Speaker A: Is the carry on limit seven? Seven? Okay. [01:42:54] Speaker B: Sometimes it's 10, but. But it's mostly seven. [01:42:56] Speaker A: And I set up a 35. [01:43:00] Speaker A: That was my carry at Sydney airport. I just came off of my, whatever, 15 hour flight and they're like, you can't fly with us today. So what does that even mean? Like, no, you, you've broken the rules. These are the rules and you broke them. [01:43:13] Speaker B: Huh? It's, it's, it. It's one I can put in, in my backpack that I take for my carry on. I can put in My laptop. Yeah, like R5 Mark II with a small lens on it and like a set of headphones and I'm starting to run out of like. [01:43:31] Speaker A: That's insane. [01:43:32] Speaker B: Wait, wait. [01:43:33] Speaker A: I don't know how you do your job. [01:43:35] Speaker B: It's crazy. Oh, it's just. I don't know. [01:43:38] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:43:38] Speaker B: So, yeah, Bruce saying the pain is real. Bruce has got an FX6. How do you fly with a Bruce? You just put in a pelican case or what do you do? He flies all the time with that battery boy. [01:43:48] Speaker A: Pelican now. [01:43:49] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lucinda, laptop, one body, one lens and all my batteries. Because. Because that's the other rule here. I don't know if it's like that in the States, but all your batteries have to be in carry on. You can't pack spare batteries. [01:44:02] Speaker A: They have to be in check carry on. Yeah, that's. That's the case here. But what I didn't know is, I mean, talk about psychotic. At least at Sydney airport they had. [01:44:14] Speaker A: They had scales at every gate for weighing people's carry ons. That would just like, people go ballistic here if they even tried to do that. It's basically, if you can walk on the plane standing upright, looking like your backpack is light, they'll let you on the plane. And if they don't, then we're gonna have a problem. The batteries, you guys have a certain wattage that's allowed as well. [01:44:39] Speaker A: So they started pulling out because I've got some V mount batteries, like small rig batteries. I think the limit is 100 and minor. 99. Just by chance. And so they pulled out. I mean, I swear they were making a spreadsheet at the check encounter of like, okay, he has these things and it adds up to this. Is that allowed? Yes or no? [01:45:01] Speaker B: I think Bruce has nailed it. Sounds like Jetstar. It does sound like Jetstar to me. Jetstar, they're like our spirit. I don't know, or something. I don't know. They're any budget carrier and they make their money on. On extra baggage and stuff. So they breaking your legs. Yeah. [01:45:21] Speaker B: Yeah. Right. So, okay, so you travel with a lot of stuff. I really. That's crazy. [01:45:27] Speaker A: Too much. [01:45:29] Speaker B: And you really think the Bennett, that there is enough benefit in the GFX system to. To carry both even of similar focal lengths? Because I could understand if you're like, hey, I bring my gfx. It's got my landscape like wider lenses on it and stuff like that. And then I bring my Sony stuff. I actually know guest of the show and Org and one of the organizers of Bright Festival Photography. Matt Crummons is a amazing wildlife photographer. He has been shooting GFX and Sony kind of together. [01:46:03] Speaker B: Gfx? Yeah, obviously for image quality and just he's loving the vibe. But then I think he was still shooting Sony for commercial work and just super long lens wildlife stuff in. In Africa. So. [01:46:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [01:46:17] Speaker B: But you, you. So you would literally travel with the same like equivalent focal lengths for both systems? [01:46:24] Speaker A: Yeah, 100, I think when I came to Queensland. So I had the GFX1 or the GFX100 Mark 2, that lens that I showed you. Then I had the 402 8. Then I had the new 400 to 800 because I didn't know like what we were shooting. Turns out a lot of birds, so I'm glad I had that and. [01:46:49] Speaker A: The two A12 bodies. I brought the FX6 in its own pelican. Never used the thing because it was driving me crazy. Then the Sigma 60 to 600 as well for that. And so like by the end of it all. [01:47:05] Speaker A: On that particular trip now it's not always this case, but like I pretty much only used my A12 with the 428. Like I was like, why did I bring all this other stuff? [01:47:17] Speaker A: No, it depends on the location. Say like the bears in Alaska. I would regularly swap between the two because the GFX autofocus is not. I'll just say it's not reliable. I mean for landscapes and stuff, it's great animals. I mean it's got the AI tracking. [01:47:34] Speaker B: But like when Fuji, Fuji, we always pick on Fuji shooters about their autofocus. But I love when it's. Yeah. When it gets to the point where they. Like for landscapes, the autofocus is great. [01:47:44] Speaker A: Yeah. If it's a static subject, it'll get there. [01:47:47] Speaker B: The world. The world is your subject. It'll get it. [01:47:53] Speaker A: No, I've had like bears walking at me and it's focusing on the trees in the back and I'm like, what is happening? And like the square is on the thing's eyeball and it still is locking to like some distant. Drives me insane. Anyways. [01:48:08] Speaker A: So that's why. A short answer to why I carry both. If I need a shot, my Sony will crush it. And the 2.8 for the Sony is like the crispiest, most lovely glass out there. If I want to melt people's minds with a big print, then my Fuji. [01:48:26] Speaker B: Comes out and you can, you can see the difference in those two. At a large print level, probably not On Instagram. [01:48:35] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:48:35] Speaker B: Let's have a. Let's have a look. Let's just have a look on the world's worst photo sharing platform, Instagram, which ironically started as a photo sharing platform, but on desktop. I don't know what it does to the images, but they're. [01:48:49] Speaker A: That's pretty good actually. Yeah. [01:48:51] Speaker B: Yeah. So do you remember like, what these would have been shot on? [01:48:55] Speaker A: That's Sony for sure. Sony. [01:49:01] Speaker A: Sony. My GFX couldn't handle that. Yeah, Sony. [01:49:05] Speaker B: So something like this, it's like you want the Sony in your hands. [01:49:09] Speaker