EP74 Tom Putt | Workshops, Wildlife, and the Business of Photography

[00:00:15] Speaker A: Very smooth. It's like Smooth fm. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Camera Life podcast. It is Thursday, the 1st of May, 2025, episode 74, if you can believe that. [00:00:32] Speaker B: That's crazy. [00:00:33] Speaker C: We're flying to 100, flying to 100, flying to 100. [00:00:38] Speaker A: So good morning, everybody, good afternoon, good evening, good night. Depending on where you're coming from, I see already some international people are dropping comments, which is wonderful. This is the Camera Life podcast, proudly brought to you by Lucky Straps out of Bendigo, Victoria. And I'm joined today by our founder. He loves that term founder. It's like a prophet. Justin Cassels, how are you? [00:01:01] Speaker C: It's me. Good morning. Before anyone gets disappointed, I'm not the guest today. Tom Hutt is joining us. He's joining us. Greg introduced me. Like everyone was like, just heard his story. No, no, we do have, we do have a guest joining us in about five minutes. But yeah, it's good to. Good to see you, Craig. Missed you on Monday night. [00:01:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm sorry I couldn't make it, everybody. Been a little crook lately, so working through some stuff, but I'm back today. I always love our morning shows. I'm a morning person. Margaret Cromie. My mother would always say that the chromies are fouls, not owls. So we're early risers, early to bed. I don't know what that. Where that came from. [00:01:41] Speaker B: I'm sorry. [00:01:42] Speaker A: But also today we're joined by Jim, wedding photographer, boudoir photographer, lucky straps, customer service all around. Nice guy. Also has a Guinness World Records for the most flannel it shirts in any one cupboard. [00:01:55] Speaker B: G'day, Jim. [00:01:56] Speaker C: Hey, Greg, how are you? Also tries as hard as he can every week to match his crazy background lighting for the podcast to his flanny, which he's done a pretty good job of today. [00:02:07] Speaker B: It's very impressive. [00:02:08] Speaker C: It was. Yeah, it wasn't quite there. It's pretty close. [00:02:14] Speaker A: If you're watching along, make sure you leave a comment. I think we need to start grading gym shirts every week, so please leave it out of 10 what you would rate this week's shirt and lighting setup for gym. But. But we will be joined in just a moment by our guest, Tom Putt, who is a highly acclaimed landscape and wildlife photographer. But he has many, many more hats than that. And we're gonna, we're gonna dive in and find out more about him soon. [00:02:45] Speaker C: I was looking at his bio on, on his website, which he has his multiple websites. First of all, that's already a sign, but his bio is. Is so long and so this. So varied. It was insane. [00:02:58] Speaker B: He's done a lot of stuff. [00:03:00] Speaker A: He has done a lot of stuff. [00:03:01] Speaker C: Some good luck. Photography career spans decades and multiple genres, multiple successful businesses, galleries, photo books. It's crazy. [00:03:14] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a lot going on. [00:03:15] Speaker C: Very excited. [00:03:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:03:16] Speaker A: You know, often we come across photographers who a. Seem to have their together and I'm sure that that's just on the surface level, but they have a very comprehensive approach to their craft and their business. You know, they've got the workshops, they've got a gallery, they've got club talks, they're doing charity work. You know, we see a lot of this from people. I think, you know, when we spoke to Russell Ord, for example, and if you haven't seen that episode, please dial back and watch that. It's. It's on the channel. Very similar kind of very congruent photography story that he's sort of. He's attacking photography from all fronts and I think, you know, and that that takes a lot of work and a lot of guts. That just doesn't happen overnight. [00:04:02] Speaker C: I can't imagine how easy it gets, you know, as well when it, when you're doing this, you're doing that. You, You've got this crazy calendar. I bet this, you know, or however he. Organ actually I'm going to ask him how he organizes it. Yeah, it's. It's impressive. And then to be able to create great images on top of all of that is. Yeah, yeah. [00:04:23] Speaker A: Now, just before we introduce our guests, let's jump to some good mornings. [00:04:27] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. [00:04:28] Speaker A: Who's in the chat? Got me to drive. [00:04:30] Speaker C: Ah, I got it, I got it. See, Yelena's here. She says one day they'll come in on time. One day. [00:04:36] Speaker B: We were on time. [00:04:38] Speaker C: We were on. She had her. She had a dislocated wrist. One of a surgery yesterday to pull some wires out of her wrist. So she's on the mend. Back in a cast again, unfortunately, but she's on the mend. Philip Johnson says morning all. And Tom. Tom will be here soon. David Mascara. They better finish before the Warrior game. Oh, you gotta, you gotta. One of the warriors there. NFL basketball, Golden State Warriors. Yeah, that's it. I don't know. I know sports. Another David from Tassie Digifrog says morning, Elena. He didn't say morning to us. So more of us moving on. Yeah. Morning, Dave, Marie, Phillip. Good morning all. And Dennis Smith says had a dream. [00:05:25] Speaker A: What was your dream, Dennis? [00:05:26] Speaker C: Yeah, was it about Meeting Tom Putt in person again? [00:05:30] Speaker A: Or was it about waking up in one of Jim's shirts? [00:05:32] Speaker C: Could be. [00:05:34] Speaker B: You never know. [00:05:35] Speaker A: Strange things happen. Well, I think it's time. [00:05:38] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:05:41] Speaker A: Let's introduce our guest today. It's Tom Putt. [00:05:43] Speaker B: G'day, Tom. Good morning, everybody. You know what? I could have just sat back and just listened to that intro all day long. There was no need to bring me on as a guest at all. I was just listening away, going, keep going, keep going, keep going. [00:05:58] Speaker C: How about you dig more into my accolades? [00:06:02] Speaker B: Actually, it was a little bit creepy. Was that Justin who was talking, giving all those praises? [00:06:08] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:06:09] Speaker B: I'm thinking this guy spent far too much time on my website. That's a little bit stalkerish. [00:06:13] Speaker C: I'll be digging around. I went all the way to the footer. [00:06:17] Speaker B: Oh, my God. Is that what I could feel? [00:06:19] Speaker A: Okay, yeah, that was that probing sensation. [00:06:23] Speaker B: I did hear a little. I not familiar with your podcast. And that's very bad, because I do need to actually look at those various episodes. Russell Ord, for example. I'm friends with him on Instagram, but I haven't seen a lot of his work, and he's just released a new book. I know you're talking about me publishing my books, and we'll, of course, go into great depths of that later. But, you know, yeah, he's. He's got some nice work out there, hasn't he? And so I must look at him, because I don't know much about him. That's what I'm trying to say. I don't know much about him, but I'd like to learn more. So I'm looking forward to delving back into your episodes and having a bit of a deep dive, as they call it, later this year when I have some time off. They are. [00:07:06] Speaker C: They are long episodes. So. [00:07:07] Speaker B: Yeah, hold on. What I need to know. What I need to know is what is the record length of your most famous episode? [00:07:16] Speaker A: I think there's one that's hit almost three. [00:07:18] Speaker C: Three hours, I was gonna say. I think we've done a three hour. Didn't you do something just you, Justin, you and someone was like. [00:07:24] Speaker B: Three hours? [00:07:25] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. [00:07:28] Speaker A: Who was that? [00:07:29] Speaker B: Oh, was that bloody Dennis Smith? Was it? [00:07:32] Speaker A: No, it wasn't Dennis. [00:07:33] Speaker B: No, not. [00:07:36] Speaker A: Not this time. [00:07:37] Speaker C: Going back through the archive. So myself and Jay Collier did three hours, 36. [00:07:44] Speaker B: Wow. [00:07:46] Speaker C: Richard Taddy. Three hours and nine minutes. That was Nightscape. [00:07:51] Speaker B: Well, we're gonna blow all of those. Those records out of the water today. Cancel anything you've got on this after. [00:07:59] Speaker C: This afternoon. [00:08:00] Speaker B: But cancel that. [00:08:03] Speaker C: Cancel it. [00:08:03] Speaker B: It's okay. [00:08:04] Speaker A: That's unnecessary. [00:08:05] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:08:07] Speaker A: Now, Tom, we've been. We have been doing a bit of digging around your website and don't believe. [00:08:13] Speaker B: Anything you read online. Isn't that what you're supposed to. [00:08:16] Speaker A: No. [00:08:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:08:16] Speaker C: Who did you pay to. Who did you pay to make up all of these stats and things? Because I get a website like this. [00:08:23] Speaker B: Hey. Hey. There's AI now, Justin. It's amazing. Chat G. Haven't heard of it already. Hey. [00:08:31] Speaker A: So you're a landscape and wildlife photographer, but you've done much more than that. We're going to dig into that. You. You're a workshop leader. You own your own photography gallery, fine art gallery, you're a publisher, you've published a shitload of books and. And you're a dad to five kids like me. I've got five. [00:08:49] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah, it's amazing. [00:08:51] Speaker A: Sometimes more show up, but mostly five. [00:08:54] Speaker B: Well, it's sort of. We're sort of fluctuating between about 2 and 8 at the moment. You know, dep on, you know, what's happening in the world. No, they're a little bit older now, which means that I've supposedly got more free time, which is not true. And it's. It's. The irony is that, you know, we'll get into the workshops in a sec, which I've been running for 20 years now. I started them in March 2005. How's the hair this morning anyway? [00:09:21] Speaker C: Beautiful, beautiful. [00:09:22] Speaker B: Thank you. Thanks, darling. So, you know, like, my motivation for doing those workshops was I really love teaching photography and I still love it to this day, but probably should admit this one of the side, sort of. What do you call it? One of the other benefits. I can't think of my fancy words just yet. I need some more coffee. Was the fact that we just had a child and it gave me an excuse to get out of the house and actually go and continue to do my photography because not that I wasn't. Not that I was trying to relinquish any of my duties. I spent my first 18 months at home looking and raising Ally because my then wife had gone back to work to earn an income. But the idea of being able to get out and about and take photos and excuse was that I was earning money, was fabulous. And that continues to this day. But now the kids are older, require less of me, I'm busier than ever and actually trying to spend more time at home so I can spend time with them before I. They completely disappear. And I Don't get to see them at all. So it's come a bit full circle, but yeah, they're 22 next month. 22, 21, 20. 19 and almost 18, so. [00:10:34] Speaker C: Oh, wow. [00:10:35] Speaker B: Yeah. A little bit older now. I'm getting older. Gray hairs getting a bit slower, things like that. Yeah. [00:10:41] Speaker A: Wow. Fairly consistent for a breeder. What a year. [00:10:45] Speaker B: We're a blended family, so that's part of the reason. So I've got the eldest and the second youngest, and then Mary, my wife, she has the. The three girls somewhat in the middle and the youngest as well. So. Yeah, it just happens to be that we were breeding around the same time well before we knew each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not. [00:11:04] Speaker A: Not. Not side by side. [00:11:06] Speaker B: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We don't unfortunately have kids together, but fortunately or unfortunately. Can you imagine? It would be chaos. I figured we. We figured that five kids between us was enough we'd contributed to. So, you know, elbows, you know, tax debt or whatever. [00:11:23] Speaker C: You already need a minivan. So I was gonna say beyond that, vehicles get really tricky. Yeah. It's like. [00:11:29] Speaker B: And houses. Houses. Because we rent a house, trying to find a five, six bedroom house is near impossible. So we've lived in various houses where we've turned rumpus rooms into, you know, two bedrooms and split bedrooms down the middle and all the rest of it. It's been quite interesting over the years. [00:11:48] Speaker C: Where are you. Where are you living at the moment? [00:11:51] Speaker B: I can't believe you don't know this, Justin. I thought you would have. I think I found that. I think that intelligence would have. Yeah. [00:11:58] Speaker C: I want everyone else to know. [00:12:00] Speaker B: Okay. It's a leading question. I get it. I get it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Silly me. Mornington. I'm living in Mornington on the Mornington Peninsula here in Victoria. We've lived here since Mary and I moved in about 10 years ago. And we'd love it down here. The kids have done their schooling down here and it's five minutes away from the gallery. So literally, if we jumped on a little earlier, Mary probably would have jumped in and, you know, given her 2 cents worth and taken over. But she. If you know Mary, you know what I'm talking about. She's amazing, but she's Italian and she's very loud and out there and extroverted, even more so than me. So we compete. We're like bulls in a paddock. Us too. She's just nicked off the gallery. Now she drops the kids off at school and then she goes onto the gallery and, you know, opens up for the day and. Yeah, so it's very convenient. [00:12:49] Speaker A: So she's your gallery manager, is that correct? [00:12:52] Speaker B: Correct, yeah. She came on about three years ago now. She was working for somebody else. She actually has a background in sales. Well, she's an accountant by trade. Accountant and lawyer. And then she's worked in recruitment. She's worked in sales and for the past 25 years. I guess this is sort of interesting in that regard or sort of blowing our own trumpet in that. You know, I started my portrait studio back in 2005 and ran that for 11 years. 2003, ran that for 11 years. Mary was running Boudoir Studios. You know, she had one of those franchises, Star Shots, you know the ones Shopping centers. Yeah. Her and her husband at the time had a couple of franchises in that. So, you know, between her and I, we have about 50 odd years of, you know, background in selling art and I can't even remember why the hell I was telling that story, but, you know, that's why. Sorry, that's why. That's it, yeah, it's my adhd. Sorry about that. I get tangents on tangents. That's why we could go for hours. I was going to say that this. [00:13:55] Speaker C: Podcast is tangents on tangents. [00:13:57] Speaker B: Oh, good. Yeah, good. I'm going to fit in perfectly. So, you know, when she was working for another studio while I was running the gallery, I was running my workshops, I was away all the time and the gallery was closed most of the time. She's like, this is stupid. Why, why are we closing the gallery? Why have we got, why are we paying rent on something that we can't open? And then why is it that I'm working for somebody else rather than working for you? And, and you know, we talked about it previous. I'd said, you know, would you like to come and work at the gallery? And she, she sort of couldn't warm to the idea because she's used to doing portrait sales where you do the shoot, you sit, you know, the customer down, you show them the pictures, they buy straight away. Excellent. Done and dusted. You know, it's a quite, quite a short buying window. Whereas with the gallery, it's very slow in terms of. It's a slow burn, I call it. You know, you'll get an inquiry and then they might come in, you know, a few weeks later and then they might come in again and there's a lot of back and forth. It's a considered purchase, probably more so. And it's a less emotional purchase than selling, you know, to a client who's buying photographs of their dog or the kids, you know. Yeah, that's far more of emotional sale. Whereas the landscape one, I mean, we could talk for hours, I could talk for hours about marketing, sales, publishing, etc, it's, it's. And mindset. It's probably far more interesting than photography to me these days. But, you know, there is that whole, you know, I guess I shouldn't say barrier but hurdle to overcome whereby you have a physical studio. I have a physical studio in Mornington which is obviously geographically restricted to the people who can visit it. Then you've got to rely on them finding you walking in, liking what they see, liking the price, liking us and then, you know, finally making the purchase. So there's a lot of those hurdles you've got to overcome in order to, to get that, that sale and I guess that's a challenge for us. But it also, I think the longer I've been in selling art, particularly through our own gallery, the longer I've. Or the more I've learned how difficult it is and I think was even in the time that I've had the gallery open, which is since November 2018, so almost seven years now, we've seen people come and go, you know, not only artists in the street that we're in, but also unfortunately, photographers like me, landscape and wildlife photographers like me, who have, who are extremely talented, who have given it a go and unfortunately not succeeded. And I can totally understand why. [00:16:31] Speaker C: Tell me this. We've chatted with a few people that own physical galleries, which is quite crazy because it's very rare in the photography world to actually do that. [00:16:42] Speaker B: It's quite stupid. [00:16:43] Speaker C: Yeah, it's the dream though. It's everyone's dream. [00:16:47] Speaker B: It is. And that's the thing, it's the dream everyone wants. Own their own gallery, be the next Ken Duncan, Peter Leak, whatever, whoever you aspire to be. And I think you're probably going to finish off this sentence go, Justin. [00:17:00] Speaker C: Well, no, probably not, but I do have other sentences now that I want to ask you, but what I was going to ask is you've got it set up on your website to sell online as well. Do you sell anything online or do you want a meaningful enough amount? [00:17:19] Speaker B: You know, do you want the truthful answer or do you want. Whatever. [00:17:23] Speaker C: The most interesting thing you could say is you can. [00:17:25] Speaker B: Okay, we sell loads of art online. My God, I can't believe it. We've got a warehouse down the road, right? We've got Multiple printers running 24 7. We employ 10 staff. We ship about 100 prints a day. And it's incredible. It's all worldwide. I mean, it's unbelievable. We can't keep up. In fact, we have to dial it back. Dial it back. Online sales. So I was one of these early adopters in the Internet. So I can remember when my then wife, and I hate saying that. How do I say it? Let's just call her Rebecca because that was a name. That is a name. When Rebecca and I were together and it was early days of the Internet, she had an optometry practice and we were actually living above it in Martin Street, Brighton there. And the only computer you had was downstairs in the optometry practice. And I used to sneak down after hours, you know, in the evening and sit behind the reception desk and sit there and play on my, you know, website for hours, you know, tomput.com early days. God, I'd love to have sort of, you know, screenshots even of what that potentially looked like because I was an early adopter to this whole e commerce thing. I've. I've been trying to sell, you know, artwork online for a good 30 years, very unsuccessfully. And you know, we occasionally get a sale and I can't make any excuses. I just don't think I've got the formula right. I now getting some coaching around selling artwork through face or not artwork, but books in particular through Facebook ads, which is going extremely well. And I just don't think, yeah, again, I've got the formula right. I could make excuses and say, you know, selling art online is hard. People have got to see it and touch it before they buy it or say things like, you know, our price points relatively high. So are people going to take that risk and you know, spend 600,000, 2,000, $5,000? But we've had sales like, you know, it's funny sometimes that, you know, you get the Shopify app that goes as, you know, the sale comes through, which we love. We're like Pavlov's dog, you know, we just salivate every time it happens. But, you know, we've had sales come through and like $13,000 and I' looking at the screen going, oh, okay, fair enough. And I ring Mary and I go, babe, that $13,000 sale was. Tell me more about that. Give me the background. Did you chat with the client first? What have they ordered, where's it going, etc. Etc. And she goes, what sale? I'm like, the $13,000 sale. It's just come up on the website and she goes, no, no, nothing about it. It's like this guy in, in Brisbane ordered three prints from us for his new office and hadn't even spoken to us, which is fabulous. Which, which hopefully means that, you know, our website's doing something in a sense that they like what they see. Obviously, they like the price point. They, they watch the videos that show me standing in the gallery explaining the different mediums and the different finishes. You can buy the art, things like that. We look reputable. We're not just, you know, going to take your 13 grand and you're never going to hear from us again. So, yeah, there's some things I'm sure we're doing right. And, and I think, I think the biggest problem and I think the, the issue that I've had and I think other photographers and artists suffer from is twofold. They build a website and they just think the masses are just going to