Travel Photography Live: Review
Posted on: 16 Oct 2012
Written by: Ngaire Ackerley
‘Are you doing right now what it is you most want to do?’ This was the question that kicked off Chris Weston’s photography career and brought his amazing work to light at the recent Travel Photography Live festival held in London a few weeks ago.
While I did not attend all three days, I still managed to see some incredibly inspiring presentations, great photography and meet some amazing people at this festival. I thought I’d share a few aspects that I took away from my time there.
Photographic Equipment
It was interesting to hear from the likes of Nick Danzigner and Chris Weston that they often don’t shoot with large zoom lenses from a distance in their work, preferring to get closer to the subject matter for a more intimate photographic encounter. Nick prefers wide-angle lenses and Chris mentioned much of his work is done on 50mm or 70-200mm lenses. This showed that it is not always the long zoom lenses that make fantastic images of travel and wildlife photography.
Impact in Photographs
Tom Mackie gave a presentation on ‘Creating Impact’ where he showed the incredible colours you can achieve just by waking up early or staying out late to take photographs at dawn or dusk. Sometimes you just have to be patient and determined to get that great shot.
Photo Essay and Photo books
As I expected one of the top self-publishing book sites – blurb.com was mentioned in Mark Edward Harris’s presentation about photographic essays and photo books. Sometimes its great to hear presentations that reinforce your knowledge, remind you of key points and still provide valuable information. He referred to a subject matter that I often blog about – narrative photography and how he goes about his work such as that in his recent book about Japanese Baths.
Approaches
Every photographer approaches photography slightly different and I always find it interesting hearing about their experiences and how they approach their style of photography. Chris Weston talked about his ‘Animals on the Edge’ project and how successful it can be approaching animals from a less expected angle – such as from a boat on a river or in an underground pit during the Wildebeest Migration in Kenya. He likes to get close to the animals and capture their personality, creating images that really do stand out from the crowd. It was really inspiring to see someone who cares so much about conservation, using his passion of wildlife photography to make a difference.
Making money from Photography
As a travel photographer looking to do something with my photographs besides display on my website and blog about it, I found Colin Finlay’s presentation about different avenues for selling photography provided plenty of food-for-thought. The main thing that he got across was the three C’s: Content, Customers and Competition. Plan a strategy and do your research.
Overall the event was a great success and had a great location at the Royal Geographical Society in London. I hope that next year I’ll attend the entire event and find it even more inspiring and hopefully have time to speak with more of the presenters and fellow attendees.
As for my own photographic work, I’m still looking into avenues and working on a self-published book that I hope to release in January 2013 – so keep an eye out for more details!
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