A: High speed. Yeah. Actually, I think I forgot to bring cam batteries out for my other one. Anyways. So. [01:49:17] Speaker A: That'S the Fuji, is it? Yeah. This bald eagle sat on a branch eye level with me for two and a half hours. I could touch. I could touch the thing and it didn't care. Like you could literally reach out like you were gonna touch it. And it didn't move at all. I'd never seen anything like it. So he just kept walking in circles around it and I was like, focus sucks. Whatever this is, like it's static as a bird's ever gonna be. [01:49:43] Speaker B: Focus. Stack it. [01:49:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:49:45] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. [01:49:47] Speaker A: That's trickier. The aspect ratio makes me think it's Fuji. [01:49:53] Speaker B: Do you shoot the Fuji? Do you ever set the Fuji to aspect ratios in camera even though you're obviously shooting raw? You do? [01:50:00] Speaker A: Yeah. I think that's amazing. [01:50:03] Speaker B: That's probably one of the things that I that the biggest tempter to the Fuji system. And what's funny is it's like Canon could so easily do that with firmware. [01:50:13] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:50:13] Speaker B: Instead of just giving me like, here's a 1.6 crop. Here's a one by one crop. [01:50:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:50:20] Speaker B: You know, like. [01:50:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I wouldn't do it on their smaller. I would only do it on the GFX system. Because If I shoot 65 by 24 aspect ratio, which is like the slimmest thing on earth, it's still 60 megapixels. [01:50:37] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:50:37] Speaker A: Like, that's just stupid. That's. That's more than my A12 is full frame. Like. [01:50:43] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:50:44] Speaker A: And so you have. But you have to shoot JPLEG plus RAW in order for it to really work. If you shoot just only raw, it doesn't let you do it. And so it's cool because it'll bring in the JPEG and RAW in the lightroom and then automatically applies the crop to your RAW file. So it somehow knows and like makes it interesting. [01:51:06] Speaker B: So that's how Canon works. So if I do Shoot in a crop. Like say if I shoot in square crop with canon, I can shoot raw only and it'll still work. It just. Yeah, it just brings the crop in, the crop information in on the raw. But it does. Yeah, it doesn't need a JPEG for it to function, so it's interesting. [01:51:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:51:30] Speaker A: What's crazy, that's a Sony. [01:51:33] Speaker B: Sony. [01:51:35] Speaker A: These bears were humping each other for like an hour in the ocean. It was like the most gnarly thing I've seen. We were like. That's what it was. The two on top of each other. It's like the tide is rising. I'm like, someone's going to drown here. You know, like, what's going on? [01:51:53] Speaker B: Wow. Okay. [01:51:54] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:51:55] Speaker B: I thought that. I thought they were just wrestling. [01:51:58] Speaker A: No, apparently there's a lot more going on. [01:52:03] Speaker A: I did not want to put it up. Someone asked in another post, you know, you said this was like the most violent thing you've seen. Why is it so violent? I'm like, all right, well, here you go. Yeah. [01:52:13] Speaker B: Wow. [01:52:14] Speaker A: It's crazy. [01:52:17] Speaker A: That one, the portrait. This one, me pointing to the right of that. Oh, that. Yeah, that one's on my Fuji. And like, I will say there's always this argument too. Oh, like the lint, like the bokeh and stuff. Medium format versus full frame. If I'm in a lab, I can make them look the same. It's like no one's in a lab. [01:52:45] Speaker A: Like, at the end of the day, like this. The isolation of that bear's eyeballs is out of this world. I mean, and that couldn't be done as far as I'm concerned with any of. Couldn't be done with my Sony. Like, it's just. And it's so detailed. Like every. Everything is visible. You could zoom in infinitely on that guy. And it's just. If I can get a. Like, I'll risk it to shoot with questionable autofocus. And I'm single shotting on the gfx because if you do burst mode, then it takes. I think it shoots 14 bit. Color is like the highest it'll do maybe 16, I'm not sure. I can't remember. But once you start doing multi shot, it starts binning pixels and then it also, it just starts doing weird stuff. Your color bit depth is different. So I. I paid for the thing. I want the full. Everything that it can give me. So I'll go back to old school shooting one shot at a time and, you know, risk it. Because if it's. If I can get an animal filling the whole 4x3 frame, it's going to melt people's brains. I mean, so it's worth it. [01:53:55] Speaker B: So it really is about that being able to print large format and have that shot look completely different to what anyone else. [01:54:04] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. And then also, like, it's. [01:54:09] Speaker A: I only start. It took me a while to realize that's. I think the Fuji as well. But. [01:54:17] Speaker A: Their film simulations come over into Lightroom as well, so that's what I want. [01:54:23] Speaker B: So I've got a Leica Q3 as well. [01:54:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:54:26] Speaker B: And some of the Leica call them looks or whatever, but they come over right. No, the JPEGs look fantastic, but I cannot get a RAW to match a jpeg no matter how much Lightroom editing I do. And it doesn't have any. Yeah. Whereas I talked to Greg, who's normally on the podcast, obviously. Miss you, Greg. Hope you're doing all right. He shoots with Fuji, like, X series stuff, and he's tested a lot of GFX stuff and he's like, yeah, I just put it into Lightroom and like, what if I was shooting on Acros? It just comes up with that. But it's a raw, like, ready to edit raw. [01:55:02] Speaker A: Yeah. Simulation with the simulation on it. [01:55:05] Speaker B: I love that. [01:55:06] Speaker A: Yeah. So I'm just like, use them. I do. Because it's a great baseline. Like, instead of using Adobe Color as your starting point, you can, like, look at. [01:55:20] Speaker A: You can just click through the simulations and be