come in and start buying straight away just because you've taken the time and effort to build a website. And I think the second thing is just a lack of marketing, a lack of awareness around the product and who you are as a person or an artist or just what you produce. You know, we still get people to walk past the gallery today and go, oh, wow. Oh, this is lovely. Oh, is this new? And we're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, when did you open? Seven years ago, you know, and we take a bit of a mickey depending on. Depending on whether we think that's going to land well or not. But, you know, like, oh, we come down Main street every week and we've never seen you. And it's like, well, there's a problem for us, you know, like, clearly not visible enough or we're not doing our marketing in the community well enough, things like that. And I think that's a big problem with, with just selling art in general is perhaps just not enough people knowing about who you are and what you do and selling the story. I think the biggest problem that I face at the moment is selling me as the face of the business, which I used to do more of. I, you know, five, 10 years ago. Lots of selfie videos. You know, hey, guys, I'm out and about taking photos here and it's amazing and it's epic and to the point that my friends would go, can you stop doing those selfie videos? You know, like, we just of seeing you, you know, my, my best friend Ian actually blocked me off Facebook about three or four years ago and, and I Only heard this through Mary. And she's like, no, he doesn't see your posts. And I'm like, what do you mean he doesn't see my post? Is he not on Facebook? And she goes, no, he blocked you. And I was like, what the. He blocked me, right? And I know. I said, what are you doing? He blocked me on Facebook. And he goes, yeah, mate, every time I open my Facebook, you're in another country. And, oh, look at me. I'm amazing. All the rest of it, I'm like, okay, fair enough. That's. That's probably true, but the younger generation are doing this really well. They're doing it really well. They're the selfie generation, right? I just. Mary and I just shake our heads and just go, oh, my God. What? Like, they. They take their phones everywhere and they video themselves on the toilet and like that, right? You know, like, it's extreme. Example. Probably not, but, you know, like, sometimes when I go out and about and want to take photos, I just want to be in the moment. I just want to be with my clients, you know, guests on the workshop, things like that. Bringing a third, you know, that other element into it and bringing other people along for the ride, which I love doing, but it kind of disrupts your flow sometimes. It disrupts the tranquility or the vibe or, you know, anything else that you're aiming for there when you're out and about taking photos. So that's definitely something that I need to work on more. Is not. It's not. And I think this is a sort of a tip for those watching, is it's not just about the art. It's actually probably more about you and you selling your story as the artist, which is probably more important than the art itself. There you go. We need a sound bite there. We need a sound. [00:23:42] Speaker C: I was just gonna say, Greg, before we get too far away from this, because Dennis read my mind. [00:23:48] Speaker B: Can we block him on this? What's his name? [00:23:50] Speaker C: This is what your website looked like in 2004. Haven't you ever used it? [00:23:54] Speaker B: How did you find that? [00:23:56] Speaker C: The Wayback Machine. So we can go to snippets of it all through the year. They won't always work and they won't always load. But there's a website called. I think it's web.archive.org but it's called. If you Google Wayback Machine, you can put any URL into it and you can go back and it will have tried to take snippets through the years so we can sort of have a look. So that's O4. I can see if we can get one to load a little bit later. [00:24:19] Speaker B: You have just blown my mind. I'm taking screenshots of my screen at the moment, so check it out. Oh, my God. This is embarrassing. [00:24:28] Speaker C: So, yeah, see Dennis. Dennis was under it too. Opens way back machine. Yeah, I was doing that in the background as soon as you mentioned it. I'd love to have a screenshot of my website. I was like, I can give you one of those. Let's go. [00:24:39] Speaker B: If I could. I've never seen this big kiss right now, now, Justin, I would. Because you know how many times I've thought about this? Because I tell that story occasionally and you know. Exactly. I've been trying to sell freaking art online for years. Wow. That first one gave me shivers. Unreal. [00:24:55] Speaker C: 2009. Let's go. [00:24:59] Speaker B: This photo. This photo of. Of us on the workshop that was at Stevenson's Falls down the Otways in July 2005. I think it was first or second year. I ran workshops. And there's 12 of us. Or four. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. There were two or three people who didn't make it across the creek. We had to wait across the creek in waiters, right? There was a flood and had taken out the bridge. And what we had to do was bring our own waders along, and we didn't have enough pairs for everybody, so we had to string this rope across the creek and we all had to wear waders. And then we had to sort of like take the waiters off on the other side and then ship them back to the other side to get people across. So there were 12 people plus Glenn, who was leading the workshop and I on that workshop. And all I did. I still reference it to this day. All I did all weekend was just count heads, right? Have we lost anybody? Have we lost anybody? And I just said, never again. And now we run workshops. You know, I've heard the term by you and Bell saying eight is great, which I love, because we used to take a maximum of eight, and now we're more like two to four to five. I mean, four is my ideal. Yeah, I love it. I love the intimate stuff. Of course, you don't make as much money, but for me, it's more about just being connected to the guests who are coming along, giving them my full attention. Oh, God. What's going on? [00:26:21] Speaker C: Flash player. We all went through that. [00:26:27] Speaker B: We all went through that phase. We all went through that phase. [00:26:32] Speaker C: Still. [00:26:33] Speaker B: Flash don't tell me. You see, this is why I've never sold out online for Flash Player me. Terrible. You didn't have like to swear on this or. [00:26:41] Speaker C: No, absolutely. You didn't have like automatic music playing at one point, did you? [00:26:49] Speaker B: Probably no. [00:26:50] Speaker C: This one won't. How many of those websites have you built, Justin, with automatic music? Never. Never. That got drilled into me fast and hard. I worked in a web so I, I actually was in a marketing company for a little while and I was the, I was the digital marketer just I guess because I was young and young. [00:27:09] Speaker B: He still looks 12. Look at him. [00:27:13] Speaker C: I think we've, we've reached the limits of Wayback Machine. So I worked in this like dev room of five really good web developers and yeah, anything like that, autoplaying. Anything with autoplaying music was a no. No. All the sort of user interface stuff that I carried on to today that would just be like. No, we just look at people's websites and they were just brutal on. Yeah. So. [00:27:37] Speaker B: And. But how much were people charging to build a Flash website for you you couldn't access because you had to download the, the Flash, you know, app in order to use it? Like, my God, what were we thinking? Thank God for Web 2.0. [00:27:54] Speaker C: We're gonna see. Not it's nowhere near as bad but. And we've been dealing with it for years now and I don't know why, you know the cookies pop up that comes up on every single website ever. Like, what are we doing? What, what are we doing? Like, oh, do you accept cookies? Like just. No, let's just delete that. Yes, we either use cookies or we don't use cookies. We don't need to have a pop up on every website on the Internet asking everybody if they don't accept cookies. [00:28:18] Speaker B: And then if you don't accept it then goes through to these preferences and you have to tick the preferences and you're kind of like, oh, oh come on, what are we doing? [00:28:27] Speaker C: That'll be, that'll be a similar phase to Flash websites. [00:28:31] Speaker B: Well, thank you so much for showing that to me. I am, I'm gonna. As soon as I jump off this call, I'm ringing Mary and I'm gonna. [00:28:37] Speaker C: Show her that go dig in. So yeah, way back. If not I'll, I'll send you the, the link to it. But yeah, it's easy to find. [00:28:42] Speaker B: Thank you so much. [00:28:43] Speaker C: That's great. Before we get back into the actual episode. As much as that fun. [00:28:49] Speaker B: Is that why we're here for the. [00:28:52] Speaker C: Listeners now we're here for us. Few, few comments in the chat. Tim Siama says whole crew is here today. Hello. Yeah, good to see you Tim. [00:28:59] Speaker B: Hey. [00:28:59] Speaker C: Tim is here and I don't know what Digi Frog saying something about the boys saying something. I don't know. Oh yeah, he didn't say g'day to us. Yeah, that's what you get. Dennis has an actual question now. We're going to ask Dennis. [00:29:15] Speaker B: Dennis is. Look, I've read this question, I've read this question. He's just, it's making it all about himself again. Yeah, yeah, he's trying to find it. [00:29:23] Speaker C: He's trying to find new locations by. [00:29:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've already invited him to Lake Baikal in Russia and said you got to come there. You know the largest freshwater frozen lake in the world that freezes over every winter with at least a meter of ice, which I've been to two or three times now and I've said, man, you could go there and have a freaking ball like you know, out in the middle of nowhere spinning your spinny things and then you know, ice caves that you can get into. Friggin phenomenal. You'll see it all on my website there, of course. Tomput.com Not 2000, not 2004 version. Yeah, yeah. So but yes. Yeah. [00:29:59] Speaker A: On that note, what, what do you think is the most extreme location that you've been to? An extreme. Could be it was dangerous because of this photo. [00:30:10] Speaker B: Oh my God. I'm channeling my inner Peter Lick now. Yeah. [00:30:13] Speaker A: You know, I want to. [00:30:14] Speaker B: Whether it be Peter Lick too, whether it be Justin, put it on your list. Yeah. [00:30:19] Speaker A: What is the most extreme? No, no, you're right. What is. I live with someone who has adhd, so I get it. What, yeah. What is that location? [00:30:29] Speaker B: What. [00:30:29] Speaker A: What was the most extreme? Like intense to get to a little bit of danger, a little bit of excitement. [00:30:35] Speaker B: What. [00:30:35] Speaker A: What was the standout for you? [00:30:39] Speaker B: Wow. I wish I had a really cool answer for this. I feel like I haven't done enough in order to have a good example of this. But you know, Lake Baikal in Russia. Let's just continue with that because I'll tell a story. First time we went, I, we were, we were starting the workshop in Baikal which if for those who don't know where that is, if you sort of look on a map, sort of north of Perth, Singapore, straight up into eastern Russia, it's this sort of banana shaped lake and it is huge. It's 2600 km circumference to go around it. Right. Wow. So as I said, it's the largest freshwater lake in the world. It holds 22% of the world's freshwater. And if Mary was here right now, she'd say, thanks, Rain Man, I'm full of useless facts. And so, you know, when we went there, we started in Baikal and then we flew to Moscow and we were finishing up with a few days shooting around Moscow. So when I booked the flight for the first time, we went Melbourne, Singapore, Dubai, Moscow. And then I had to go. That's it right there. Yeah. And then I had to go Moscow, fly another six hours back on myself to get to Auts, which is just the left hand side there of, excuse me, of Baikala in the bottom left hand corner. It took me 41 hours door to door to get there. Right. I was absolutely shattered by the time I got there because I wanted to take the whole, you know, the return Moscow flight, which was totally useless. So it was an epic journey just to get there. Anyway, it's as I said, it freezes over. We go there sort of January, February, when the wars aren't on. And I must have missed the memo on the first day because we had two cars. They're these, they're these crazy little Mitsubishi. Mitsubishi. No, they're just these crappy little four wheel drive vans. The name escapes me. It starts with the D. Anyway, Justin, I'll Google it. [00:32:43] Speaker C: Delica. [00:32:44] Speaker B: Delica. Thank you, Jim. [00:32:46] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [00:32:49] Speaker B: And you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can imagine being in Russia, eastern Russia of all places. These things have rip seats and look like they would barely, you know, go, let alone, you know, take us out on the ice and save our lives potentially. Anyway, so Anton jumps in the front vehicle, I jump in the back vehicle. It's first thing in the morning, first day, it's pitch black. We're going out for a sunrise shoot, which was probably leaving at about, I don't know, 8 or 9 o'clock, you know, because the light doesn't get up all that early at that time of year. And on goes my seatbelt. He just suddenly rushes from his car and just taps on the door on the window and just goes, tom, Tom, Tom on. And I'm like, why? What happened? What happened? And he goes, don't ever put your seatbelt on. And I'm like, oh, oh, okay. I didn't even ask. I had to work it out myself. Anyway, the reason you don't put your seatbelt on. And I told this story to Mary and she's like, I don't get it. Why don't you put your seatbelt on? And I'm like, think about it, babe. Think about it. You're driving on this frozen lake and it's really complicated. You just don't just go and drive and have fun. There's. Ice can form in many different ways and it also melts in many different ways. And in one way are these huge cracks that go through the ice, through the lake, and they're random. And Anton is constantly getting updates from his, his guides out on the lake, locals out on the lake, mapping it all on his phone, etc. Etc. As to where those, all these cracks are because they, you obviously have to navigate through them in order to then. Yeah, they're similar to that, but there's also freaking big ones as well, you know, that one looks pretty spots. No, that's tiny compared to big mounds, cracks like this. Freaking huge ones. Right. Anyway, you know, of course you don't want your seatbelt on because if the car falls through one of those cracks, you want to be able to get out quick smart. And, you know, you don't want to be fiddling around for your seat belt, you know, for a couple of seconds or more. If you're going down to 1.6km. It's also the deepest lake in the world, I believe. So. Yeah. It's one mile deep in its deepest spot. I think it averages 600 to 700 meters deep throughout the whole lake. So. Yeah. Yes, many stories. Not. Not, I don't think necessarily so much, you know, photographic groups, although I can't be sure, but private, you know, private people, people who just come out, hire a car, don't know what they're doing, drive into, crack down and go, yeah, yeah. Well, I don't think there's loss of life necessarily. Let's not be true. Dramatic. But yeah, you can imagine how freaking scary that would be, particularly at night. Yeah. [00:35:26] Speaker C: What brought you to this location originally? What. How did it get on your radar? And then. And then what? What made you take the first. [00:35:32] Speaker B: Great question. So I guess part of what I love doing with my work and I haven't had enough time to do that lately, is just to research, just to open books, open magazines, you know. I was up in the corner country of, you know, Queensland the other day and I picked this up and I just pick it up and I just flick through it and I look at photos and I look at maps and I go, oh, I wonder what's there. Blah, blah, blah. Just curiosity. And I think I just stumbled across it one day, this, you know, largest freshwater lake in the world that freezes over. And did some research and found some really interesting photos of it and went, hey, that'd be a pretty cool place to go. Let's try and organize a workshop there. You know, we did the similar with the Faroe Islands years ago, where else? There's been two or three places in the world where, you know, we've sort of been the first to offer workshops from here in Australia to travel there. And so, yeah, I just dug and dug a. Dug and then found this, this the guide in, in Russia, who is a very, very good friend of mine. Now, Anton, you know, I love finding guides who have similar values to me. They run their own small business, they run workshops like I do. And then we just form these lifelong friendships where, you know, we obviously try and work together as often as possible. But then also too, we, we, we build on ideas together. You know, you know, he's running stuff and I'm running stuff, and we collaborate together. And so part of my downtime in inverted commas is doing that research for places to run future workshops that are different to everybody else as well. You know, when I started my workshops back in 2005, there were two other photographers that I know of who were running landscape photography workshops. One was Darren Leal, and the other one was the late Richard White. And, and so there wasn't this, let's just say, buffet now of workshops like there is today. It's brilliant. I'm not complaining about it at all. You know, the industry has grown exponentially. It's not like, you know, I started off and I had a third of the pie, and now I have a very small segment because, you know, there's so many other more people doing it. I'm not ever in that mindset. I'm always in the mindset of growing the pie rather than, you know, slicing it up even further. And you'll, you'll have to admit that there's far more people who are aware that workshops are available and that want to do workshops these days. And not only the growth of workshops, but the growth of photography in general. You know, that's a whole episode itself on the mindset and people wanting to do photography because it is, you know, good for their mental health, for example. So, you know, like, these days, there's lots of people offering it, and I don't want to be offering the same workshops that they are necessarily, because then it's just. It often comes down to price. And I think one of the the sort of what I hear around the traps is my workshops are so expensive and I think what people, what people perhaps do some people do is that they look at a workshop that I'm offering and they look at a workshop that somebody else is offering and then they just compare on price because they go, oh well, they go to the same location and they oh, you know, the accommodations included and blah blah, blah. Not realizing that perhaps the accommodation that we're including includes your own room, you know, with the ensuite bathroom and that, you know, alcohol is included and that you're not going to be crammed into a full four wheel drive vehicle. There's actually going to be a seat in between you two in the back. So it's going to be more comfortable, let alone, you know, the experience that I have, etc. Etc. And I think to bring that home, one of the experiences I had recently was actually going on somebody else's workshop. So I'm into bird photography. How I got into photography was back when I was about 13 years old, I was a bird watcher since I was nine years old. Ornithology. If I use bird watcher, everybody takes the mickey out of me and makes jokes about, you know, the feathered variety. But you know, I got into bird photography and I freaking loved it. And then I sort of fell out of love with it a little because I got distracted by sports photography, landscape photography and all that stuff that we'll get onto. But more recently, unfortunately, one of the my dear friends who I used to go bird watching with died. And I hadn't seen her for many years. I sort of lost contact with her and her nephew rings me out of the blue. She didn't have any kids, brings me out of the blue and says, oh, you won't know me, my name's David. You of course know that Doris passed away, you know, last year. Well, she actually left you some money in her will and I was just like, oh my God, like amazing, you know, and totally unexpected. And so she left this small parcel of money which was very generous. And I said to my wife Mary, I said, how are we going to honor her beautiful gift, you know, what are we going to do? And of course I love publishing books and I thought, oh well, one day I'll publish a book and we can dedicate that to her. And Nikon, God bless them, released this bloody kick ass. 800 mil 6.3, you know, Z series lens. And I'm like, I've always wanted to own an 800 mil lens for bird photography. How good would that be? And so, you know, we bought that and the rest is history. So my point being is that I went on a recent workshop with a mate of mine that I've been following on Instagram for a few years. And, you know, his work is in what I consider to be the best out there, but he also charges a premium for that. And I'm like, I could go on other workshops, but their photographs aren't as good. So do I want to take their photos or do I want to take his photos? And I'm like, I'm going to pay a premium in order to go on his workshops because it looks like he can deliver and his photography is freaking amazing. Right. My point being is that I don't think that's considered sometimes when people are coming to sort of look at Workshop A versus Workshop B. I hope it is, but I don't think it always is. And it probably does. You know, of course, for, for a lot of people comes down to price because they've got a budget. And I, I understand that not everybody can afford sometimes what we