like, actually, this simulation's colors are closer starting point for my edit than what I like as what I ultimately want. And so, yeah, it's like. It's so good. It's crazy. [01:55:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I would love to. [01:55:36] Speaker A: To play. And then you can blend. What I did the other day with the canyon shot in Utah is you can blend simulations, you know, if you bring. Make a smart. Make a virtual copy of it, have a different simulation on each, then bring them both over as smart objects in the Photoshop. Then you can blend different film simulations together. So say you like the color of the sky for one and the landscape in another. That's an option too. [01:56:02] Speaker B: Is that one of these shots? [01:56:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I think the top right one. The sky. So, like, I think the canyon is like Velvia. [01:56:14] Speaker A: And then the sky is. [01:56:18] Speaker A: What is it? Fuji. [01:56:22] Speaker A: Reala Ace. It's like a Gensler kind of is this. [01:56:27] Speaker B: And then I added something that you think the horizon might have been crooked. [01:56:30] Speaker A: That's not straight, is it? [01:56:33] Speaker B: I can't tell. I think you're like, are you saying that you think the world is crooked in that spot? [01:56:38] Speaker A: No. Go to the other canyon. And it's definitely not straight. Yeah. [01:56:42] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. That's crazy. Okay. [01:56:46] Speaker A: Imagine you're looking at a 4x5 camera. Those mountains in the background are an angle too. [01:56:51] Speaker B: Yeah, that's confusing. My brain doesn't know what to make of this. [01:56:57] Speaker A: Everything's leaning. [01:57:01] Speaker B: Yeah. Interesting. Gosh, the canyons. The canyons are amazing. [01:57:05] Speaker A: Over there, the big landscape one with the rainbow sky up there next to Yalls. Yeah. Like, look at that. That's literally slanting to the right. That is on a tilt shift lens dialed in perfectly. And the whole horizon line looks like it's in a. Like a. A bowl. [01:57:26] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:57:27] Speaker B: That is. That is confusing. Oh, is that your camping setup? That's sweet. [01:57:31] Speaker A: That is my camping setup. Yeah. Monster. [01:57:37] Speaker A: But yeah, it's like a whole. [01:57:42] Speaker B: Yeah. This is fun looking through these. So let me guess. [01:57:51] Speaker B: Gfx? [01:57:53] Speaker A: No. I don't know. Yeah, I didn't bring. I never brought my GFX out on this trip, but I did bring it on the trip. [01:58:02] Speaker B: Okay. [01:58:03] Speaker A: It was one of those things like, okay, you're gonna see moose, but how often are you gonna see the moose? What light are you gonna see the moose in? How quickly are they moving? All those things factor into whether I'm willing to risk the shot on one thing, one system or another. [01:58:23] Speaker B: If you had to pick one. [01:58:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:58:27] Speaker B: One system. [01:58:29] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:58:30] Speaker B: Which one would it be? [01:58:33] Speaker A: Oh, my God. It's so hard to answer. The Sony just. [01:58:40] Speaker A: It's like when it works, because it doesn't always work. I can't go with the Fuji, but when it does, it just makes bangers. The. The Sony will nail the shot every time, and if it doesn't, I'll throw it in the closest body of water I can find. Like, because I. It'll just drive me mad. I actually wanted a place. I did. I went on a sailing trip in Alaska. I've never been in such a weird environment because you're like. You're inside, it's hot in the boat. Then you go outside, it's of course, freezing cold. But then because you're on the water, it's so humid. And so I had two. These two camera systems on me. Both of the glass, like, the glass on both of them fogged up internally. Even my sensors had fog on them, and I'd never seen that before. And so I would take my camera, open it up, and just point it straight at the sun until it dried out because there were two bears right in front of Us. And I was losing my mind because I go from one to the next and both of them were broken. And I was just like, this is ridiculous. I've never had it happen since. But I was just, like, for your sensor to get fog on it. I was convinced that the weather ceiling on my mount had a gap in it because, like, I understand your front lens element fogging up, but internal components fogging up is next level. Like, weird weather. [02:00:11] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:00:11] Speaker B: I'm just trying to think if that's happened to me before. [02:00:14] Speaker A: It's. [02:00:15] Speaker B: I have had internal. No, I've. I've definitely had internal fogging. Just trying to remember if. If the lens come off at any point or not. But, yeah, we had often had issues with that in Japan because everywhere inside is so insanely hot. [02:00:32] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Cooking. [02:00:34] Speaker B: And then you go like. I was doing snowboard photography. And yeah, there was this. This risk if you went straight into the cold air. Like, it was good to let it acclimatize in the bag for a little while for sure. And then be very, very careful about changing lenses for the first, like, until your camera. Until the system's cooled down. [02:00:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:00:53] Speaker B: Otherwise. [02:00:54] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:00:54] Speaker B: But I just can't remember. I had internal fogging, but I don't think I ever had it internally fog without changing lenses or anything. Like, just there where the seal should be. [02:01:05] Speaker A: So surprised. Yeah. Because I had them on and you know the. Where everyone always jokes about putting your camera in a bag of rice to, like. Yeah, solve for that. Okay. I did that once, and I went to shoot. I pulled it out of the bag of rice. A grain of rice got stuck in the SD card slot and broke it. And I had, like, the most amazing scene of my life in front of me, and a grain of rice broke my camera. [02:01:33] Speaker B: Oh, no. [02:01:36] Speaker B: Well, I don't know if the grain of rice thing works, but I think we did. I can't remember if Jim did it for me, but I was at a wedding. I was a guest at a wedding, so I was drinking. But we also filmed them jumping in the pool in slow motion. And then I jumped in the pool with my new R5 Mark II and went completely under the water, like, fully submerged. And I don't know if you're aware, but the new R5 Mark II has some nice cooling vents in it to keep it cool while you're shooting videos. Really good for water ingress. But, yeah, Jim. I think Jim might have put it in rice and put it next to, like, a warm something for like, a day or two. [02:02:16] Speaker A: Oh, my. Gosh wow, that's crazy. Yeah. Here. If you get water in any electronic device, as long as you don't turn it on, sticking in oven, whatever, then it'll maybe come back to life. [02:02:29] Speaker B: And it certainly did. [02:02:31] Speaker A: Crazy. [02:02:32] Speaker B: All right. I don't want to keep you for too long because I'm sure you've got a ton of things to do today, but let's. What else do I want to talk about? What other images should we have a look at? Oh, hang on. [02:02:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:02:44] Speaker B: Paul's got to go. Enjoy work. Paul, thanks for joining us. I think a few other people. [02:02:51] Speaker B: Other poll. Gotta run. Thanks, Matt. Great interview. Thanks. [02:02:56] Speaker B: So, yeah, any other. Any great images we should have a look at of yours? [02:03:01] Speaker A: Some of my favorites lately. Yeah, I really like the Greenland village one. [02:03:09] Speaker A: That colorful one. Yeah, I thought that was like, really well. I just love the road leading through it. I love the cartoonish colors of the village. The iceberg that's in the background just floating there. I mean, there's so many elements. [02:03:27] Speaker B: I didn't even see that the light. [02:03:29] Speaker A: Poles are like symmetrically spaced. I mean, there's just so much going on that makes it so clean. So it's. [02:03:38] Speaker B: How did you approach this scene and how. How did you end up finding this? Like you say, how. Working to get the light poles spaced the way you wanted and things like that. [02:03:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I wasn't even thinking about the light poles. Someone told me about that after the fact. [02:03:58] Speaker A: No, I. We were walking the streets. I'm not gonna be able to say the name of this town. It might be somewhere in my caption, but it's like a ridiculously long name. [02:04:08] Speaker A: Yeah, that title. [02:04:13] Speaker B: So you. [02:04:13] Speaker A: When you go to sail. Milford Sound. [02:04:19] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the sound you go. You always stop at this native village. And it's. Of course Denmark owns Greenland, so Danish police, but like Inuit native people in the town. So it's kind of weird thing going on. But, you know, you land on the. In the town, kind of towards sunset, and you walk, you know, the whole area, it's pretty small. And for some reason I. As we were walking, I mean, I saw there were like clothes on people's balconies. And then there was just the low. The road leading down through this houses. And I was like, wow, that's like the perfect leading line through. [02:05:04] Speaker A: The town. But it also really does a good job of showcasing the architecture and what like the rest. I mean, everything behind me looked more or less the same, so just not compositionally as well laid out. So. Yeah. And the light was beautiful. And, I mean, if had we gotten there any later, I don't think the image would have worked. Iceberg happened to be there. I mean, there were just a lot of elements that happened to come together to really make it something special, I think. [02:05:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that shot. What are your rules around editing? Do you. [02:05:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Where do you draw the line when it comes to editing your images, whether it's removing distractions or anything like that? Do you have rules that you set for yourself, or does it depend on the type of the image, what its application is? [02:05:57] Speaker A: Yeah, it depends on what I'm going for. So let's say. [02:06:04] Speaker A: As far as colors on this kind of thing, I really do try my best to make it as accurate to what I saw in the moment as possible. Because I started in hdr, I went through kind of my phase of over editing things because I think HDR lends itself to that. And so now I've kind of been dialing it back to more just make the colors pop. But I want it to be a representation of what was there when I was there. I don't do. [02:06:34] Speaker A: And I. Whether it's to my benefit or my detriment, my portfolio is not very cohesive. And it's the, like, color themes. [02:06:45] Speaker A: And the reason for that is I don't really do color grading, as people say. You know, you'll get my loss across. A lot of people that no matter what the subject matter, it's got that it's orange and blue or it's shades of green, and whatever it may be, I don't do that because that's not, to me, a realistic interpretation of where I was. And I'm not shooting for. I'm shooting for the end user, which I'm hoping is a big print on someone's wall. I'm not shooting to make my Instagram grid look pretty, which I think is kind of what a lot of people fall into the trap of sometimes. [02:07:26] Speaker A: And so it may look like a smorgasbord of things, but, you know, those trips in isolation probably have some sort of uniformity. But, I mean, there's a lot of color on my page, and there's a lot of different stuff going on. I. I like it. You know, that's just how I see the world. But as far as rules, I try to minimize. Like, I, I. I really want whatever I'm doing to happen in the field more than anything. [02:07:58] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:07:59] Speaker A: So. [02:07:59] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So, for example, you wouldn't add a rainbow. No, no. [02:08:07] Speaker A: In fact, that day. So this is the time of Year in Yosemite, when the falls, there's some, some waterfall on the left there that comes off of, I want to say El Cap, that if the sun hits the right angle, it looks like lava coming off of the. [02:08:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [02:08:28] Speaker A: The firefall. So that was this time of year, and I was like, do