offer. [00:41:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I think having choice is good. And having varying price ranges. I, I do wonder about how crowded the market it's becoming, especially with a newer generation of kind of influencer type. [00:41:41] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:41:41] Speaker A: Kind of youth market who are making the loudest noise, especially on socials. [00:41:48] Speaker B: They're very good at doing it. That's the thing around what they're doing. [00:41:50] Speaker A: And. [00:41:51] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:41:51] Speaker A: And you know, and I think you're right. I think that people need to know what they're buying. They need to research it, they need to spend time understanding. And it's like this with buying anything. You know, you can go and buy, you know, a Nissan Delica or you can go get a Toyota Tarago. Like there's a big price difference. But, you know, like, it's, it's about quality versus value. So. Yeah, and it's, it's being able to sort of, I guess. I mean, I don't run workshops, so I can't really speak to this very clearly. But being able to communicate what that value is to someone, you know. [00:42:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:42:29] Speaker A: Lucky straps. You know, we, we make and sell premium handmade, handcrafted leather camera straps here in Australia. Plenty of other brands won't do that, that will offshore. They will. You know, there's the whole TEMU market. There's, you know, it's all about what you're prepared to pay for. And, and you know, you can either buy, here's a plug, you can either buy one lucky strap for your whole life or eight Temu straps just for this year. [00:42:55] Speaker C: You probably buy 80. You could probably buy 80T bootstraps. Yeah. I was about to say, nicely done, Greg. That's ad read number one without having. [00:43:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I didn't even mean to. [00:43:07] Speaker B: Exactly. And this is where the banner comes across the screen, the web address, you. [00:43:12] Speaker C: Know, something like that. Run it across the bottom like that. [00:43:18] Speaker A: And if only it was a handy barcode that people could like it. [00:43:21] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:43:21] Speaker C: If you scan the code near Tom's head, you'll get. You'll actually get 15 off. [00:43:27] Speaker B: There you go. [00:43:27] Speaker C: There you go. Beautiful. [00:43:28] Speaker B: Amazing. Get onto it while, like, before they run out, you know, you've always got to have like a. Oh, yeah, well, stuff. Oh, yeah, exactly. Like a reason. [00:43:39] Speaker C: There's only one left. You better get it fast. [00:43:41] Speaker B: That's it. [00:43:43] Speaker C: So I'm actually scrolling through some of your workshops at the moment, which look insane. Like, just. It's like the bucket list of stuff to pick from, you know, like these. These are all the things that people dream about doing. If you guys, if you haven't seen, just go to tomputworkshops.com and scroll along there and you'll just see all the things that you wish you could do. And honestly, yes, from my perspective, the prices, Some of the prices do hit you. Like, hit me to the point where I'm like, well, I couldn't afford to do that, you know, which, like Greg says, choice is good, though, because some people can afford to do it and maybe one day I would be able to afford to do it. And if anyone that's traveled to some of these locations, even just. I think that's the other thing people maybe don't consider is just traveling some of these places. If you add everything up, maybe, maybe you don't think about it because you just go, oh, the flights would be this and the accommodations that. So I don't know. But then once you, you know, once you take into account all the other incidental costs that are potentially included in these tours, plus having someone along with you to guide you, like, it's probably. The prices probably aren't that different to what you would end up spending if you just did it yourself in a similar level of quality and stuff too. So. Yeah. [00:45:01] Speaker B: Yeah. Thanks, Justin. Yeah, I think, you know, the other thing is too, is that you could. There's always the potential to do it yourself. But are you going to be able to get to the right places at the right. Find the right places at the right Times, you know, spend two weeks rather than the week that we're there in order to see the same things, you know, leveraging off the experience that we have, say in the Faroe Islands, where, you know, you've got to book fairies and you've got to book them well in advance. And if you don't know that information, you could, well rock up there and not even get across to some of the islands that you want to go and photograph, where to stay, not knowing that there's a supermarket or there isn't a supermarket on that island, all that sort of stuff. Pharaoh's is. Is probably one of the more logistically challenging workshops that we run because of that. And, and, you know, being in a foreign country where they don't necessarily speak English as their first language, that's challenging as well. So all those things, I think that we can add value whereby people can go, well, I've always wanted to go to that location. That sounds amazing. You know, I'll go with Tom because he's been there before. And just like the experience that I had, you know, doing this bird photography tour in, in Channel country of Queensland just last week, you know, you literally pay your money and turn up and everything's taken care of. You don't have to worry about where you're eating, what time you need to be up, where you're going, you know, research, you know, it's all. It's. It's brilliant. And it was great for me to experience that from a customer point of view, because that's the same experience that we provide for our clientele. And now I get it. Now I get, why not. Let's not talk about price. I get more like, why they want to come on more, because at the end of the day, if they have a good experience on one and they can afford to come back and do another, they're kind of like, wow, that was so good. Why wouldn't I want more of that? It's like a, you know, it's like coffee or, or drugs. Not that I do drugs or anything like that. You kind of like get your first hit and then you kind of like, wow, give that to me again. That was amazing. Do you know what I mean? You know, so do you have a pretty good return rate for up to about 91? Was. Was. I think the return rate back in 2022. It sits around the 80% right now. Because we're, we're trying to introduce more people to the workshops who perhaps haven't heard from us before. So we're Doing a little bit of social media marketing, things like that. But, you know, we can't keep going back to the same world all the time. We have a VIP list that, you know, get first dibs on our workshops sometimes, you know, whereby we're like, hey, we're just going to introduce this new workshop. But it's really limited on places because we're hiring a. We're charting our boat in Alaska, right. And we've got like, you know, four rooms, you know, six people can come along. You know, like, we just want to make it exclusive and we have to reward those. And I want to. I shouldn't say have to. We want to reward those people who have rewarded us, you know, over the years. Yes, they've become a multiple workshops. We've got a lady who's. We've got multiple people now for running them 20 years, 26, 27 workshops they've been on. We've got three or four clientele clients now, or should I say guests that have been on over 20 workshops. And so. And they come on multiple workshops. I, I call them my, I call them my workshop wives. I've got my, my wife Mary here at home, and then I've got my workshop wife and I've just hired a va. So she's my, she's my, you know, virtual wife. You know, I literally spend more time with them than I do sometimes with Mary. Like this year alone, I've, I've been home, I think, six weeks of the, of the sort of the first four months of the year. So, you know, they, they're close friends. You know, I don't consider them clients. They're just. We love hanging out together. I love what I do. I love spending time with them. Of course, you can't run these workshops without enjoying the company that you're spending time with because you're literally with them, you know, like 24, seven almost. You know, like, besides sleeping in separate rooms, you wake up, you have breakfast with them, you take them out on shoots, you're with them all day, you're doing lightroom sessions, you're traveling to a new location in the cars, etc, so you're spending a good, you know, 15, 18 hours a day with them, which, you know, I love. Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't do it otherwise. But yeah, it can be pretty full on like that. [00:49:06] Speaker C: Pretty cool. You're booked out for the 2027 Alaska. Like that's. [00:49:10] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's the, that's an example. Well, that's an example. For example you know, we go like, oh, okay, hold on. We can't fit that into the. I booked that almost 12 months ago where we couldn't fit into the schedule before then. And so with the. The, you know, the boat operator, we said, well, how does April 2027 sound? And then we had little number of spaces. I went to my VIPs and said, you know, we're looking at this trip to Alaska. What do you think? And they went, yeah, we'd love to do it. And so that booked out without us even having to go to, you know, the market, so to speak, and advertise it to our database. For example, that we have a sort of hierarchy of how we run the workshops, which is basically, you know, offer it to our VIPs first, then offer it to the people on the. On. On the. You know, those people who, through the website have made an inquiry about it, perhaps, and then offer it to the general mailing list and then from there offer it to, you know, the general public through socials, etc. So, yeah, that's how the sort of. [00:50:09] Speaker C: Business runs the Kimberly Heli Safari. Sounds insane. [00:50:12] Speaker B: Yes. [00:50:12] Speaker C: Have you ran this before or. [00:50:13] Speaker B: I've run that three times now, so that's an interesting story. [00:50:17] Speaker C: Tell us about. [00:50:18] Speaker B: Freaking amazing. Actually, on that page, there should be down the bottom. [00:50:23] Speaker C: Oh, not. Not in this page. Or on. [00:50:26] Speaker B: Yeah, when you. When you click on. Learn more. Yeah, down there, bottom there. When you go a bit further down, there should be a video that actually is a highlight reel from the first time we ran it. So keep going, keep going. This is like a funnel, supposedly. There it is there. Why is it buried all the way down there? It should be up. [00:50:45] Speaker C: Well, I'm gonna press play with it. [00:50:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll talk over the top of it. Yeah, yeah, I'll just. [00:50:50] Speaker C: If. If the sound blasts everyone's ears off. I'm sorry, I'll manage it. [00:50:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Turn it off. Yeah, yeah. Why is it not playing? [00:50:56] Speaker C: I haven't pressed play yet. [00:50:58] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [00:51:00] Speaker C: But I'm about. [00:51:00] Speaker B: Do you want me to talk over the top of it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. So this was all shot on an iPhone. I've since got one of those little DJI pocket osmos, which I freaking love. [00:51:12] Speaker C: How good are those? [00:51:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I do love them. I took it to Antarctica this year and it was so good to use because different to an iPhone, where you generally have to hold two hands, you know, you can be holding these. This in one hand, holding on to, you know, the Zodiac or whatever with the other. And so it's really what's with your. [00:51:29] Speaker C: So this thing. I need to show you this. I paused it. [00:51:32] Speaker B: What is that? [00:51:33] Speaker C: I modified this mount. I can make you one. It's got the OSMO mount on it, right? [00:51:37] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:51:39] Speaker C: Then this goes around your neck and you shoot POV footage of what you're doing hands free, and it's all smooth. And then you just clip the little. The DJI mic. You just clip that bad boy on there. [00:51:51] Speaker B: And you can talk about Windows. [00:51:52] Speaker C: And I'm just talking. All right, I'm going to go and try and take a photo of this. This street sign. [00:51:56] Speaker B: Yes. [00:51:56] Speaker C: Oh, that's a terrible photo. All right, we're going to move on. And. And that's. That was my. That was how I made 30 YouTube videos in 30 days. [00:52:05] Speaker B: Really? [00:52:05] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:52:06] Speaker B: And it was quite smooth. Like, it's not too jumpy. [00:52:08] Speaker C: Super smooth. Because it's a gimbal. That's. That's the key. And. And because it focuses like action cams are, they don't focus. They've got like a infinity focus kind of thing. So they. To just get everything. This actually focuses. So if you lift your camera screen up to it, it focuses on the camera screen, nice and sharp. And then if you pull it away, it focuses on the. You know, on the landscape. So, yeah, this. This little mount thing was like 50 bucks. And then I just had to cut. It had a phone holder, a magnetic phone holder on it. And then I just like sliced it off with a hacksaw and then screwed the DJI mount onto it. [00:52:42] Speaker B: Unreal. [00:52:43] Speaker C: So that's my little. My little love in my pocket hack. [00:52:48] Speaker B: That wouldn't work for me, Justin. As much as I love it, it wouldn't work for me because I probably just have it turned to me most of the time. Selfie, mate. [00:52:58] Speaker C: You should do that. People would love that video. Your face while you shoot it and you can't see what's happening. [00:53:04] Speaker B: Have you seen that guy who. Who runs around the UK younger. [00:53:08] Speaker A: The train guy? [00:53:09] Speaker B: Yes, the train guy. Oh, my God. [00:53:14] Speaker C: That gets a. Excited about the trains. [00:53:17] Speaker B: Excited? [00:53:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He wears that on his hat or something, like a head mount, and it. [00:53:22] Speaker B: Just distorts his face. He's got. Yeah. And he's not the most attractive fellow in the first place, but he. He gets. How many millions has he got? Yeah, he's crazy. Two million followers on Facebook, on Instagram, I should say 2.4 million from 257 posts. Has he been deleting posts or something like, this is unbelievable. [00:53:44] Speaker C: Anyway, I can't remember someone who said it, but someone once said to me, the key for content like that is being interested is interesting. So people are, people are so excited about something about the content because he's so interested and excited about. And people can see straight into that. And that's. And I've always thought about that. I was like, that's what people want to see is someone that's just excited and passionate about something. Even if they don't care about trains, they still find it cool that he cares so much about trains. [00:54:16] Speaker B: I've got an example of that. Back in the 90s when I was just a wee fellow, I started a Bachelor of Science degree at Melbourne, right. And my brother ended up being a geologist of all things. But geology wasn't my favorite subject at uni. In fact, nothing was. But there was this lecturer called Dr. Ian Plimer. I can still remember his name to this day. And he was so fascinating and such an engaging speaker that everyone would turn up to his lectures. You'd just love the content. And he had the, the, the record, or should I say he had the reputation whereby no one had thrown a paper plane in any of his lectures. You know how you're bored, you roll jaffers down there, you know, the aisle, or you throw paper planes, shit like that. Right. The immature things we did back then. Yeah, no one had thrown because they were just A, to be disrespectful, but B, just so engaged in what he was saying and so he was so passionate. Like he would spit as he, you know, like would talk and wouldn't draw breath for the whole 60 minutes. Things like that. And it does, it rubs off on people and, you know, we all want a bit of that where people are passionate about what they do and what they're into. So, yeah, I totally get why he's popular for sure. Where were we anyway? We were back to the. Yeah, just we're in the focus on a very big change in there. [00:55:31] Speaker C: I know, I love it. It's gonna be a five hour show. [00:55:35] Speaker B: Stick to the program here. Now we can do part B. We can talk about the business of photography after this. Because, you know, to be honest, 80 of what I do is admin. 20 of it is photography a lot of the time. And then I love the 80, 20 principle. I use it all the time in my life. But, you know, 80% of what I love about photography is the business side and 20% is the photography because, you know, I love photography. I'm probably not as. What does I say it's not that I'm not passionate about it. I'm not as sort of like the word will come to me. I'm not as, you know, like just obsessed, let's just use that word. You know. I was obsessed with photography for a long time whereby I just couldn't take enough photos. Whereas these days it's not necessarily about the photography for me, it's about making a success with my gallery, with, you know, my books, running the workshops, things like that. And I find I'm, I'm one of those people again, ADHD get bored easily so therefore I need to be challenged all the time. So when we come back to talking about my sort of career in photography, I'll talk about my sports photography career where I left it after three years because I was just bored. I was like, I've learned probably 80% of what I need to learn here. I'm going through the motions, I'm not feeling challenged, so I'm going to move on. And so I need to re. Engage or I should need, should I say I need to sort of like find reason and purpose in the work that I do and be as a self employed, you know, photographer to keep me engaged and involved and challenged, you know, every minute of the day. So I wake up with a purpose. [00:57:08] Speaker C: Let's dig into this tangent before we go. The Kimberly, the Kimberly video. [00:57:13] Speaker B: Look, imagine this on a. Can you imagine this on a, like a tree or you know, like one of those mind maps? Those mind maps. It'd be insane. Yeah, yeah. [00:57:22] Speaker C: Do you. Because this, I'm trying to see if the way my brain works is maybe similar to the way your brain works once you, you get good and. Yeah, you never know. Once you get good enough at something. [00:57:36] Speaker B: Yes. [00:57:36] Speaker C: Do you find it hard to stay applied to that thing? Yeah, as. [00:57:40] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:57:41] Speaker C: So like, so I've always felt that I get kind of good enough but then I. To do that, that extra work and dedication that maybe takes you from like, you know, pretty good to world class. Yes. Is, is very difficult for me and then I'll often move on to maybe a different, maybe similar, but different or whatever. Is that what you mean when you say you got good at different sports? [00:58:03] Speaker B: I do, I do, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and it was, and again it was like for that sports photography example, I could see other people in the industry who were perhaps more passionate and more skilled than I was and did I want to go down that path or not? Did I see myself in 20 years time still photographing sport and I was like no, not for me. These guys are seriously good. They're better than I probably could ever be. And not that it becomes competitive, but was more just like, this is just not the path I want to take anymore. It was kind of almost. I'd tick that box. So for me, in my sports photography career, I joined the company Sport the Library, who were the official photographers to the Australian Olympic committee back in October 1998. And they sent me to the Olympics in the year 2000 in Sydney. Right, that's cool. As a young sports photographer, 26 years old, having very little sort of experience in sports photography, being one of the nine photographers to the Australian labor committee at your home Olympics, and being One of maybe 400 photographers who get to go to the Olympics every four years, that was just like, oh, my God, I've climbed Everest. Like, more is there. [00:59:15] Speaker C: You peaked early. You peaked. [00:59:16] Speaker B: I peaked very early. Very early. I. I had a very sort of rough start, and it was touch and go there for a while with. With regards to whether or not I keep my job even. I remember my boss pulling me in after three months and going, how do you think it's going? And I'm like, oh, no. I was a young cock guy. I was like, no, it's going great. I'm loving it. You know, he's like, well, you know. Well, yeah, we. Is it though? You know, like, so I. I had to sort of pull my socks up. There was a few, I think, personality clashes that he and I had. I think, again, like a bit of two balls in the paddock type thing. [00:59:50] Speaker C: What. What do you think was the. What were the challenges? Like, what was it? Was it the way that you were working within the organization? Was it the image quality? What was it where you. [00:59:59] Speaker B: No, I think it was. Yeah. I think it was more personality more than anything else. I think at the end of the day, I was a little too big for my boots, so he just needed to cut me down the size of it and have me perhaps be a little bit more of a team player rather than anything else. I've tried to block that out, to be honest. Justin, you know, like, sorry. Yeah, it was. We're still friends now. We don't keep in touch much, but Jeff's an amazing guy and I have to thank him so much for the opportunity. [01:00:25] Speaker A: Can I ask you a. Sorry, Tom. I was just gonna jump in. Can I ask you a gear related question? What were you shooting during Sydney 