I gamble on seeing the firefall or do I go up to Tunnel View and shoot that for the first time? And I drove up the Tunnel View, it was pouring down rain and the sun came out and a rainbow appeared. And I was like, what a joke. This is crazy. [02:08:46] Speaker B: Magic. [02:08:47] Speaker A: Magic. Unbelievable. [02:08:49] Speaker B: Yeah. That is a beautiful shot. Yosemite is, is really. [02:08:56] Speaker B: Otherworldly. [02:08:57] Speaker A: It is. I've seen a lot of fjords in my life and like that place. I don't know what it is about it. I'd say this about any national park in the States, and I ask this all the time, how did they decide where to draw the line? Because every time you pay the entrance fee, it gets 10 times better beyond whatever that imaginary boundary is that they set. And it's like you could be any at any of them. As soon as you go past the gate, it's insane. Just before the gate. Pretty cool, but not like, what's beyond. [02:09:36] Speaker A: And I just, time and time again, I'm amazed by that. [02:09:40] Speaker B: It is beautiful. Like it. And yeah, they're all so different and unique and just. Yeah. I couldn't believe how, how interesting the national parks were. That's basically what we did for. We did a road trip for. We drove from Austin to Nashville. [02:09:57] Speaker A: Okay. [02:09:58] Speaker B: And then we flew to la, and then we drove from LA up to Yosemite and then down through Vegas and then back up to Colorado, basically. And like crazy national parks and, and stuff. [02:10:11] Speaker A: Yeah. Did you go to Death Valley? [02:10:13] Speaker B: We, we would. I wanted to. And it was like proper heat wave. [02:10:19] Speaker A: Good thing you did. [02:10:20] Speaker B: I, I, I was like, I really wanted to go via Death Valley somehow. [02:10:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:10:25] Speaker B: But we ended up coming down because it was going to be after Yosemite. And then we ended up coming down and basically scooting straight across to Vegas and, and we hid out in Vegas for three days while it was just insanely hot at a place that had a pool. [02:10:41] Speaker A: Man, even Vegas would have been scorching. [02:10:44] Speaker B: It was miserable. It was like we hung out in the pool. Vegas sucks. I don't like Vegas at all. It was, yeah, it was kind of crazy. [02:10:56] Speaker A: Vegas is like one of those places like the Strip itself you think would be pretty walkable, but those blocks, the city blocks are so Big. So to get from like one spot on the strip to another, I mean, you're Talking like a 45 minute walk. [02:11:12] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:11:13] Speaker A: And if there's a heat wave, like you're gonna die. [02:11:16] Speaker B: You know the good thing though, for us Australians, because if this happened in Australia, you'd literally be thrown in jail. You're walking, you're walking down the strip and it's stinking hot. And then every. Everywhere is a casino. So to do anything like to get inside is like, it's a, it's another long walk just to get inside this. And then they're, they're designed to keep you in there, so you just don't want to go in anywhere because they all suck. [02:11:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:11:44] Speaker B: So you're hot and it's. You're thirsty and you're Australian, so you just want a beer. And then there's these people on the street just selling beers out of like coolers and just for cats. [02:11:56] Speaker A: Craziest place. [02:11:58] Speaker B: I don't know how that's like how they're. Because there's cops everywhere too. Driving around. I don't know, they obviously just don't care, but. And I was just like, so I can just buy a beer? And they're like, yeah, perfect. This is great. I don't have to go anywhere. Bruce, not a fan of Vegas. I could, I could see you in Bright in Vegas with that beard. Bruce. Just at like a high roller tables or something. Love it. [02:12:21] Speaker B: Anyway, we hit out there and here's my summary of Vegas. We booked a place that had a. [02:12:28] Speaker A: Pool. [02:12:30] Speaker B: And at one point, while I was in the pool, it slowly got less and less. [02:12:38] Speaker B: Busy. And then we found out that that's because someone had just thrown up in the pool. And that's. [02:12:45] Speaker B: That'S. That was Vegas. [02:12:47] Speaker A: Somehow you missed the message on the bar. [02:12:51] Speaker B: It got to me eventually, but yeah, not fast enough. Enough. [02:12:56] Speaker A: Everyone's clearing out pretty quick. [02:12:57] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I'm finally getting a bit of peace and quiet around here. Oh, okay. [02:13:05] Speaker B: Okay. Any other, any other images that we should have a quick look at before get out of here? [02:13:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I really like. I mean, the moose lately, I was really proud of. [02:13:23] Speaker A: There's just so much. I was really proud of what I came away with in Australia. You know, I really didn't know what I was getting into. [02:13:32] Speaker A: As far as what we would see. And. [02:13:37] Speaker A: I, I really don't photograph birds. I'd say those puffins in Iceland were like my first attempt. But like that black cockatoo was out of this world and this was on my gfx. And it made the other people. My trip so mad because we'd been. They were. So we had several New Zealanders and then Aussies. And the New Zealanders are mega birders because apparently they have no mammals other than sheep out there. So they're just like, every time a bird flies by, they can name it immediately. And the Aussie guy with us could do it the same. And so we showed up at this next lodge and we're surrounded by black cockatoos. And everyone's like, oh, I really want a photo of one on the ground. And so I get out of the car. [02:14:30] Speaker A: Like within five minutes, see one on the ground, take a picture, go to bed, take a nap, whatever, don't even look at it. And then I get back to my computer. When I'm back in Austin, I was like, whoa, look at how this thing's like framed between these trees. That's pretty cool. I go through editing it. Similar thing happened on our way out. I was like, I got 10 minutes, I'll go see if I can find one up in a tree. And the previous shot of the one on that branch, this guy, like the light, the dappled