2000? [01:00:34] Speaker B: I still have it. I still have it. It's in the garage Film days. Shooting on transparencies. So I worked for a sports photographic library called Sport the Library. I don't know where they're still around these days, but it was, you know, all on transparency films. So we went. We're an agency, so we were taking photographs on spec. So, like we were taking them not necessarily for a client, we're taking them with the hope of perhaps selling them in the future. So, you know, to magazines and, and to athletes and to advertising agencies, stuff like that. So it was all transparency films. Sensio 100 for those who can remember. Fuji Sensio 100, what a great film that was. We went through bucket loads of that stuff. And my boss was shooting Nikon and he said to me, if you decide to go down the path of Nikon, all of those cameras are and all of those lenses are available to you. But I was a Canon guy. I got given a canon for my 21st birthday from my grandparents and I had a Canon 100 QD or something like that. And I've got a Sigma 35 to 70 lens and I got a Canon 100 to 300 miles, 4.5 to 5.6. Anyway, yeah, so I shot the Sydney Olympics on a Canon 1N EOS 1N, which was their flag or top level, you know, professional. Three, maybe five frames. As Justin furiously looks to his. Is that it there? [01:02:00] Speaker C: Brilliant focus. [01:02:02] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. [01:02:05] Speaker C: It's a one end, but I had to get it off Marketplace. It's got a data back on it. So it doesn't have the aperture wheel, but it does have a data back. To put the data back is what. [01:02:15] Speaker B: I had on my first. On my first EOS camera. [01:02:19] Speaker C: Yeah, interesting. I'll sell you this one for whatever nostalgia. I'll trade you for a workshop. [01:02:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, let's do that. [01:02:26] Speaker C: Let's do the Kimberly. The Kimberly workshop. [01:02:29] Speaker B: Absolutely, yeah. Tag along on that. So, yeah, it was. And so the funny thing about that was that I was dead broke and I got this job. I literally was driving a 1967 Holren Tirana that my grandmother won in a competition and then gave to me. And it had a hole in the floor where the accelerator pedal was. You could literally. The battery wouldn't. Wouldn't start half the time. So you could literally just. It was so light, this car, that you could jump out of the car, push start at yourself and then just jump in and quickly ram it in a second and off you went. It was a disaster. Had no heating, no cooling, whatever it was. What color was it still had it. It Was. It was, it was a maroon typey red. And it was the first car, first, hold on, Toronto, that they did they build the engine here in Australia and then the body was made overseas or vice versa. Anyway, you lifted the bottom on this thing and the, the casing for it was huge. But the, the motor itself was like this. I was like, hold on, where's the motor? I can't see it. Oh yeah, there it. This right down there. It was unbelievable. So I was dead broke and I get this job with Jeff at support the Library. And he goes, you're gonna need to upgrade your gear. And I'm like, yeah, fair enough. And so I said, what do I need? And he goes, well, get yourself, you know, a canon this. Get two bodies, because you need two bodies. Get a wide angle so you know, you're 17 to 35. That was before they had the 16 to 35. 2.8, 7202.8, 402.8. He came to 18 grand more than that. Let's call it 20, 24. I remember ringing up the, the bank, the bank of Melbourne, I think it was. I'd been banking with them for years and they said, we've got your application for this loan. Should we just run you through it, you know, answer a few questions and I'm sure no problems. I'm shitting my pants because I needed this gear to get the job. And the only question they asked me was, so just let me get this straight, in order for you to have this job, you need this gear? And I'm like, yes. And he goes, okay, no problem. Just come by and grab the check whenever you like. So I went into the city, signed over for this check, and I had this check in my hand. And you can imagine as a 24 year old with no money having, you know, 20, I think I look, I hope I took a photo of it. No, we didn't have phones back then. So I just looked, stared at this, this check for ages. Walked out a camera exchange in Collins Street. Was it Burke Collins, one of those. And, and, and handed over the check. And they handed me all this gear and I was happy as I had a 400 Canon Greg 402.8 lens, right, that had a, you know, front element on like, like a dinner plate. Yeah, that weighed nine kilos out of the box and 13 kilos in the box. You know, one of those like, you know how the cricketers all used to get around with those, those big boxes to hold all their bats in. I carried one of those on planes for years while I worked this job to the point that I think only once did I get refused not to carry it on the plane. But 13, thanks very much. In the overt locker just. It became my extension of my right hand. Yeah, heavy beast. Lucky I was young and buff back. [01:05:38] Speaker C: Then, but you were young and buff. I saw you, you were running triathlons and stuff. [01:05:43] Speaker B: Stuff. I was doing triathlons. Isn't that. Why have I still got that photo on my website? Yeah, because it's a little bit, a little bit different. These. Oh, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, you know, it's a Hacking back to my former days where I'd hit the gym three or four times a week and yeah, I, I got into triathlon and that's in fact how I got into sports photography because I was chasing, you know, the Hawaii Iron Man Triathlon and taking photographs there every year and world, you know, triathlon championships over in Perth and stuff like that. And I was paying my way to go there because when I wasn't competing in triathlons, I was wanting to photograph them. So I was never anything, you know, other than a sort of middle of the road age grouper. I was a good swimmer, but my biking and running, running weren't so good and so I'd go along the local events. I'd just go along to anything to try and practice. And in the end I, I left. I finished my degree in psych and sociology at Monash. And then I was like, right, what am I going to do now? I want to be a sports photographer. And so I, I went to, to Jeff and he gave me a job and, and he liked my portfolio because I had all of these great sort of sports photos from back in the day. I think I still got the portfolio in my garage in fact. But yeah, that's how it started. I was, I was competing in triathlon a fair bit, even running a few marathons, which I don't consider myself to be a marathon runner at all. I have not got the frame for it. I weigh about 90 kilos now, but. And I'm just under 6 foot, so I'm a little bit heavy for the marathons. But yeah, some of the best times of my life. That was, it was unreal. [01:07:11] Speaker C: So cool, so cool that it basically stepped you into the job that launched it all. That's amazing. [01:07:16] Speaker B: Yeah, it did. Yeah. Right, where are we? Yeah, where were we looking at that Kimberly video? I think we researched. [01:07:29] Speaker C: Tom, do you Research all the tours before you make them or you can't. [01:07:33] Speaker B: No, just wing it, mate. Just rock up. [01:07:36] Speaker C: No, sorry, not research. I mean, not research. I mean, like go there previously, say, spend a week or two there. [01:07:45] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like most of the time I've been there already, like just, you know, off my own bat or we've obviously run workshops there in the past. It's a good question because one of the, One of the workshops coming up in June next month, in fact, is Carnarvon Gorge in Queensland. And I've never been. I've always wanted to go, but I've never been. So I'm going to arrive about five days earlier, you know, do my recce, do the research and then obviously I'm ready to go for when the participants arrive, for example. But we'll always research a location before we go there. Obviously. Aside from that, if we don't, it's because we're subcontracting to expert guides overseas, for example, I know Australia pretty well, but overseas, where they're experts and they know where to take us. So we're the leaning on them in order to guide us to the right places, get to us to the right place at the right time. [01:08:37] Speaker C: Yeah, but that's part of the fun places. [01:08:40] Speaker B: That's part of the. The fun is. Yes, let's go back to the Ghibli helicopters. We haven't talked about this one. So about seven, eight years ago, I came up with this idea of running a safari, a Hali safari, because I freaking love helicopters and aerial photography, right. And this company that I deal with in the Kimberley, who are unreal, had actually put onto their agenda something similar. And I rang them and I said, I've. I've had this idea in mind for ages. Do you reckon we could modify your safari to include. Included to be more like a photographic safari? And they're like, yeah, no problems, that sounds great. And so I put it out to my database and my VIPs and just did not get any interest. And I'm like, oh, it's too expensive and blah, blah, blah. So we left it for a while that sort of sat on the shelf. How's that? Two helicopters sitting on the top of a waterfall in the middle of frigging nowhere. Oh my God, it is so cool. Drones. I'm just. This is a drone shot just below where the helicopter was. Just, you know, unreal. This is us coming into land in a very remote part of the Kimberley called the Kimberley Coastal Camp, run by my good friends Jules and Tubbs. And you can only get here via plane or boat. There's no road that leads you to this spot at all. And so we left it for a few years and then we revisited it. We put it out there and we had so much interest. Interest that we had to hire two helicopters, rather one. I think there's about three of us in each helicopter. And literally what we do for a week, starting in Kununura, which is in the East Kimberley, is we fly around in helicopters for a week and we. We literally use that as our only mode of transport. It's. It's aerial photography the whole time we're flying. So it's approximately 20 hours of aerial photography as we traverse from one place to the next. Or we just literally land at a place like this and go, right, let's do a quick hop over that, or let's fly to here and land at the top of that waterfall and take some photos there. And they can, as I said, photograph the whole time we're flying along because we'll either have the doors off or there's a sliding window for them to be able to photograph at the same time. And it's freaking incredible. Look at this shot. This is a place called Mount Trafalgar. Crazy. We just. Can we land there? Yeah, why not? You know, that's what we asked the whole time to the helicopter. Top left corner there. That's. Yeah, yeah. And this is taking off from that same spot and it just drops away. And you kind of like got vertigo, right? It's crazy. It's crazy. Good. We've done this three times now. And in fact, I think the best. They're all good. But the best one we did was actually last February where we actually did it in the raining season, the wet season. And so we came. All these waterfalls were pumping. There was no one else up in the Kimberley because all the roads are closed. So we basically had the whole place to ourselves. And we had storms going all around us and we had rain coming out of clouds all the time we were, you know, traveling around. And literally what I love about it most is that you get access to places that you never would have got otherwise. So, you know, oh, can we land there? Oh, yeah, don't see why not. Brad, our pilot, is unreal. Very safe. Safety conscious, though, which is what I love, because I ask him to do stuff and he goes, yeah, no, we're not doing that. I go, okay, no problems. [01:11:57] Speaker A: Let's not push it. [01:11:58] Speaker B: I like being still alive. Yeah, I still want to see my kids and my wife. Thanks very much. So he's very good like that Nathan, the guy in that picture who's, who flew us on the first year, we've become such good friends that he unfortunately left the company soon after this because his wife got a job in Saudi Arabia setting up a lot of the. The marine parks. You know how Saudi Arabia are on this big push now to develop the country into tourism rather than relying on oil. So they're spending billions of dollars on it. Right. And so she got seconded over there in order to set up all their marine parks. She's a marine scientist. And so Nathan's gone over there and flies helicopters in Saudi Arabia. And so he's been hassling me for the last three years. Come over and I'll take you flying. And I'm like, I so want to. I so want to. So, yeah, that's. That's the Kimberly Heli Safari. It's freaking amazing. Unbelievable. But expensive, expensive, expensive to hire those helicopters. Like, they're, they're jet rangers, long ranges, they're. They're thousands of dollars an hour. They have to do fuel drops into those locations the season before we do the safari. So they truck it all in, leave big barrels of fuel, you know, out in the middle of nowhere, and we just land next to them, refuel, and then take off again. But in places where you kind of like, what's around here? Oh, there's a road that sort of comes in and, you know, you're 10 hours away from a bitumen road, and that last 10 hours is on a, you know, rough dirt track and they're dropping off fuel for us. It's amazing. So hence the cost, but crazy value, crazy value for money. [01:13:30] Speaker C: Should we say what the price is out loud? Should we actually say it? Yeah, yeah, it's. It is a very affordable. Well, the, the deposit is only 5,000, but it is, it is, it is $70,000. So it is a. What I want to know is what sort of people. Like, are there some interesting people that come on that, you know, like, people with a lot of. [01:13:54] Speaker B: They're not generally. Yeah, you know, it's not who you think. They're very down to earth people. They're generally people who run their own business or a semi retired or have retired. They've, you know, recent clients of mine have. Or very good clients of mine have just recently sold a couple of businesses that they owned. So, you know, and they're at retirement age and they're kind of like, well, you know, we want to live life while we still can, you know, if we. Yeah. You know, get ill all of a sudden, what point of all is all of this money? To me, you know, I. I think. [01:14:25] Speaker C: It'S so cool because it's. They could, they could, they could be buying a Porsche or something, you know, like, you know, like, you know, you, you get to that age, you've done fairly well, you sell a business or something like that. Yeah, you could, you could go after things, but they're investing in an experience that, that is kind of a once in a lifetime. [01:14:45] Speaker B: Yeah. That's open to a big not can of worms. But that's hit home for me because I think what I got confused with, and perhaps many of us do when we're younger, is chasing that ideal, which is owning your own house, driving the nice car, having lots of material possessions. And, you know, we've had a few stumbling blocks along the way. Obviously, you know, a marriage that didn't work out, you know, having kids and raising kids and all of those challenges. Businesses that perhaps haven't done as well as we'd like, all those sorts of things. And then you get to perhaps my age, which I hate saying, which is 50, and, you know, when you overcome those obstacles, like Mary and I have you, then I am always conscious of saying to Mary, how lucky are we? Which is we have a roof over our head. We don't own our own house, but we live in a nice house. It's not the nicest house in the world, but it's, it's functional. We have kids that still love us, talk to us, want to spend time with us and know of good health. You know, we have pretty much everything we want in life. Which to me, if you could say, what is the most important thing to do in life? I'd say, you know, having a place to live, having good relationships with your family and friends, you know, having food on the table, things like that. I think it's important for me, it's important to just reflect on the things that are basic enough that are the most important things. You know, you can ask people, you know, who are ill health. What would you. What would you change just to have the health back? Right. You know, like, I'd just love to have health back or, you know, unfortunately, I've. I've friends my age who have lost children, you know, what would you do? I'd do anything to have my kids back in my life. You know what I mean? Things like that. So we are very fortunate. I think I've got to keep. I do always Keep reminding myself. One of the best things that I can possibly do at the moment when I'm not traveling is come home, cook a steak on the barbie, sit outside with a beer and light the fire pit. That is a dream night for me at home because I just rarely get the chance to do it. And I think it also just teaches me, you know, that it's not, it's not all this other shit that's important. It's the simple things in life that are often the best, which is, I think a slogan for some company or some ad on TV or anything like that. And I'm getting a bit preachy, but it's. Yeah, I think sometimes we lose sight of all that. You know, it's nice to have. We're in a fortunate position now that, you know, the business have done quite well that we can, you know, afford the things we want. Whereas that's only been probably in the last three or four years. Where I can go, actually I'd love to have that lens or I really need that second camera. So, you know, yeah, I can, I can buy it and worry about the credit card bill later. [01:17:24] Speaker A: Well, that's what comes from hard work, isn't it? And you know, you talked about and I don't think it's preachy. I think it's important for people in, especially in your position, Tom, where you have run successful business, you are a well known name in Australian finance, photographic community. People do look up to you, they look well, how did Tom get to where he is? What did he do? And you know, like we talked about earlier in the introduction about, you know, this didn't just come from you winning a couple of awards in a photography competition. You've got a comprehensive range of kind of satellite businesses that are orbiting around you. They all feed off your photography. But that, you know, that didn't come free or easy either. And I think that you reach a point in your life where you do realize what you need versus what you want are two very different things. And I think for someone like you, you know, hearing that coming home and just lighting the fire pit and spending time with you, with your wife and your kids, you know, should they show up, you know, that's the most valuable thing for you, especially for someone who travels so much as part of what they do. You know, you're out spending time with, with other people, you're taking them on tours and workshops and traveling and all of that sort of stuff. But you're still coming home to those core, that core thing that you need in your life, which I think is. Is really wonderful. And I think it's an important balance. And yeah, sometimes, you know, when you're younger, you overlook it a bit, I think, you know, and I overlooked it working in a, you know, corporate career that I spent more time at work than at home awake. And you kind of. You get to a point in life where you go, actually, no, I need. I need greater balance. I need to be able to just. [01:19:02] Speaker B: It unfortunately just comes through age and wisdom, I think, more than anything else, you know, where I mean, you know, like, I hear a few people now and then going, oh, to be 20 again. But to have the wisdom and experience that I have now at 50. Yeah, yeah. You know, I think there's a real sweet spot that we're at in our lives where we've got good businesses, we've got, you know, the careers that we want, Mary and I, and, you know, we're in that sweet spot where we. We can sort of not relax because we don't do much of that, but it's more like enjoy where we've worked so hard to get to. It has been a slog and. And I won't say it's ever going to be easy. And I think that a lot of people, you're right, Greg, could look at me. Hopefully they do look up to me a little. I don't do it for that purpose at all. But they won't see behind the scenes of what it's done to take to get there. So 20 years of running workshops where I've canceled workshops because no one's enrolled, or I ran them for 15 years or more where I hardly made profit. Like, I would run a workshop and come home to a bank account that had zero money in it. Or even a few years ago, with my kids young, going to the supermarket, having to buy groceries and literally just scrounge the dollar and two dollar coins out of the center console in order to pay for the grocery bill. Like it was that. It was that bad, you know, so, yeah, they don't see all of that. And, And I think it's just passion and persistence and. And I, again, I love this conversation because I think it's so important. I think it comes down to. I don't say I'm the best business person around. I've still got a lot to learn, which I. I enjoy that challenge. But I think that mindset of not giving in and always thinking, how do I make this a success? As opposed to, is this going to fail? So with the gallery, for Example, with books that I publish, with workshops that I put on stuff like that. Failure is not an option. It's kind of like, you know, that old burning the bridges and not turning back type of thing. It's not something that ever comes into my mindset. It's always a case of, right, how do we make this even to the point where people can go, oh, you know, the election are coming now and you know, Trump's things up and all that sort of stuff and either, you know, it's a real soft economy, I'm like, not look, sure we could, we could, you know, blame it on that and then go, ah, the market's no good and my business is going to go down the toilet because of it. Or you can go, what are the forces that