light coming through the trees, hitting its eye, and the feathers coming up. And just on this tree branch in complete isolation, I was like, I couldn't believe that it was in focus on my slow medium format camera and the light just all these elements came together. And with. [02:15:21] Speaker A: I found it's most often that when I'm not trying that I get the craziest photos. So, like, these two cockatoos are like, oh, I've got five minutes to kill. Let's see what I can accomplish. And then they end up being some of my favorite pictures is I'm like, okay, I'm gonna. Right now I need to find a cockatoo on the ground. I could probably walk five hours and not find one. But because I thought of it as like a non thing, it happened to be right there. So I was really proud of these. And my goal for this particular, like, trip was to try what, you know, I think Kate put it very well, is like wildlife portraiture. And what is wildlife portraiture involve? I think it's. It's isolating the subject matter, shooting them vertical, because portraits of people are vertical. So why wouldn't it be the same for wildlife and really drawing the viewer's attention to the animal. And so since that trip, I mean, I credit to her think it was one of the most informative trips I've been on with someone because her style, I found it very unique and special within that space. And then I felt like I was able to bring my own touches to that same kind of thing. And then it also carried over into my future trips with the polar bears and all these things. I was like, okay, now when I see wildlife, you know, my goal is going to be total isolation of the subject matter. And I think that made my wildlife imagery so much more cohesive than it was before that. [02:17:06] Speaker A: And so I'm really proud of just that. I mean, yeah, these polar bears were out of this world. [02:17:15] Speaker A: I almost forgot about them. [02:17:17] Speaker B: Yeah. You've got so many different trips with work from. To put to. To look at. [02:17:23] Speaker A: It's ridiculous. [02:17:24] Speaker B: We've barely scratched the surface. [02:17:26] Speaker A: My hard drives are just swamped. I mean, how many. And I like the variety, too. [02:17:33] Speaker B: Well, I do. Yeah. I love that about your work. I see you were saying before that, like, your grid doesn't have this. [02:17:40] Speaker B: You know, theme through it or whatever. Although you do. You do get it. It changes thematically with each trip, I think. [02:17:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:17:48] Speaker B: Like, so. [02:17:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:17:49] Speaker B: Kind of is its own, you know, mini, mini, mini subject and theme. But I love that. I love that. It's just each new adventure is a new. A new place and should have a new. [02:18:01] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:18:02] Speaker B: You shouldn't try and make every. Every place on the planet look the same and every animal. Yeah, yeah, look the same. [02:18:07] Speaker A: It's. [02:18:09] Speaker A: It's been quite the magical journey, I've gotta say. I mean, I've seen some stuff that. And that's why, like, for anyone that's ever doubting, you know, whether they can make it or not, I mean, I do it just for the love of it. Whether it makes financial sense or not is like a whole separate discussion. But, like, I am so in love with. [02:18:35] Speaker A: Not only, like, just the. The process of capturing photos, but it's also the places it's taken me and the people that I've met along the way. Like, I don't see there being any other job I could have had that would have led to the same outcome in my life and been so impactful, you know, so whether. [02:18:59] Speaker A: Like, as far as I'm concerned, like, that other stuff isn't aside to the incredible things that you get to see along the way, the people that you meet. I mean, that, to me, is the most important aspect of what we do. And so, yeah, I'll. I'll chase it forever because it's just so crazy. [02:19:20] Speaker B: There is. There's possibly no better. Better way to leave this episode than that. I completely Agree. Whether you're doing this for. Yeah, for a living or for a passion or ideally for both. It's. Yeah, it, it's a unique way to, to travel through life, that's for sure. That might not have been opened otherwise. [02:19:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:19:45] Speaker B: What's, what's next? You got any big trips planned other than your shoot next week? [02:19:51] Speaker A: Next, like, big, big thing. I will be sailing to Antarctica for the whole month of February on a wooden ship through the Drake's Passage. What? Yeah. [02:20:04] Speaker B: Wow. Who's that with like, what, what is that on a. [02:20:08] Speaker A: The group's called Bark Europa. So it's a, a wooden schooner from the 19, early 1900s. Like, so it takes 40 guests, but they give you a job on board. So you have to work the sails and help the crew to sail to get to Antarctica. And I've been told I'm going with Benjamin and I've been told, he told me it's like the closest to death you'll ever feel. [02:20:39] Speaker B: I was just gonna say, like, what's. Is it, is it at all dangerous? Is it? [02:20:46] Speaker A: Yes. [02:20:49] Speaker A: I mean, it's definitely dangerous for you yourself. Like, I've been told that the rules on deck are you will always have a clip in point, like rock climbing, harness, you know, so there, there are guidelines all over the deck because if you're in rough seas, obviously getting thrown over is pretty possible. So you're always hooked into something and I'd say that's the primary safety precaution. They also have, I mean, all the, they have a full time doctor on board and they, so they have communication with rescue teams and stuff. So I try to go on adventurous things, but I try to limit, you know, okay, are there backstops to the dangerous situation that I'm putting myself in? And in this case, I'd say yeah, I mean, there are lots of people doing the same passage. There are rescue teams, you know, that they can get in contact with. They have all the proper equipment and. [02:21:48] Speaker B: So this is the ship, this pirate ship. [02:21:50] Speaker A: The boat, yeah. [02:21:51] Speaker B: You're going on a pirate ship to Antarctica. [02:21:53] Speaker A: Pirate, yeah. [02:21:55] Speaker B: Wow. [02:21:56] Speaker A: It's. So they do trips all over, but the Antarctica one is roughly a month is what it'll take. And there's a great book. [02:22:08] Speaker B: Sorry, I was just gonna ask, how long's the, how long's the Drake Passage part? [02:22:13] Speaker A: It depends on the weather. It could be. [02:22:18] Speaker A: Two to three days, I think it takes to get through there. [02:22:23] Speaker A: Sometimes you sail backwards because you just can't get the right wins and then you gotta make up the time for it, um, yeah, it's gonna be like the most rugged. I've done a lot of sailboat related things and it's just like, okay, for this amount of time, I'm not gonna shower. We're all gonna be filthy animals and. Yeah, because that's just what it involves. [02:22:47] Speaker A: Is. [02:22:49] Speaker B: Is there a limit to how much of your camera gear you can take on there or anything like that? Are you. Is there? [02:22:55] Speaker A: Surprisingly not, no. Because you take commercial flights all the way. So you're going down to Argentina and then you're sailing from there. [02:23:06] Speaker A: Whereas Greenland, Greenland, you take a plane onto a dirt. You land on a dirt Runway. And so Greenland limits the weight that you can have. Alaska is similar. You go, you're on a bush plane. So the bush plane has a weight limitation. Australia is the same. Just because you guys are insane. Limitation. [02:23:31] Speaker B: Don't lump me in with Jetstar. I didn't make the rules. I, I mean, they're not. [02:23:36] Speaker A: It's very UN Australia 747 here, stateside as it is there. I don't know why the rules are so different. [02:23:43] Speaker B: There's so many weird rules like that. Like, you know, you know when you guys. [02:23:49] Speaker B: You guys call it gas, when you pump gas at the pump? Yeah. And you can, you can put the thing in and then you pull the thing and then you lock the thing so it just, it just fills up. We're not allowed to have them. We used to have them. They took them away. You got to stand there and hold it. Because apparently our petrol at our petrol stations, I don't know, they're different to those in the States. Because unless. Are you guys having like just explosions on the regular over there petrol stations from people? [02:24:23] Speaker B: You would think so. But apparently those little things so you can lock the petrol thing on are just too dangerous for Australians to have. [02:24:30] Speaker A: So they took them away, guys, someone, some doctor association lobby, you know, the elbow surgeons are like, nah, make them hold it longer. [02:24:39] Speaker B: I mean, something, there's something up with that. Because when I was a kid, when I was a kid, everyone, every pump had it. And then as I grew up, then only the diesel pumps had it. And then now even the diesel pumps don't have it. Only the truck. The truck filling, you know, for the large, large truck. [02:25:00] Speaker A: So anyway, I mean, our gas stays. Can you guys. No, you definitely can't. I was at a gas station in Utah where like at the checkout counter there was a display case just under the cash register and you could buy like a pistol. Just middle of nowhere, Utah. There's like handguns. Like, I've got my Skittles and a pistol if I wanted. [02:25:19] Speaker B: Wow. [02:25:19] Speaker A: And you could just. With that. [02:25:22] Speaker B: Let's. Let's go the other direction in. In the States. Yeah. You can buy a pistol in. In Japan, you can buy beer almost anywhere everywhere in the States. You can even buy beer at a lot of gas stations, I think, depending on. And you can certainly buy it at like, Walmart or. I went to the Whole Foods in Austin. You can drink beer while you shop because there's a bar at the back. [02:25:48] Speaker A: Yeah, there is. [02:25:49] Speaker B: I was in the. I was in the milk aisle with a pint of like, craft beer and the bartender was so friendly as well. Anyway. [02:25:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. In. [02:25:59] Speaker B: In Australia, you cannot buy beer at a supermarket. You cannot buy beer. Like, you can't. If it's. If it's at a supermarket, it's in a separate area. Like, it's a. Yeah. [02:26:09] Speaker A: I had to go to like a bar and the bar had a liquor store attached to it. And I was like, that's way sketchier than it just being in the grocery store. [02:26:18] Speaker B: Yep. And definitely not got no. No petrol station, gas station. [02:26:24] Speaker A: No. [02:26:24] Speaker B: No. No beer whatsoever. No. So it's our rules are. They're different where. [02:26:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know. [02:26:32] Speaker B: I don't know how they come up with all these rules. I guess we drink too much beer. [02:26:37] Speaker A: You guys don't protest the right things, though. Like, you protest a lot. I'm aware of that. But like, they're like base level things that need to be fought over. [02:26:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I think. I think I'm gonna do it. Protest about the petrol pumps because it's an unnecessary use of grid. We don't need to be doing this. [02:26:59] Speaker A: What is the fear? Like? Because. Well, I've never tested this, but I'm imagining even if you pull it out, doesn't it automatically stop? Or will it just keep shooting gasoline all over the place? Like, if you wanted to, could you have a gasoline fight in a parking. [02:27:12] Speaker B: Lot like Zoolander you. I actually don't know. I don't know. I'll. I'll try that never. [02:27:20] Speaker A: Am I right, Ryan? Would I keep it like pulled and just pull it out and see what happened? [02:27:24] Speaker B: But I'm sure there are some risks. But I just. I don't understand how if. If, you know, other countries can handle it. I think even New Zealand has them still like it, you know? [02:27:37] Speaker A: Anyway, I've driven away with gas pump once. That was crazy. [02:27:41] Speaker B: That's why I do it. [02:27:43] Speaker A: I was on the phone with someone And I was just so distracted. I got in my car, I put it in drive, and I drove off. My whole car jerked. And I look at my mirror and the whole hose and gas line was dragging with me. And I took it out, ran back. I was like, oh, I'm so sorry. And I handed it to the mechanic. He's like, pay more attention. [02:28:05] Speaker A: Yeah, Yeah, I gotta go. [02:28:09] Speaker B: Philip Johnson