I can control? What are the things that I'm not doing well, that I could improve on? Like, you know, learning more about how to advertise online or you know, upping my skill set in X, Y and Z because I can control those variables and I'm not maximizing those yet. So therefore, let's work on that, let's lean into that. Yeah, so I think that's what's made me relatively successful over the years is just that never ending pursuit of learning to be better. And I love working in my own business because of that. I love waking up every day and going, right, how can not consciously even just, you know, like, oh, there's something else that I could do to the website there. Or that's, you know, that website that Justin showed us, you know, still tomput.com but has been around for probably 30 odd years, perhaps even more, has gone through so many iterations, you know, and even recently went through a big upgrade where I changed the theme in Shopify, which I love, and in a couple of years time I'll fiddle around with it again and go, oh, that's not working or that's not as appealing anymore, let's change it to something else. So I love that tinkering part of it. And I, when I do presence camera presentations or lectures and things, I always say, you know, if I can make a 1% improvement in my business every week, well, that's a 50%, you know, improvement over the year. And therefore hopefully it's, you know, it's better again next year, etc. So, you know, I think we tend to underestimate how much change we can make over that period of time just by making small incremental changes, you know, each and every day or every week, for example. [01:23:01] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, there's definitely photographers that have got websites that look like you're. You won from. [01:23:09] Speaker B: There is. And they wonder why they don't make sales. No. Yeah, like it's gonna be a good experience for everybody when you come to buy something online at the end of the day. Look at Amazon. I buy so much through Amazon. I mean, but it's so easy to buy and you know, trust the prices of, you know, competitive. And arrives on the doorstep the next day. I mean they've nailed it, right. And I get cranky when I don't get something. If I order something and it comes three days later, I'm kind of like, I even forgot I ordered it. All right, how come that's taken so long? I, I give Mary that, that. So for example, this is an interesting little story. I hope. We started using Facebook ads to sell my books because we have three titles at the moment, self published titles in the gallery and they were a bit slow in moving. You know, we were just relying on people coming into the gallery and buying them. And I'm like, babe, we've got to move these books. Like this is, this is not working for me. You know, like generally when we publish a book, we print either a thousand or two thousand copies and we'd like to have it sold in the first two to five years maximum. Because by then there's something else I want to publish. And we need space in the warehouse, you know, in the storage unit in order to move it on things like that. Well, at the moment we had, well just till recently we had a storage unit which is 3 meter 4 meters wide by 6 meters long. It's like a little garage just down the road here which you know you're paying 300, 400amonth for, right? So it's costing you four to five grand a year just to hold that. And then, you know, there's six pallets of books sitting in that gallery, in that storage space, you know, six or seven pallets and I'm like, this has got to go. I want to publish a new book. We need this space. So we learned to run these Facebook ads etc and I can't remember why the bloody hell I was telling the story, but it'll come to me in two seconds. Time gallery. [01:24:58] Speaker C: Is that the first time you've ran Facebook ads? [01:25:01] Speaker B: Pretty much when I read my portrait studio years ago. I'll get back to the topic in a second. Sorry guys. We used to. 10 years ago, 10, 15 years ago ago I had a gallery or a studio in the corner of park street in Kingsway called Ella and Friends Photography. It was named after my daughter Ella. For those who are in Melbourne, may or may not remember it. I know it. [01:25:22] Speaker A: I live around the corner from there for a while. [01:25:23] Speaker B: There you go, Greg. We used to run $10 ads a day. So we used to spend $70 on Facebook ads calling for people to have their dogs photographed. And we would generally get one client a week from that which would spend something in the ORU out 900 with us. So we're spending $70 to get 900 back. It was such great return. I love the fact that we're running ads all the way back then. Now what did I spend on Facebook ads last month? [01:25:49] Speaker C: I was going to ask you. Yeah. Do you like what's the current spend looking like? And are we working? [01:25:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it is. So a company that I'm working with is a fantastic company and they teach you how to run ads yourself rather than giving it to anybody else to do so. For example, we last month and, and they've for the first time taught me how to, you know, track revenue and, and spreadsheet this stuff and look at figures. You know, like the, the most successful people that I know in business are the ones who every day could tell you how much they sold yesterday, you know, what they did for the month, whether that was up or down on previous months, things like that. So I've not been good like that and that's one of the things that I need to improve on. On. But yeah, the. We're doing a fair bit in ad spend but by the same token, we sold 150 books last month in March and then we sold 226 in April. So we've had. That's $25,000 in revenue just on books. Books alone, which is yeah, pretty good. Which is pretty. So with the books we, we publish that, you know, the sort of small print run etc and I, I'm now about to publish my 18th book, which is pretty exciting. [01:27:00] Speaker C: 18Th? [01:27:01] Speaker B: Yes. [01:27:02] Speaker C: That is insane. [01:27:04] Speaker B: Where my. If you give me two seconds, I can show you some of them, but they're in the, they're in the other room. I literally have that many books in my house now that I bought two new IKEA bookshelves and they sat in the hallway for three months while I was traveling and my wife cracked it the other day and put them all together and so we, we have one bookshelf right next to me in my living room and then we have another one in the bedroom which looks like a freaking library. Because we couldn't fit it anywhere else. But, yeah, I love publishing because I've always been an avid sort of. I wouldn't say reader. I'm obviously visually stimulated, being an artist, photographer. And I just remember as a kid with this interest and passion in birds, I used to have this IKEA bookshelf in my. In my room and I used to go to bed an hour before my mum said I had to turn the light out. She was very regimented in that regard. I still, to this day, do, you know, still to this day, I'm 50 years old. It's not like I live at home still. And I'll still turn to Mary and go, babe, shouldn't we go to bed? And she's like, why, what are you talking about? I'm like, it's 10 o'clock, we're going to be in bed by 10, you know, or it's still in my brain from all those years ago. My parents have scarred me that much. But I would go to bed an hour before I had to turn the light out and I would grab books off these bookshelves, you know, birds of Australia and field guides, so I could learn all the birds and then birds, books on national parks of Australia, stuff like that. And I just pour over these books. I wasn't much for reading, you know, anything other than a short caption. And that's how I publish my books these days. They're full of photographs. They're not necessarily, you know, full of heavy. They're not text heavy. They just, you know, a way of me perhaps just showing off and that's a bad word. But, you know, just a collection of. It's a collection of images that then I then say to myself, oh, I've got, you know, I've been to Cradle Mountain that many times, I must have enough to put together a book. Yeah, hey, let's put together a book, you know, and then you reverse engineer it. So that's where the business side of me comes into it, because I love the photography side and I've taken all these beautiful photos and you put them together together in a beautiful book. But then I like diving into the business side of things and going, right, I'm going to do a book. How many do I need to print? Who's going to buy it? How am I going to distribute it to that market? And that's, I guess, where we've struggled a little with those books more recently is like finding people other than who come into the gallery. Because getting your books in a bookshop is sort of like, I would say, a little bit of a dream in a sense that, you know, there's only a certain market, they're going to come into that bookshop and actually want to buy it, as opposed to what you can do online as, you know, where you can target your audience so specifically. Sure, you have to spend money to do that, but you'd lead, you know, you're obviously dealing direct with the consumer rather than going through a bookshop that might buy a box every now and again, as opposed to, you know, the. The units that we're moving through the. Through the Facebook ad at the moment. Just going really well. [01:30:00] Speaker C: What made you want to do your first book? [01:30:04] Speaker B: Yeah, good question. So my first book was a book publishing. Have I got two seconds to go and grab it? [01:30:11] Speaker C: Yeah, do it. [01:30:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay, hold on. [01:30:14] Speaker A: Just while Tom stepped away. Just to remind everyone watching and listening along that this is the Camera Life podcast, episode 74. It's the first of May. [01:30:24] Speaker B: Welcome. [01:30:25] Speaker A: If you've only just recently joined us, be sure to subscribe to the channel, like, hit the bell. So you get notifications for upcoming episodes and leave a comment. Let us know what you think of. Of Tom's story so far. And if you've got any questions that you'd like us to ask Tom or you want to ask Tom, please jump in. [01:30:44] Speaker C: Yeah, it's been a bit quiet in the chat. I think everyone's just been listening intently. Yeah. So good at telling stories. But if you. [01:30:50] Speaker B: They've fallen asleep. [01:30:51] Speaker C: Oh, my God. [01:30:51] Speaker B: They've fallen asleep. Okay, so I've got them. I've got some of them here. One of them, one of these days is to actually find them all somehow, somewhere, and. And actually take a photo and put it online, for example. [01:31:05] Speaker C: So, Dennis, this is the human Wayback Machine. [01:31:09] Speaker B: That's it. This was 2006. So I published my first book called the Kids of Bayside. So we ran, as Greg remembered before, was that. It was a. When I left my sports photography job, I. I just ran from down there. I started a portrait studio. [01:31:28] Speaker C: Triathlete and marathon runner. [01:31:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Years ago. Anyway, I. I started a portrait studio called Ellen Friends, named after my daughter Ella, who's 22 next month and she'd only just been born, and I'd left a sports photography job, and I thought, what am I going to do with my life? And I started this studio photographing kids and families and then eventually dogs. I'll get onto that in a sec. So, Tero Sade, who I don't know whether you know of who's been in the industry, portrait industry for years, mentored me. And he said, one of the ways that you can generate some sales is by running this sort of project whereby you ask for a small 75 sitting fee and you donate that to charity. And in return, what you do is you publish, you know, a photograph from every shoot into a beautiful coffee table book. And what you do then is sell the book to the, you know, to the. To the parents of the kids in the book. Right. And so I said, oh, that sounds like a good idea. We generated, I think, 200 shoots out of this book. And I remember having $20,000 in my bank account at the end of the first year of doing this. And I thought that was frigging amazing. So. So this was the start of it. So you do this, you know, this was all me photographing kids because I, you know, as this was photographing my daughter. So I'm like taking photographs of other people's kids going to their house, you know, or local park, you know, etc, and photographing these kids. And in return, as I said, producing this beautiful book. Oh, look at that photo. Wow. Who's that sexy beast? Wow. Not much different to our look now, really, to be honest. Yeah, my daughter Ella here. So this is my beautiful daughter Ella. And we actually have a huge. We used to. I think we threw it out, but it was one of those foam core. There's my beautiful girl there, taken. I remember specifically where this was taken. We were. We had a little unit in Hampton, and in the afternoon, the light would shine through the kitchen window and pour down the hallway and reflect off the floorboards. And I said, stand there, Ella. I'll get that photo. Because it was all about using the light. I guess I'd learned from shooting outdoors in the sports photography job. And I just translated that into the portraiture, and it was all about where's the light coming from, you know, etc. Etc. And, you know, putting kids. If you like the hat. If the. If it was outdoor, it was raining on the day the photo shoot, you'd perhaps have to, you know, improvise. And so you just use, you know, a beautiful window light. Yeah. Using a 500 mil, a 50 mil F 1.4 canon. No, not even 1.4. 1.2. I think I had, in the end, beautiful sharp lens. Unbelievable. 1.4. Maybe it wasn't 1.4. [01:34:23] Speaker C: It's probably this one that's on my. [01:34:25] Speaker B: No, I never had that one with the red ring on it. No, Way. Oh, really? No, the one I had was only probably 500 bucks. [01:34:32] Speaker C: That was the 1.4. It would have had a gold ring. Gold ring, probably. [01:34:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, that was it. So, you know, just using to do. Learning to do that. I remember I did a shoot in an apartment block in south bank, and they had all the windows and doors closed, and they had these two dogs in the apartment, and it was tiny, and it was. And then they didn't want to take the dogs out of the apartment. And I'm like, what the hell am I going to do here? This is disaster. The place was a freaking mess. It was unbelievable. And all you wanted to do was open the windows and the doors and just like, let some air in. And I just used this flash bouncing off the roof, you know, to photograph these dogs on a couch. And I get back to the studio, Mary goes, how did that shoot go? And I was like, it was a freaking disaster. That it was dark and did you blah, blah, blah. Oh, well, let me see the photos. And then she brings the clients in and they spent like five, ten grand on these two or three photos that I'd taken that they liked of their dogs. So that was nice. So we did three of these books in the end and. And raised in the end, we ended up doing three Kids of Bayside Books. One thing at a time, Tom. And then we transitioned. We transitioned to dogs. And so we did. We became known as the, like, the Pet Portrait Studio of Melbourne. Which, like, kills me to say that these days, because I was like, I never thought that I would lower myself to be a pet portrait photographer, but it worked incredibly well for us. And we ended up doing seven of these books called Wolf. And these are huge, by the way. Look at the size of these. These are 30 by 30 centimeters. This book here was book. Three hundred and something pages. 350 pages, right? This weighs about three and a half kilos. In the end, after doing seven dog books and three kids at Bayside Books, we'd raised a hundred thousand dollars for charity. And. And that was money that I really couldn't afford to give to charity, but we did it anyway. And so, yeah, that was this. That was the start of it. And these books are. You know, what the thing is about publishing books yourself is when you do the layout and design like I do, you, you probably put the better part of 100 hours into doing it. Right? You know, by the time it sends to print, you kind of like, get it away from me. I never want to see that thing again. Which is the next stage I'm at to with this latest book, and I think only once I ever sat down after receiving the book from the printers and gone through it page to page, what you tend to do is sort of go, yep, great, flick through it and go, yeah, it looks fine. Done. And mostly that. The point. The point is that you can't really come to appreciate the good work you've done because of the fact that you've seen it so often, you know, on the screen, unfortunately. But one of the things we did really well with this book, I'm just trying to find examples of it. It's not a great example. There was one which was called Honeycomb. We used to hire designers to do special fonts and they used to actually build. Build fonts for us. You know, for example, the designers did this design because you've got the graffiti in the background of this little dog. So they'd match the font sometimes to the shoot. This one here, Ella and Hugo, you know, they've put a couple of leaves in there because it was taken in a park, you know, stuff like that. So we've done some really cool things with these over the years, and I'm incredibly proud of those. And I hope one day I can look back on those and really appreciate them, because there was a lot of time and effort into those. So from there I did some landscape books eventually. So these were my first three books that I did. I did one on the Milford Track in New Zealand, the Root Burn Track in New Zealand and Cradle Mountain. I don't have those two with me at the moment. Small, little, you know, souvenir books. Not. Not very big. 25 bucks we used to charge for these. They're tiny. I can't believe we still charge $25 for these. That was quite expensive, if you ask me. But we printed a three and a half thousand copies of each, and we sold out of the Cradle Mountain one in about three years. The Milford one took a little longer to sell. I think that took about six or seven years to sell. And disastrously, we had to pulp the last sort of 2,000 copies of the Reburn Track book because it didn't sell as well. And in the end, the distributor still said, we've got these books sitting in our warehouse. What do you want to do with them? And I said, get rid of them. [01:38:49] Speaker C: What year, roughly. What year roughly were those books? [01:38:52] Speaker B: That was 2009. Yeah, we published those first three books. So that was sort of my foray. The Kids at Bayside Books was 20002006 through to 2009 and then the Wolf Books for 2009 through to 2014 when I sold the business. And then the. The. This book. Yeah, it was sort of a crossover there, so that was my sort of foray in a landscape. So we did those. But then it wasn't until I opened the gallery that we sort of got back into the landscape photography books. And this is the second iteration of my morning Spinshaw books. So we've. We've done two books and they've both sold out. This one sold out more recently, you know, like the last, I think, think 12, 18 months. And this is a really nice format that we've gone with. These are now. We sold them for $75, but they're now $95. Beautiful hardcover coffee table book. Couple hundred pages printed on the end papers. You know how you normally open a book and it's white. We pay extra to have this be to be printed, for example. Yeah, you can even print on the back side of the end paper as well. That's generally white. But we print on that, for example. And stupidly, what I've decided to do these days, I don't know whether I've got a copy here, is actually sign each book and number it. So I thought signing books was a little bit of a wank to start with. I'm like, who'd be bothered? Or who wants a book signed by the author? But I actually appreciate it too, when I buy a book from a bookshop and I thought, wouldn't it be nice to actually number them? Well, I tell you what, I will never do that again. It takes me. I've just. If you look on my Facebook page. If you look at my Facebook page, yesterday I went into the gallery and I reckon I unpacked 25 boxes and ended up having to. They come wrapped in brown paper inside the box. So you open the box, you unwrap the paper, I stack them up in the gallery and then I sit down and I have to sign and then I have to remember the number. All the numbers are kept in my phone. What number am I up to? And write, you know, 236 of 1,000 thousand, blah, blah, blah, blah, God knows what reason. And so, yeah, I won't do that again. But we did that book and then we sort of decided that the. The formula, I should say, was quite nice in terms of that size. This was a book that we published a few years ago on Lake Air, by the way, just for me to have a gripe. Do you know how Much racism comes because I called the book Cutty Tanda Lake Air. So this is the Aboriginal indigenous name for this lake. This is the European. We invaded this country, we did all the bad things to the Aboriginals. Right. I'm so passionate about this. You should see the hate I get on Facebook ads because we called it that. Comments like get rid of that name and I'd buy it. What are the first two words doing there? What does katitanda mean? [01:41:48] Speaker C: I'll let you know a secret. They wouldn't have bought it. [01:41:52] Speaker B: What it was called. [01:41:53] Speaker C: No chance. They're just looking for something to comment on. [01:41:57] Speaker B: I. But. But I know what, you know what, this is my little comment and this will get me in trouble and I don't give a. Australians like to think that they're very welcoming, that we accept everybody. It's the biggest crock of. We are on whole extremely racist. So I'm just going to put that out there. From what I've seen, I think it's disgraceful. We've got a lot to learn. So that one's selling reasonably well and really well online, which is good. And then Cradle Mountain, we revisited this one. So that little Cradle Mountain souvenir book that I did back in 2009 that sold out. I thought we should really revisit that. Maybe there's a market to perhaps publish that again. But I thought to myself a lot of the photos that were in there was from. I walked to the overland track twice and I, I visited many times, Cradle Mountain herself. But the whole track, the over overland track, I'd only done twice. And I'm like, I really don't want to walk that track again. Right. It's nice enough, but it's not that great. And it's a hard walk. Has anyone else done that walk? Have you guys done that? [01:42:54] Speaker C: I want to. I want to. [01:42:57] Speaker B: Justin, my advice for you and anybody else listening is that if you want to do it, you can do it during the summer or the. The season, but you're not necessarily going to get the best weather. I actually walked it for the third time to finish off this latest book. Back in August a couple of years ago, had days like this. Sunshine for every day I walked it, except the last day where I chose to not take the ferry across Lake Sinclair back to the visitor center. You can take a ferry back and it saves you 15ks. I stupidly walked the last 15ks because I'd never done it before. And it rained the whole time that I walked that last 15k, which is terrible. But that's okay. So I would do it actually in the winter, you know, it's amazing. You don't have to book. You don't have to, you know, pay a ridiculous amount of money. [01:43:45] Speaker C: You can, though, like, really. [01:43:47] Speaker B: It can be. It can be, but I like to. [01:43:50] Speaker C: Have the right gear. [01:43:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Have the right gear. You know, don't do it by yourself like I did. Perhaps do it with a few other people. Makes it a bit safer. And you can stay in the lodges as long as you want. Like, if you book during the season, you stay one night, you move on. Whereas if you go in the winter, you can. You can have the whole lodge to yourself. And the bright sunny day, sitting in the, you know, the window, watching the world go by, reading a good book, you know, with a glass of wine if you want to carry it and, and. And, you know, enjoy the serenity. But if you're going to do it, whatever time of year you do, do it. Do the side trips. Don't just do the main track. I think the best part of the whole walk is the side trips to, you know, the crowd of mountain summit, if the weather's nice, barn bluff, you know, Mount Ossa, which is the tallest mountain in. In Tassie, things like that. A lot of the side trips is where the gold is at, not just straight through the middle. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, so rather than walk the track, you know, for X number of times, I. I collaborated for the first time with a mate of mine called Cam Blake, who also owns workshops. I don't know. [01:44:52] Speaker C: I've heard of that guy. [01:44:53] Speaker B: Yeah, you've had him on the podcast, haven't you? Yeah, we have. Right, right, right. I. I must watch that episode. You know what Cam's like. He's a bit of a character. So he. He'd guided about 20 workshops through the overland track. And I said, mate, have you got any good pictures of the overland track that I could use for my next book? And he threw me all of these pictures and they were fabulous. And they make up most of, like, half of this book. And to the point that it works so well. I think this collaboration that when I was laying the book out, we initially, we're going to individually credit each photo in the back. We were going to have thumbnails of each of the photos. And, you know, it's a collaboration, so we should, you know, attribute, you know, each of the. The photos to the author. Hate that word. To the photographer. And in the end, I felt like it was such a complete, you know, book that we didn't need to attribute the photos to either one of us. So in fact the whole book is without credit other than on the front. So you don't know who's is whose. So speak. And I think that's what makes it work so well is that our styles really complemented each other well and looked very similar in that regard. So yeah, really proud of that one. That's selling really well. And then. That's a great question. [01:46:03] Speaker C: That's a great question. [01:46:05] Speaker B: Guess what we. Yes, exactly. [01:46:07] Speaker A: So AI couldn't decide. [01:46:11] Speaker B: Guess what? We did this before. I see. Yeah. Rock paper scissors. [01:46:16] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:46:17] Speaker B: Cam came up with an idea. He said why don't we. Can we split the print run? Can we do a thousand with your cover and a thousand with mine? And it's exactly what we did. This is my cover which is this nice silhouette. He's got this beautiful early morning shot of cradle, blue skies, clouds etc but similar photo. But I've Crater Mountain. But it's nice blue cover. I've got the pink cover. Yeah. So I split the print run. [01:46:40] Speaker C: And the importantly which one's selling better? [01:46:46] Speaker B: We can't answer that question as yet because he took as part of the arrangement. What he did is he took his thousand copies down to his place in Hobart and he's been distributing it through all of the retailers down there. So. And we've just been selling. It's hard to compare. [01:47:03] Speaker C: So the only way to do a proper comparison, we need to make a Facebook ad for each book, then run them the same side by side, see which one sells more. Then we know who's the better photographer. [01:47:12] Speaker B: Well, there you go. I might actually do that and, and see how it comes out. Thanks for that. [01:47:17] Speaker A: Have collectors actually bought both just for the sake of having both gravies? [01:47:22] Speaker B: That is another great question. And they have. Yes. Yeah. When we did the book launch down in Tassie, we did it at Rob Lakers gallery there, Wild island in Salamanca and we had people coming along and buying too. Yep. They go, well, I want, I want one of each. Even though as soon as you open the COVID the whole book is the same from Magic from the end, from the end papers onwards. But they were. [01:47:46] Speaker C: Imagine their disappointment when they got home and opened them both up. [01:47:51] Speaker B: I thought these were. I thought this was different. This is rubbish. Yeah, yeah. I want my money back. [01:47:58] Speaker C: Speaking of collectors, our friend Glenn Lavender from Creative Photo Workshop says if you can find a non signed book, they're actually worth more. [01:48:09] Speaker B: Lavender. Oh my God. You've obviously had him on the podcast. [01:48:14] Speaker C: We have he also. He also has commented here. Just looping back a little while, he mentions someone who volunteers to photograph kids deserves a medal or a straight jacket. Interestingly, they say, don't they say, never work with kids or animals? [01:48:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I did both. [01:48:35] Speaker C: Tell us why. What I want to know is. So basically, sounds like you built. You built quite a cool business, an iconic portrait and then pet photography business leading up to when you sold it in 2014, but you started doing these landscape photography books in, in like 2009, 2010, somewhere around there. So there was this kind of crossover trajectory, was it? What led you to the sale of that business? [01:49:03] Speaker B: Great question. There were a couple of things. There are a couple of things. You know, how at the start of this conversation we were talking about, you know, being challenged by the work that you do and, you know, ticking boxes and, and learning pretty much everything there was to learn. I had sort of morphed my role in that business. Ellen Friends, so many times that I got to the end and I went, I don't think I can. What is, what is Damien. Damien, the, the coach of the, of Gold Coast. Damien said he used to be the coach of Tigers. I'm having a mental thing. We can only, we can only, you know, cook these sausages so many times. And he said, I've done it a thousand times. And he couldn't find another way to do it. Do you know what I mean? And I just ran out of, of motivation and the business had gone into a bit of a hole whereby. Damien Hardwick, thank you very much. It's mental blank. I need more coffee. There was sort of only so many times I could have sort of reinvented my role within that business. I started off, you know, I grew it organically for nothing. Right. When I started in 2003, I was literally going to the mums groups, you know, because I wasn't working. My wife then was. My then wife was working and, and I was going to the mums groups every Friday and I was basically sort of handing out flyers, you know, would you like your kids photograph? Type of thing. So I grew up from scratch and then built it to this very successful but with large overhead business in. In Park Street. Park street and Kingsway in South Melbourne there, where we were paying $120,000 in rent a year. And that was, that was 15 years ago. So it was huge. Like it was 10 grand a month, multiple staff, et cetera, et cetera. And. And I just went, nah, I don't need this anymore. Sold the business, thankfully sold the business, because we sold it for six figures. We sold it for quite a nice sum of money. But, you know, it was just a. Nice to have that sort of burden gone. Yeah. Monkey off my back, so to speak. And I kind of felt like I. It had run its course. It was the. Probably one of the hardest things I had to do is tell my daughter Ella that I'd actually sold the business. She was devastated because it was named after her as such and it still exists to this day, I believe. [01:51:19] Speaker C: I was gonna ask. Yeah, yeah. [01:51:22] Speaker B: So the guy bought it. The guy bought it and then he ran out a little for a little bit of time in that park street complex or. Or studio. And then he took it to. To being a home business. And I. I still think to this day I. I try not to Google it because I don't want to be good. A lot of friends. But, you know, he still, to this day, I believe, does the books like dogs wanted. You can see it apply here. Wolf book, you know, Wolf 13 they're up to now. [01:51:52] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:51:52] Speaker A: So he's doing the books as well. [01:51:54] Speaker B: Still doing the books to this day. We taught him that. He's still using the same logo, which is amazing. Things like that. Mary keeps in touch with this more than I do. But, you know, we sold the business. We sold the intellectual property here. What was my. What was the question, Justin? [01:52:08] Speaker C: Oh, I don't know. [01:52:09] Speaker B: Why did I sell the business? [01:52:11] Speaker C: What led up and. And there was this new. New sort of passion in landscape photography and books forming, obviously. I just wanted. Yeah. Did that influence it at all? [01:52:20] Speaker B: Yeah, it did. It was kind of like, all right, I just want to do this landscape photography gig full time. And, you know, interestingly, you know, just from a business point of view, I would have loved to have made a business in landscape photography well before then. But an O gallery like I walked into, how did I get into that? Good question. I walked into Ken Duncan's gallery in south bank back in 1998. And I don't know whether any of you remember that. Yeah, I remember it. I was. Yeah, great. Yeah. And how good was it? And I walked in and I just went, oh, my God, this works amazing. I was already into landscape photography. I. Day one, I was really into landscape. [01:52:55] Speaker A: It was a draw card for South Bank. [01:52:57] Speaker B: It really was. It was a beautiful little gallery and. [01:53:00] Speaker A: You got a walking and then you'd go there to have a look and. [01:53:03] Speaker B: Correct. Correct. You know, And south bank was really pumping at that time too, wasn't it? It was. Was the place to go, you know, And I walked in and just went, all right, okay. Like this penny dropped. I was like, up until then my mindset had been, if you want to make. There's no one makes a career out of landscape photography. And the only ones taking landscape photographs are the sort of like the keen die hard bushwalkers who just happen to carry a camera with them. And, and if you. Actually, one of my favorite things to do is to go into op shops these days and, and get out books from the 70s and 80s on national parks of Australia and pour through them and just go, oh my God, how shitty is this photography? I mean, at the time it was great, but you know, poor quality cameras, poor quality film, you know, they just happen to climb a mountain and get there by midday. So let's take a photo. And that's the only photo that exists of that, of that. From that spot. Right? Like, how far have we progressed these days? The quality of photography is insane, as we know. And so, and so with that, I walked into Ken's gallery and I went, all right, so you can make money out of this. This guy is selling prints commercially. This is interesting. And that's when it was just light bulb moment. Oh my God, I want to own my own gallery. And it only took me 20 years to get there, but I really loved his work and, and Peter Lick's work as well. [01:54:21] Speaker C: And Justin, I, I wanted, I want to find. Have you been to a Peter Lick gallery? [01:54:26] Speaker B: So from there, that's a good segue. From there I was like wanting to go to more of Ken's galleries. And every time I went to a, a location or a town where Peter Lick had these galleries, I'd go. So Peter used to have galleries. He started with his first one in Cairns. That was his flagship one. I remember walking in there in 1998 and it was huge. It had this sort of double entrance and then the reception just immediately to the left, should I say, you know, desk? And then it was, it seemed to be huge. Maybe it wasn't that big, but it had many different twists and turns and the photography was amazing. And then he, and then he moved, had one in Noosa and then he had one in Port Douglas and then he had one in Sydney. So in the sort of late 90s, early 2000s, he had four galleries going and he would open them at 10am and he'd close them at 10pm People in Port Douglas, for example, couple would go out to dinner, have a few wines on their way back to their, you know, apartment, condo. Whatever, and go, oh, let's have a look in here. And then, you know, make a sale out of that, right? Very successful businessman still to this day, so we could talk forever about him. I really idolized both what he and Ken Duncan were doing. And so that was my dream. And I. I then bought a panoramic film camera. Always wanted to own, you know, a Linh or a Fuji. Could never afford them. They were five grand at least. Was it five or ten grand for the body and then another five or ten grand for the. For the lens? Again, crazy money that I didn't have. And I actually walked into. So through the sports photography job, we used to get our film printed or developed at cpl, which is now in South Melbourne. And Darren Roker, the guy who managed, manages the lab, still to this day I owe a lot of gratitude to. To. I walked in there just sprouting the fact that I. I was loving my job as a sports photographer, but I really love landscape photography as well. And my drink. I love Ken Duncan's work. And Peter Leak. And he goes, oh, yeah, we. We print some of Peter's stuff here. And I'm like, what do you mean? And he goes, ah, you know, when he's traveling, he sends his film to us because he trusts that we're going to do a job of it. I'm like, oh, wow, that's amazing. I'd love to own one of those cameras, like those big panoramic cameras they use. And he goes, oh, yeah, we've got one of those. And I'm like, what do you mean you've got one of those? And he says, oh, we've got one at the back. We bought, you know, an older model. We just use, you know, staff. They borrow it if they want to do a shoot, things like that. Because all of the staff working in the lab were keen photographers as well. I'm like, oh, wow, God, I'd love to own one of those. And he goes, oh, if you ever want to borrow it, just let me know, you know, just. And I'm like, are you serious? And for the first three, four years that I shot panoramic film, he would lend me that camera and was supposed to charge me for it and never did. He was just like, if it's free, if it's available, I'll give it to you. So I'd take it away on those trips, holidays, all sorts of things. I remember going to. Because we used to holiday in Port Douglas as well. My. My Rebecca and I used to holiday in Port Douglas Their family had an apartment up there. So every year we'd fly up to Port Douglas, very nice li da and holiday there and I'd visit Peter Leaks gallery. And you got to remember this is the days before social media, right? So the only real way you got to see these guys latest work was to go to the galleries. So it was amazing. You kind of like had this incredible experience of going in and just being so stimulated by their latest work. Oh my God, that's amazing. Where's that? I'd love to go there. This is brilliant. And then, and then I just borrowed this film camera and went to Mossman Gorge for the very first time with the camera. And I just remember thinking to myself, I just want this first photo to be iconic. You know, I just want to look back on only news to come and go. I had no idea what I was doing. But that was a damn good photograph for the first one I took. It is, it is so terrible. I took it, I took it on this overcast day and the, the shadows are really dark and then the sky is really nondescript and I, I was really very much on my training wheels. In the end I think I shot. So I borrowed that camera for about three or four years and then I went to the Sydney Olympics. As I said I could rabbit on for days, just cut me off. And Greg who shot with me at the Olympics says, remember that panoramic film camera I was shooting with the Olympics? He was working in the school of photography out at Monash Clayton. He said, the guys of here have decided they don't want anymore. They're going to sell it. Do you want to buy it? I'm like, oh my God, do I want to buy it? It was like three grand. So I'm spending three grand rather than ten. And so I bought that and so I used that for another 10 or 11 years after that. And so I shot panoramic film up until about 2014 for about 16 years. I still have a box of every single photo I took in the garage. And then I have a special box in my next to my bedside table that Mary knows if the house is burning down, it's the box first, it's the kids or even the dogs and then the kids, right? That's the order of preference. Grab the box of slides first because there's about 100 or 200 in there that I absolutely freaking love. And one day I should just get a light box and set up a camera and do a live feed of me just going over everyone and talking about it just for if that'd be interest or anyone, I don't know, let me know in the chat. Except you, Glenn Lamina, don't comment because he's only going to be the out of me. But you know, just for my kids sake more than anything else because I reckon what will happen in years to come when I'm gone, they go oh, what's this box of and just take it to the tip, right? But you know what, the other day, tangent number four, I asked Mary, baby, anything happened to me, what would happen to the gallery, do you think? And she said I'd probably end up closing it and doing something else. And I please tell me you didn't say that, that. And she went oh no, no, I'd probably keep it running. Yeah, I kept it running. And I was like we need to have a serious, like we need to have a serious chat about this because I guess one of the things about the legacy I'm not Mary says I'm big on legacy and I guess perhaps these books are part of that is that, you know, if I'd like to think that the photographs that I'm taking now and the photographs I've taken 20 years ago with that camera perhaps are timeless. Hopefully my, the style in photography has changed too much that they seem too old school. But I'd like to think that in years to come that Mary would, you know, continue to sell that work because it wouldn't be necessarily out of date. I know Peter Java. Do you know, did you guys know of Peter Java? He was kind of like one tier down from Peter Leak. He used to have a gallery across the road in Cairns. Peter did a lot of great work in the 70s and 80s up in Darwin. He was actually running I think a film lab up in Darwin and he would go out and shoot first of all of those many beautiful, you know, wet season storm photos. He's known for his iconic storm pictures with lightning coming out of them, stuff like that. Google Peter Java. He's like, he, he died of pancreatic cancer back in the 90s and he, his wife ended up running a business up until recently selling his work for. Selling them as limited editions with a digital signature on them for 20, 30,000 thousand dollars. So she continued to sell his work for many years after he'd passed. So Mary, if you're watching this in many years to come and I'm no longer here, it's on you. [02:01:35] Speaker A: Well it worked for Picasso, it worked for work for many famous artists. [02:01:39] Speaker B: Look at Van Gogh who hardly sold A painting while he was alive and you know, look at the rest is history, things like that. So yeah, the gallery thing, there's I, I shot, I think I estimated $40,000 worth of film and processing through that panoramic film camera. You know, one of those beautiful 617, you know, film cameras. Well, you've got four pictures per roll on 120 roll film. And, and I'd go to the lab and you know, often you'd use the same roll to shoot all sort all four frames because you could then clip the first frame. Does everyone know what I'm talking about there? Film days. You take the film into the developer and you'd process just the, you take it into the dark room, you'd unwind the film, but you just cut the first frame basically. So you're cutting the first frame in half and then you develop just that first part and that way you could then tell whether your exposure was correct or not. And then you could process the rest of the film either at zero or under or over. So that it was basically like using exposure compensation after the fact. Yeah, you'd end up shooting the whole four rolls or four frames on the same roll. The same. So that you could afford to waste that first frame and then you'd have three other frames of the correct exposure. This is obviously more digital now, you know, if you're still using that camera. And what I did for a number of years was that I would shoot, shoot those three frames or roll, not even shoot the whole roll, but use the digital camera to get the exposure right and then process that, you know, transfer those settings across to the film one so that you didn't screw up the whole roll or you didn't even have to click the frame. You could just go, I can shoot one on that and I might shoot another one or under or over. Etc. Yeah. So I shot that film camera for many years trying to emulate the likes of Peter, Peter Licking, Ken Duncan. Yeah. So I have been into any of his galleries just to ask you a question. He's closed them all now. He closed them all back in sort of. He moved to the US and, and in 2003 and since then has only operated galleries in the Vegas and, and the US he's got about 10 or so and sells millions of dollars a heart every year through. Through dodgy practices. Oh no, did I say that? No, I didn't say that. That's another topic altogether. We could do another whole podcast just on selling art and the value of selling limited edition prints versus Open edition prints. But again, I could rabbit on for hours about that. [02:04:12] Speaker C: I want to know about that. I still have. I've got. Hey, we're coming up on two hours, I'll tell you. [02:04:17] Speaker B: I'm just getting going. We're gonna be. [02:04:19] Speaker C: I'm gonna have to go, guys. Thank you. [02:04:23] Speaker B: Thanks, Jim. Great to meet you. Sorry. [02:04:27] Speaker C: Enjoy. See you, Jim. [02:04:29] Speaker B: Dennis has got to go as well. [02:04:30] Speaker C: Well, Dennis has gone from the chat. He says I gotta go. Love you, mate. But if we've got like, if. If you've got a little bit more time, I had a couple more questions. I do need. [02:04:39] Speaker B: I do have up. I do have a little bit more time. I do also have to do an art installation today, so. Yeah, very good. Allegedly. Allegedly. Thank you, Glenn. Lavender says yes, allegedly. Take that back. Cut that bit out of. Of the. Peter. Peter will come help me. [02:04:55] Speaker A: We're live, mate. [02:04:59] Speaker C: Bring it on, Peter, we can take you. So first I do want to dig into a couple more things. I'm going to quickly grab a glass of water because I've got a super dry throat. So if you guys can cover me for 30 seconds while I do that and then we'll go into a few more questions. 20 minutes or something. [02:05:20] Speaker A: Hey, I'll get a question for you, Tom. [02:05:22] Speaker B: Maybe a business question and a dog that desperately wants my attention. Who's that? This is Molly. She is a beautiful spoodle. So she's a half Crocker spaniel cross poodle and she is so affectionate and she loves having me at home at the moment. So she's been all over me, much to the. Much to the jealousy of Mary because she's Mary, she shadow. But every now and again she just needs a cuddle and she comes up onto my lap, baby. Yeah, she's lovely. [02:05:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:05:52] Speaker B: All right, off you go. [02:05:54] Speaker A: Oh, business question. You know, if you were to sort of break down the. The various elements like we talked about earlier, those satellite businesses that you've got that all contribute to Tom Part photography. [02:06:05] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:06:06] Speaker A: What would the breakdown be in terms of where you earn money? [02:06:09] Speaker B: Like books? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Clean lavender. Does Tom go to the. Something about Mary's school of hairdressing? My hair. I need a haircut. It's a bit insane. Sorry about that, Glenn. I'll make sure it's more gorgeous the next time I see you. Good question. I got us. I get asked this quite often. What's the breakdown in revenue? You know, where does the money come in? It's roughly 50. 50. We run the workshops as a Separate business to the gallery. So when I say that it's all under the one umbrella, as in company name. But what I do is I have two separate bank accounts and Mary gets paid as the gallery manager from the gallery bank account. So all of the revenue from the sale of the art and the books comes into that one bank account. And then the rent gets paid from that, you know, Mary's wage, etc. So the. The reason I do that and the workshops, obviously all the revenue comes into there and then the expenses and my wage comes out of the workshops. Mainly because I run primarily the workshops business. Mary runs primarily the gallery business now. And also too, I like running them independently, even though for tax purposes, they all come under the one umbrella. Just because it helps me keep track of, like, how the businesses are performing. Because over the years, in the 20 years I've been running workshops, there's probably been many occasions where, you know, the galleries had to borrow from the workshops or vice versa. The studio, Ellen, Friends had to borrow from the workshops, things like that. So, yeah, I like to keep them. And they are roughly 50, 50 in terms of the. The revenue that they generate, you know, give or take, you know, 10,000, 20,000, $50,000, something like that. But it's a roughly a 50, 50 split. I wish the artwork sales were a greater part of our revenue than we would. Wouldn't have to rely so heavily on the workshops. I love running the workshops, but the time it takes me away from being at home and working on the business rather than in the business means that I would prefer to run less. And so that's the succession plan is to obviously for me to continue to run the workshops because I love doing it, I love teaching photography, but then also have leverage more from this, the artwork, because obviously that is scalable as opposed to workshops, which are far less scalable. I'm selling my time, whereas with the photographs, you know, the artwork, you take one photograph, you can sell it many times over. We don't sell limited edition prints. Mostly we sell open edition. Yep. Okay. [02:08:37] Speaker C: I have a question on a similar but different topic before we dig into your camera kit, which I really, really, really want to do. [02:08:44] Speaker B: Yes. [02:08:45] Speaker C: How do you balance? So you're running workshops and you also need to create images to sell in the gallery. [02:08:50] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:08:51] Speaker C: Obviously you spend so much time running workshops out and about in beautiful locations. I assume that some of the work you're creating from for the gallery comes from those workshops. [02:09:02] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:09:03] Speaker C: How do you. How do you balance that time where you're dedicating trying to get people to get their perfect shot on the tour versus you spending the time to shoot. And is that that hard, or does it just work? [02:09:17] Speaker B: I feel like I'm being set up here. Like, Cam Blake might have planned that question with you, and he's like, try and trip Tom up here and, and really have it look like he's not paying any attention to his customers, and he's spending. He only runs these workshops to, you know, feather his own nest. [02:09:34] Speaker C: That is not. That is not the intention. [02:09:36] Speaker B: No, no, no, I get it. I get it. I know. That's the way I wanted to twist it. It's a really top interesting topic, and it's again, one that we could spend hours on. I was recently in Africa with. Remind me of your question, by the way. I was recently in Africa, whereby we stayed with a dedicated photo company which have their own lodge hotel with an editing suite opposite the room in the hotels. Like, it's amazing, right? And I got chatting with this, this guy. I won't name him because he won't. I, I, I'm sure he said it to me in passing rather than wanting to me to broadcast it, but he said, you know, you want to use the editing suite? I said, yeah, that's why we've come. Like, you know, we came here two years ago, you showed this editing suite to us. We want to take advantage of it. Like, it's amazing. You've got your own dedicated space with plugs everywhere and TVs and stuff like that. And he goes, you'll be amazed at how many workshop leaders come through this place and don't even once ask about it. I'm like, well, why not? What do you mean? It's perfect. And he said, I reckon 8 out of 10 people who run workshops and come through this space are only running the workshops for themselves and for them to get their own photos. And I went, that is disgraceful. And this comes back to the conversation we had at the start, which is about, you know, competitiveness in the marketplace, stuff like that. I'm not here to bag anybody. There's. There's people who I see run great workshops. There's also on the Grapevine stuff I hear that's disgraceful. People not giving any tuition whatsoever in the field. So it's a tour rather than a workshop, dumping their clients in the bush and going off for several hours to then take their own photos. Like, literally saying, you guys seem pretty good here. Yep. Okay, I'll be back in a couple of hours and just leaving their guests all together. People leading trips to Antarctica, never once getting any tuition whatsoever. Clearly just doing it for themselves. So I'm pretty passionate about it because at the end of the day it gives the whole industry a bad reputation if we've got all of these people running workshops claiming to be experts. And as I said, there's some people doing some great work out there, don't get me wrong. But there's a buyer beware that has to be there, whereby you need to, obviously. I think I've even got an ebook on my website that is like, you know, is there one that says about going on workshop seven Crucial Questions to. [02:11:54] Speaker A: Ask Before Enrolling in a Photographic Workshop? [02:11:57] Speaker B: That's the one. I just couldn't remember the title. I sounded very vague on that. I haven't. That was written during COVID All of those ebooks were Covid projects. Holy crap, I'm bored. Photographic checklist. That's like a hundred things to do in photography if you're bored one even about how to get back your mojo, regaining your mojo. They were all Covid projects. [02:12:17] Speaker C: Most of these ebooks are free too, guys. [02:12:19] Speaker B: So yeah, they are free. So jump on. And even the ones that I charge measly $7 for, like the Beginner's Guide to Shooting Landscapes and the one about the drones, there's quite a bit of information on there and it's essentially what I teach in my one day workshops for landscapes and what I teach in my four day workshop for drones. There's a lot of good info in there. And in fact, the other one that I don't have on there that I must put back up is one on wide angle lens photography which I wrote just recently that has good info in it, but it has 70 examples with 70 different stories relating to each photo about how I use the wide angle lens in order to take that photo. Really highly practical. Like, I'm really happy with that book and I love doing those books and I must do more of them because I can write quite well. It's just me taking the time to find or write them as well. So getting back to workshops and using my own gear, etc. I've even seen a workshop leader who's quite well known in the industry who's been running them for almost as long as I do. Say X does not use his camera on these workshops. He's purely there for you, which I like. I like the sentiment. But I could never teach anybody photography without taking a photo myself and saying, this is what I mean, you know? Yeah, I can verbally it's the wrong. It's. It's fitting a square peg in a rat hole. We're artists, we're visual artists. We need to see the photograph before we can perhaps understand what that photograph should look like. You could explain it a hundred or a thousand times and still not get it. So for me, constantly got my camera in my hand, hey, guys, what you want to do is you want to get over here, you want to do this, get down like my baby, you see, like that. And they go, oh, yeah, no, they're over my shoulder the whole time. Which is absolutely what you want to be like. You want to be seeing examples of it so you can then relate to it to then take your own photographs as well. So I'm big on that. I'm passionate about photography, so I'm always going to take photographs as well. And I'm standing side by side with them. You know, why wouldn't I at the end of the day, you know, So a lot of my content that goes into. Onto my website and onto the, into the gallery walls is. Yeah. From workshops themselves. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm not going to shy away from that. I take my camera on a workshop so I can teach you photography, guys. But, you know, I won't launch a drone, for example, unless I get permission from everybody else. Because most of the time, unless it's a drone dedicated workshop which we. We now run. I'm going to say to them, hey, guys, is everyone cool? Great, we've been here for an hour. Does anyone mind if I get my drone off for five minutes? And they're like, no, go for it. Unreal. And then they're looking over my shoulder and they're going, oh, wow, that looks amazing. I should get myself a drone. You know, things like that. I'm very conscious of making sure that I take care of the. For me, to me, it's. This is going to sound crazy because those people who are looking going, Tom charges a lot for his workshops. How ridiculous. Perhaps if. If we have a. We have a money back guarantee on our workshops. We don't. We. It's advertising on the web, on the website. I was going to say we don't advertise it. We. We don't really need to advertise it because at the end of the day, no one does ask for their money back. But if somebody came to me and said, I really didn't get a lot out of that workshop and you promised this, but you really deliver that, I would be absolutely mortified. B, I would jump on the phone straight away and just go, hey, sorry, what happened? What were your expectations? What didn't I deliver on? What can I learn from. Sorry, you had that experience. Can we offer you a free workshop? Like, you know, come on the next one. I just want to prove to you that I absolutely can deliver. But Thirdly, I've for 20 years run this and I have refunded the money once, and that was in the early days and that lady wasn't a nice person. It sounds like a big excuse, but we had, we had, we had Tom from the great outdoors come along. What's his name? The guy, big built guy, used to be a carpenter and ended up being a celebrity. Come on. Glenn Lavender, you should know, you know, ripped his shirt off and Dancing with the Stars, things like that. He came along on one of our trips down the great ocean road and did a piece on the great outdoors for us, like in The Early Days, 2007. It was amazing. And, and, and she got a, she got her nose out of joint because she didn't get enough air time. She didn't say this, but we put two and two together. I mean, she didn't get enough airtime. Sorry about that. Refunded her money. To me, it's not about the money. When I run these workshops, sure, I get paid well for it, but I, I feel I can justify that. But to me it's all about client satisfaction. It's not. That's not his name. Glenn Secure. No, Tom Williams. It was. His name's Tom Williams. If you want to know, if you want to know what I'm talking about, and this is well before your time, type into Google Tom Williams, Dancing with the Stars and you'll see. Right. He came along on one of our workshops. I actually can't find the video. Like they burned it onto CD for me and I can't find, find it, see who, who can run a CD these days, things like that. I wish I could find that footage because it was, it was pretty good. It was a pretty good segment. They did a really good job of advertising our business really well. Anyway, yeah, to me, I do always cover the camera and I like teaching that way. That was a very long winded answer to your very simple question. Do you use a camera on your workshops? Yes. [02:17:33] Speaker C: I think it's. [02:17:34] Speaker B: Shut up. [02:17:35] Speaker C: I think, think there is, there is obviously a balance there. If you're just there shooting your own stuff and not paying attention to anyone else, people are going to, you know, feel like they're not getting any tuition and they're not getting the photos. But there is also something really enjoyable about seeing what someone with a. Probably better, but even if, say, different skill set than what you have, seeing how they approach whatever it is that we're approaching as photographers in a group. Like, when I've done workshops with other photographers, I like seeing what they get, what images they get, and I like them so save later on. So, you know, I've. I've done workshops with Richard Taddy, not recently, who's a. Like a nightscape photographer. [02:18:18] Speaker B: Yes, yes. [02:18:19] Speaker C: I know he spent most of the time helping everybody, like 95% of the time helping everybody, but it's still cool as well. Then he'll do some shots and then when we're doing the editing or whatever, he's asking this, this is what I got and this is why I took it this way and blah, blah, blah. And that is actually, I think an important part of the learning process is seeing that you do something. It's not like, learn from somebody else. [02:18:44] Speaker A: It also adds credibility. You know, it also, you know, someone's paid you this money and you're. What's that term about, you know, walking the walk and what does it. [02:18:54] Speaker B: Talking the talk, talk the talk and walk the walk. Yeah. [02:18:57] Speaker A: So you need to be able to do both. And I agree. When I do street walks for camera clubs and, and other groups, I've always got my camera in my hand the whole time. And I'll be walking and talking with people and talking about settings or looking at stuff. And I'll say, hang on a sec, I'll stop and grab a shot and. And we'll do that with each other. We'll kind of watch what everyone else is doing. And you learn. You do, you learn from one another. [02:19:20] Speaker B: Yeah, you do. You know, like, with this. We had a joke on this most recent workshop we did where I attended up in Queensland doing this bird photography, where we were like, oh, Laurie hasn't got his camera out. Clearly this isn't a very good photo. You know, we're all snapping away. The leader hasn't got his camera out. So therefore, how good could it be? But, you know, and again, like, if the lady's got the camera out, that's shooting pictures and going, oh, how cool is this? You know, it must be pretty cool, right? You know? Yeah, but you do. You learn from that. You. You can visually see what they're shooting, things like that. And. Yeah, and it's just an important part, I think, of teaching photography. David asked David. [02:20:00] Speaker C: David from San Francisco says, what would the Number one thing you teach on one of your. What would that. Yeah, what's the number one thing you teach? [02:20:09] Speaker B: Yeah, that I consistently teach. I think I understand this question. It's a great question. And I'm not heavily technical in terms of photography. Like, I will tell you the numbers and I will explain what those mean, but at the end of the day, I kind of don't want to bamboozle people with photography either by getting overly complicated and they're not understanding what I'm talking about. So I'll give them sort of set and forget numbers where you might say, hey, let's all shoot manual. Let's go at F16, because that's going to get you maximum depth of field. Let's shoot on auto, auto ISO or even 100 ISO because there's plenty of light around. And then you'll probably be 60 of the F16. And, you know, let's play with that for a bit, you know what I mean? Or you might be on aperture priority with an auto ISO. So let's let the shutter speed do its thing, okay? Things like that. Where I think I can add the most value when I'm teaching photography as well as teaching editing photography, is the experience that I can bring after all these years of saying to people, hey, check out this composition here. This is perhaps not something you would have seen immediately from being here, but I reckon if you got down low here and you introduce this here and with the wide angle lens, go super wide and get in really close to that. Look at, look at the effect that has versus taking this standard shot. Do you know what I mean? I think that's where leaders like us can provide the most value. Sure, we can take this to the technical side, but you can watch that on YouTube or you can probably go on any workshop and hopefully learn that. It's the vision that I have. And that's what separates. I hate saying it sometimes. You know, I used to say amateur versus professional. Let's say the less experience versus the more experience is when you get out on location, you can see that shot, that shot, that shot, that shot, and you've probably exhausted all possibilities versus somebody who's less experienced, who might just take the one. So that's where I feel I add the most value when I run a workshop is the art of seeing, which is a whole series of workshops I ran last year. But a. And I've rolled that in, incorporated into all my workshops, and I was probably doing that for many years anyway, but I've labeled it as the art of Scene. And Glenn said it there. Learning to see things is huge because that's where we can add value. Glenn and I, with our experience, for example, can then, you know, go to a place like India, anywhere else and go, I've been in this situation before, I know what to shoot here. And pass that on to your guests. Yeah, that's. And for the processing side of things, just to continue on with that example. Where I add the most value when I teach Lightroom and Photoshop, for example, is by not only just showing you how to use the tools, but then you give me a photograph and I can absolutely tell you where to take