says, service stations in the US you pay first, fill second. In Australia, pay for. You fill first, pay second. That is correct. [02:28:17] Speaker A: That is weird. Why would you ever. That's never made sense to me that you fill up and then you're supposed to pay. You could just leave. [02:28:25] Speaker B: I'll tell you why. Because you don't know how much you need to put in the tank. You just want to fill the tank. We all just fill our tanks. We don't. We don't put. Put, you know, $50 in or whatever. I mean, not all. It's lots of different people, but you just don't know how much goes in. So you just fill it up and it's $86.32. And then you go and you pay for the. For the thing. [02:28:46] Speaker A: But you could just get it all done in one go. It's calc. It's a calculator. It's a. It's a. The machine itself is a calculator. It's gonna give you the total no matter what you do. [02:28:56] Speaker B: No, but how do you pay first if you don't know how much it's got? How much it's gonna be. Be. [02:29:01] Speaker A: You can just stop it at any point. You can just let go of the trigger and be like, all right, that's all I want, and just put it up. [02:29:07] Speaker B: No, but what I mean is we don't know how much needs to go in the tank to fill it. Maximum. We just want that. We just. We don't know how much is left in the tank. We just want to fill it up to the top. [02:29:16] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:29:16] Speaker B: Full tank. [02:29:17] Speaker A: And it can be the same. You can just leave that thing running all day if you wanted. You'll just have to pay whatever it. [02:29:23] Speaker B: Ends up at, but you got. Okay. So I think the way it works in the States and this screwed us over a couple of times, is you have to have of a credit card to authorize beforehand, and then it'll charge whatever happens. But if you want to pay with cash or like a debit or whatever. [02:29:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, you gotta go. [02:29:40] Speaker B: You go inside and you're like, I'll have 25 on pump number two. [02:29:44] Speaker A: And I don't know what that means. [02:29:46] Speaker B: That's right. [02:29:47] Speaker A: So that does make sense. Exactly. Yeah. [02:29:49] Speaker B: I'm like, you're trying to do the math. [02:29:50] Speaker A: Is that mean I have. [02:29:53] Speaker B: Do I have a full tank for that? Yeah. So it actually got us. Because I don't have. Have credit cards and we're traveling around and I got stuck a few times. I had to go to places that would accept, like, an international debit card, which. Which is. Yeah, it wasn't too hard. What it is insane is California's taxes on gas compared to Texas. It was literally like. It was double the price for the same stuff. [02:30:18] Speaker A: And I'm like, it's crazy how. [02:30:19] Speaker B: How. How is this allowed? [02:30:22] Speaker A: That's the most expensive part of road tripping out west as you go. It's exponentially more expensive in my car. The gas mileage changes with the wind. [02:30:31] Speaker B: I mean, yeah, we. We went. Yeah, we went to Tahoe. And then I think you can go and fill up across the border. [02:30:43] Speaker B: Am I in the right way? Yeah. [02:30:44] Speaker A: Death Valley is the same Death Valley in California. If you leave. Leave the park and go to Nevada, it's like $3. And then if you come back and it's like 12, I'm like, what? Who? [02:30:54] Speaker B: Anyway, it's crazy. [02:30:57] Speaker A: It is crazy. [02:31:00] Speaker A: Sweet. [02:31:01] Speaker B: All right, we should wrap it up there. I think there's a million things we talk about. But one final question, and I think I've already asked you this, but I'm going to ask you again so I can really try and nail down the answer with a lens attached. If it was end of the world and you had to document the end of the world with just one camera and one lens. Anything you want. [02:31:20] Speaker A: Sony A12 with a 402.8. [02:31:24] Speaker B: You would stick with a 402.8. Even at the end of the world. [02:31:27] Speaker A: Yeah, 100%. [02:31:30] Speaker B: I love it. It's heavy. You can carry that bad boy around. [02:31:33] Speaker A: That might make my life at the end of the world a bit shorter. That's true. But. [02:31:42] Speaker A: Clean. It's so clean. At the weight, I mean. Oh, it's just so crispy. Yeah, that's like. Like my. I would die on a hill for love it. Yeah. [02:31:56] Speaker B: Okay. We'll be keen to follow up after your trip, so I'm gonna try and. I'll try and hassle you to even snag. Yeah, that'd be amazing on the show after you. After February and see how that thing was. [02:32:05] Speaker A: That'd be sick. Thank you for having me on. [02:32:08] Speaker B: Oh, thank you. Thanks for your time. Thanks for the amazing photos. [02:32:12] Speaker A: Thank you. [02:32:13] Speaker B: They are truly beautiful and thanks for. It's always fun to hear people's real experience because most people that use medium format or use the Fuji GFX system, they usually jump in with both feet and so it's nice to hear the pros and cons from two different systems in use that it being used side by side because a lot of people that that do that. So it's, it's always fun. [02:32:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Glad. [02:32:38] Speaker B: Where can people keep an eye on your work and buy prints if they want to or anything like that? [02:32:43] Speaker A: My all my website, my Instagram is trabled photography.com or just tra photography is my Instagram. So just my last name photography. Easy enough. [02:32:58] Speaker B: Love it. [02:32:59] Speaker A: All right. [02:33:00] Speaker B: With that we'll roll our terrible reggae reggae music and we'll catch everybody in the next one. [02:33:05] Speaker A: Thanks so much, man. [02:33:06] Speaker B: Thank you. Thanks very much. [02:33:11] Speaker B: Thanks, Rodney. Thanks, Philip. David Mascara. Oh, he did it. He's only been to Yosemite once. Did the Half dome hike with two F5s, three or four lenses in a backpack and it came out killed him. Thanks, Bruce. Bruce is gone. Thanks Paul. Thanks everyone that joined us today. Lucinda, you're all amazing and we'll catch you guys on the next show. So Monday night we've got Dennis Smith's special guest and then next Thursday, Nick Carver, the large format landscape king. See you on the next. [02:33:45] Speaker A: See ya.