that photograph in order to make it better. That's where people fall down. And I've been in that situation before without my experience. I just used to look at photos and just go, I don't know, it doesn't look that great, but I don't know what to do to make it even better. I couldn't see what the final image should look like. [02:22:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:22:56] Speaker B: And I think that's where I can add the most value to my editing workshops, for example, also. Yep. You were going to talk here, Justin. [02:23:06] Speaker C: I do. I know we're close to the end of the show, but I do really want to know what now we're going. [02:23:11] Speaker B: To have a part B here. I've got through like 10% of my content here. I've got so much more to cover off. Really. Have me back. We'll have you back. [02:23:19] Speaker C: Yeah. All the way to parts. Might have to make it a regular thing if you like. [02:23:23] Speaker B: If, if your, if your guests would put up with me. How many people generally watch the, the podcast or listen, by the way, live. [02:23:29] Speaker C: Is usually somewhere between 10 and 20. Because we, you know, we're during the day. A lot of people actually have jobs. [02:23:35] Speaker B: Ridiculous jobs to go to things. [02:23:38] Speaker C: But then, then later on it just keeps ticking along. Plus we also, for those of you listening, we're on like Spotify, Apple, podcast. People can listen back later as well. If they don't watch the show. They get a ton of views too. So it's a slow growing thing. But we're, we're going places. [02:23:56] Speaker B: And you do this like once a week or once a month or. [02:23:58] Speaker C: We do, yeah, twice a week. So weekly interviews on Thursday mornings and then we do a weekly Monday night random show where we try and get guests like you back to just talk about the industry. [02:24:13] Speaker B: Why did you have me on Thursday mornings, mate? You should have had me on the Monday nights. [02:24:17] Speaker C: We've got to get on the Thursday Morning first, so we can get, like, all the. The stuff out of the way. Who's Tom? What do you do? Then we get you on Monday night, and then we're like, all right, this camera just got released. How terrible is it? And you're like, oh, man, it's terrible. And then that's the. That's the show. Okay, very good, basically. And we just. Yeah, a bit more interaction. We actually usually get maybe more viewers on the Monday night show live. Maybe because it's on Monday nights. [02:24:41] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:24:41] Speaker C: But the interviews usually get more views later on, so. [02:24:44] Speaker B: Right, right. [02:24:46] Speaker C: I want to see Tom talking. I think it'll be great. [02:24:49] Speaker B: He does a good job of that. You know, the worst thing you could do is actually get Glenn and I on the same podcast together. That would be amazing. Challenge accepted. That would be bad. [02:24:59] Speaker C: You. You actually have. You have your own sort of sporadic, sort of. With Matt. [02:25:05] Speaker B: Sporadic podcast. [02:25:06] Speaker C: Sporadic podcast. [02:25:07] Speaker B: Matt Cummins. Yes. [02:25:08] Speaker C: Yeah, I need to try. Do you guys put that on YouTube at all, or is that just audio? [02:25:12] Speaker B: No, no, we tried that, and he. Matt absolutely hated it. We really set up his little studio, and we sat there and we recorded three or four sessions in a day. And. And I think he got one piece of bad feedback and he went, yeah, no, we're not doing that again. He just went completely silent on it. He didn't. He hated it. Yeah. [02:25:29] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, I'd have to put. [02:25:30] Speaker B: This is the way to go. [02:25:31] Speaker C: I'm gonna make. Yeah, I was gonna say live YouTube is the way to go. I'm gonna try. And I'm gonna make a petition to try and get your show onto our channel. So it's just like, you just. Guys will just log on and live stream it, and then you put the audio under yours and be like, I'm up for that. Yeah, bloody O. [02:25:47] Speaker B: Sounds great. Thank you. [02:25:50] Speaker C: Anyway, before we finish up, because I do have a photo shoot to go to very, very soon. I've got to pack all my gear. What are you shooting with these days? [02:25:57] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So as I said, I started off shooting Canon, then I moved to nikon with the D800s back in 2014, roughly because Canon were dragging their ass on megapixels. So I've shot Nikon ever since. So I currently have two Nikon Z9s, which I mainly use for. For my wildlife and sports stuff. I still shoot a bit of sport. Mainly my son playing hockey, and he's a legend. Good on your Ollie. And then I have the 800 mil, because, again, that 800 mil doesn't work very well on a Z7 mark one, which is what I went to Africa with a few years ago. Got this massive camera with a little tiny pissy camera lens camera. So I've got the 800 mil, I've got the 100 to 400 all Z series lenses, the 24 to 120 great aerial photography lens and then I've got the 14 to 30 great landscape photography lens. All really sharp. I'm a, I'm a bit of a gear snob but those F4 lenses and, and are so sharp these days that you don't need the 2.8. I've got two Nikon Z9s, two Nikon Z7s and then I had too much money the other day or a couple years ago so I bought a Fuji GFX one hundreds or 100 I think it is. And then I bought the really new release, new newly released 20 to 35 for that and then also the, the 35 to 80 for aerial stuff. So I've got a medium format that I don't use all that often. I found it a little difficult to sort of get to know and use. [02:27:24] Speaker C: Well, what, so what's the image quality difference like between those two systems? How, how much difference does that bigger sensor make? [02:27:33] Speaker B: Yeah, so I think very little Fuji Dwight, like me saying that but like for example, a lot of the stuff that we blow up in the gallery ends up being on average a meter and a half. That's our sort of standard size. And I've blown images up on acrylic which is 300 dots per inch and canvas at 100 dots per inch and you can't really tell the difference between those two camera systems that either. I, I think what it is is the, the Fuji is a great camera but that Nikon Z7 sensor is just amazing with what it produces. So yeah, I really, really love using either or. Yeah, I like the, I like, I think, I think, I think the ego. You know, part of me loves the, the medium format system and goes, look at me, I'm using a medium format and you're not. But it's a bit of a pain in the ass to use particularly with what I want to use it for, which is doing the more donboscar style of photos where I'm shooting really wide and then getting close to my foregrounds, which is the whole premise for my wide angle lens photography book. And even at F16 you just need to, you don't get the background of your shot like the foreground. You need to focus Stack it. And I'm so freaking lazy that I can't be bothered putting it on a tripod and focus stacking it. So there's a compromise there. [02:28:50] Speaker C: Yeah, interesting. So a smaller sensor actually becomes an advantage for that style. [02:28:53] Speaker B: No, yeah, correct, correct. Yeah, absolutely. Whereas a larger sensor, my F16 on the, on the Fuji is like your F8 or your F 5.6 on your conventional full frame lens. And so you don't get the depth of field that you want out of it. So that's why, you know, when Olympus people come on my workshops and we're talking F16, I'd say the. Them. No, don't use. You use F16. You're using a micro four thirds. You use a, you know, F8, F11. That'll give you the same as an F16 type of thing. So, yeah, it's a great camera. I really enjoy the process. But then sometimes. But then the lack of depth of field and getting that all right. Is a bit of a challenge, that's for sure. [02:29:37] Speaker C: I think that's one of those things too where it's like, yes, you could probably say the image quality of a GFX is going to be superior if you're just talking straight, you know, file to file. Yeah. But what really comes down to it is the image that you make at the end of the day and if the, if the system is more comfortable for you to use, you're probably going to make better images even if the pixels aren't maybe not quite as nice. [02:30:02] Speaker B: Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, that's correct. And you know, for, you know, hiking, bushwalking, etc. To have a Z7 with a 14 to 30 mil lens on it, that's just thrown in your pack somewhere, taking up barely any room and not weighing much. That's a great camera to have rather than your iPhone, you know what I mean? Like, you're going to get really good quality images out of that. This, this one here, I remember just opening the book now, was taken on exactly that. This was one of the first shots that I took on that camera system. And the. I know it's only, you know, in this size, so size book, but the quality is fantastic. If I could actually find the photo. [02:30:42] Speaker C: I know Jim just bought that lens. I think that's the lens he was saying he's still got sitting in, in a box at his house that he hasn't opened yet. He tested it and he. Yeah, he ended up buy. I think, yeah, the 14 to 30 F4. [02:30:55] Speaker B: Yep. Second, that's the 14 to 30. [02:30:58] Speaker C: Ah, yeah. [02:30:58] Speaker B: So super sharp. Like it's amazing. Yeah. Really nice lens and I really enjoy having that super wide angle these days because I haven't had a wide wide for quite a few years and 14 is just fabulous. Yeah. And I also have two drones just to finish off my equipment stuff. I have two DJI Mavic three Pros. [02:31:20] Speaker C: The fours. [02:31:21] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. Keeping a bit of close eye on that. I kind of. [02:31:24] Speaker A: Well, the specs got leaked overnight too too. [02:31:27] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. Tell us more. [02:31:29] Speaker A: I haven't looked at it. I can't give you anything because I've just seen on one of the rumor sites. Or was it a maybe photo? Rumors. [02:31:39] Speaker C: I'm looking, I'm looking now. [02:31:42] Speaker A: I did see. [02:31:43] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, still three cameras I think. I think longer battery life or something as well. Or there was some couple of things that really caught my eye that I thought, oh, I might need to upgrade. I kind of do and I kind of don't want to upgrade. You know what I mean? [02:32:02] Speaker C: What is it saying here for the main. It'll be a new 4/3 CMOS sensor in the main Hasselblad wide camera, but it's saying 100 megapixel. Effective. [02:32:15] Speaker B: Yeah, effective 100 megapixels. Well, it means that the sensor is in 100 megapixels as such, but it's probably stacking photos together in order to give you the equivalent of 100 megapixel photo, which is what I think some of the other earlier or models below this, the three Pro offer you as well. Yeah. [02:32:32] Speaker C: And they're saying yeah, medium, medium will be a 70 mil and then the tally will be 168 mil. [02:32:39] Speaker B: Sounds similar to the 3. Look, if it's wildly different to the 3, I'll, I'll upgrade. But I've, I've only, you know, in the last 12 months bought that second one of, of the 3 Pro. So again, I tend to not sort of upgrade just because I bought out a new one. I've. I've really got to be convinced. I was using my Mavic 2 Pro for up until sort of 12 months ago. I freaking loved that thing. I had it for about three years. It shot the majority of my morning to Peninsula Book. It was this morning. Peninsula Book was basically all aerials and half of this book was shot on drone. And like you would not know from, from one photo to the next whether I've shot it out of a plane or with the drone. Like the quality even on that, you know, drone. I am like five years old now. That's pretty awesome. [02:33:21] Speaker C: I've got a Mavic 3 the classic. So it's only got the one. The one camera. [02:33:24] Speaker B: The one camera. [02:33:25] Speaker C: That's all I need. It's amazing. I use it for mountain biking and stuff, but I've wanted to get more into image making with it because I mainly use it for video. [02:33:32] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:33:33] Speaker C: And I wanted to do at the Bright at BEFOP last year, the Bright Festival of Photography. I wanted to do your drone workshop so badly. And so you might not have heard this, but we actually, we'd never been to BFOP before. We didn't know much about it. We got our tickets and we live streamed us trying to book the workshops that we wanted. [02:33:53] Speaker B: I didn't know that. [02:33:57] Speaker C: I had only one workshop that I wanted to do and it was your drone workshop. So that's all I wanted. And I put it in my little cart thing and then I had to fluff around and find other workshops to fill up my. My weekend. The cart and the cart. I didn't. And then apparently there were people screaming at me through their computers saying, you have to check that one out, otherwise. Check out. Yeah. And people, even many people at BFOP walked up to me in person and said, I can't believe you just. Just let that sit there. And then you missed. [02:34:31] Speaker B: We were watching. [02:34:32] Speaker C: Yeah, we were watching. You're an idiot. And I was like, yeah, well, I have, I have. [02:34:38] Speaker B: I have somewhat of an exclusive to drop on this podcast if you'd like me to do that. [02:34:43] Speaker A: Drop it far away. [02:34:46] Speaker B: I and. And let me just premise it by saying this. Let's use the AFL analogy. The team is far. Or the club is far greater than any one player. I'm at this stage not going to be at B fault 2025. I know, but as I said, BF's far bigger than me. It's got about 30 other presenters, but apologies to anyone who, like yourself, who's wanting. Been coming, wanting to become on one of my workshops. Yeah. I'm taking three months off photography. August, September, October. So that means that BFOps are fortunately out of that within that period and. And out of the range of my capabilities at this stage, let's just say that. [02:35:27] Speaker C: So dang. [02:35:28] Speaker B: Yes, once. Disappointingly, I'm not gonna be there. You'll have to wait another year. You'll just have to. We'll just. We can get together on one stage, Justin, and we could. We can do something together. [02:35:38] Speaker C: We'll just fly drones around. [02:35:39] Speaker B: We'll do it. Fine. Yeah. But, yeah, I'm Disappointed. Totally disappointed. But I've just got to the point where I need some. Some time off. And now that I've started spriking it and talking to a few people about it, particularly, you know, friends of mine who run workshops here in Australia and overseas, they're kind of like, yeah, we always take, like, two to three months off a year. What are you. And I'm like, who was going to tell me this? I just work, you know, every. Every day of the week, every month of the year. Like, what are you talking about? They're like, no, you need to take time out. So, yeah, I'm going to take some time off and. Nice. And recharge the batteries. Yeah, exactly. The balance is really out at the moment. My schedule is crazy to the point that I had to hire a virtual assistant, which I never thought I'd have to do. I was always like, I'm always across everything. You know, it's fine. And it's now got a little bit out of control, so just need to take a breath before I. Before I run myself into the ground. Yeah, good call. [02:36:33] Speaker A: Good call. [02:36:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:36:34] Speaker C: Makes total. [02:36:35] Speaker B: Good, Good point to perhaps end on. What do you think? [02:36:37] Speaker C: I think so. [02:36:38] Speaker B: I think so. [02:36:39] Speaker C: Before we. Before we run this podcast into the. [02:36:41] Speaker B: Ground, David asked whether I've ever used the D5 Wildlife. No, I only ever owned the D8 Hundreds and then. And then moved across to. To Mirrorless about four or five years ago. So, yeah, fair enough. [02:36:54] Speaker C: David's a Nikon aficionado. I think he's got 13 or 14 Nikons going back to, you know, old F. What are they? FM2s? F2s, whatever they're called. The old film. [02:37:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [02:37:07] Speaker C: All the way through to. I think he's got two D5 hundreds and heap of other stuff. He loves it. [02:37:11] Speaker B: Nice. Yeah, nice. [02:37:13] Speaker C: Cool, Cool. Should we call it. [02:37:15] Speaker B: Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Provided some value. [02:37:19] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely. No, most definitely. So, Tom, just on behalf of myself and Justin and Jim, thank you so much for your time today. I'm sure I speak for all of our viewers and listeners who are either watching or listening along on audio podcasts. Was a fascinating story and amazing to see someone be so humble about how they got to where they're at. You know, that it has taken the tough slog. It has taken the ability to adapt and morph with the changing industry. And I think it's a great example for those that aspiring to, you know, get into serious photography and start to make some money from it, that there's. There's Definitely things to learn from your elders. [02:38:08] Speaker B: Putting me in that category. Jesus I am now. [02:38:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm nearly 52, so it's nice to meet another elder. But, but look, thank you once again. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. For those of you watching along and listening along, be sure to like and subscribe and, and don't forget to leave comments. We'll, we'll come back to comments probably on our Monday night episodes and cover off the questions people might have. But obviously, yeah, we'd love to have you back on the show, Tom. [02:38:38] Speaker B: Anytime, anytime. [02:38:40] Speaker A: We might get you and Matt Crummins and. Yeah, yeah, and maybe Glenn, we'll just. [02:38:45] Speaker B: Get a little bit of a. Oh God, wild. [02:38:47] Speaker C: That'd be wild. [02:38:48] Speaker B: What are we going to try and broadcast and break the Internet for like 12 hours straight or something? [02:38:52] Speaker A: That'll love it. [02:38:53] Speaker B: That's how long it'll take to get off. Yeah, it'd be great. And look, if anybody is wanting to reach out, you know, obviously there's my website. Tom pot.comtomput workshops.com email is just tom.com very self gratuitous. But if you, you know, particularly in terms of mentoring or following up with any questions that you might have had from this, if you're watching later, just reach out. Happy to help. Oh great. [02:39:17] Speaker A: It's very generous. [02:39:18] Speaker C: Generous. The chat's going crazy. Philip Johnson says, thanks for the inspiration, Tom. Also Justin and Greg, Good show. Glenn Lavender says, this has been the best podcast I've watched this morning. Greg. Greg Carrick. [02:39:32] Speaker B: Can we expect anything less from Glenn Lavender? [02:39:35] Speaker C: Craig says, I love logging on just when you are finishing. David mascara says SP 1957. I assume that's a Nikon. Nikon camera. [02:39:45] Speaker B: The first earliest Nikon model that he owns. [02:39:48] Speaker C: Yeah, it must be. Tanya Knight says, thanks, Tom. Shattered. You're not at bfop, but a break will do wonders. Thanks guys. And finally Greg says, can we talk about Fujifilm now? Greg? You. We, I, I thought we were going to have finally an episode where we just talked about like cool stuff and then, and then we heard that, oh, I've actually got a gfx. I was like, no, another one. They're everywhere. [02:40:11] Speaker B: Really? Really. Did I, I didn't get that memo. Was I not supposed to mention that? [02:40:15] Speaker A: No, no, I'm a Fuji fanboy and. [02:40:21] Speaker B: Really, Wow, I didn't realize that. [02:40:24] Speaker A: Just, that's just coincidental that they all. [02:40:26] Speaker B: Use Fuji cameras, right? I have nothing to do with you, Greg. No, nothing at all. [02:40:31] Speaker C: I was like, is Greg Tom, before. [02:40:34] Speaker B: Greg's getting kickbacks, isn't he Is getting major kickbacks from every time. It's in his contract. [02:40:40] Speaker A: Although there's a career arriving today with something from. No, no, not at all. But look, on that note, I think we will wrap up. This has been an amazing episode. For those of you watching along at home, this has been the Camera Life podcast, episode 74, first of May. Make sure that you are liked and subscribed and let your photography friends know that we're here. We've got some great content. We've got 74 episodes just like this one. [02:41:09] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:41:09] Speaker C: Send it to a friend. We need to. We get it. Get that live chat going. [02:41:12] Speaker B: Love. Yeah. [02:41:14] Speaker A: Spread the love. Thanks again, Tom. We'll have you back for sure. Because I feel like we only covered about two years of your actual life, so we'll definitely. [02:41:26] Speaker B: So much to share. No, it's wonderful. [02:41:28] Speaker A: Look, I think the more that we can share. Yeah, look, the more that we can share, the more that other people grow, which is why we do what we do here on the Camera Life podcast. So thank you for being a part of that. On that note, I. I'm gonna say farewell. We're going to play out some music and we'll see you Monday night. [02:41:47] Speaker B: Bruce. Bruce. [02:41:52] Speaker A: So we're going to do a Monday night interview because Bruce couldn't make it. [02:41:56] Speaker B: For a hugely talented. Hugely talented guy. Yeah. [02:42:00] Speaker C: Very excited. [02:42:01] Speaker B: Yeah, he's great. [02:42:02] Speaker C: He's. He's actually. He's missing from the chat today. He's normally here. [02:42:08] Speaker B: He's trying to make a dollar like most of us. [02:42:10] Speaker A: Yeah, some people have day jobs. [02:42:13] Speaker B: I know. [02:42:14] Speaker C: Speaking of which, I've now got 20 minutes to pack my gears. Let's roll the. [02:42:20] Speaker B: Thanks, everybody. See you guys.