Latest / The MOOD Podcast / Chronicles of a Photography Podcast Pioneer, with Martin Bailey, E020

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Chronicles of a Photography Podcast Pioneer, with Martin Bailey, E020 · The MOOD Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: In this online episode of the Mood podcast I connected with Martin Bailey.
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Martin has lived in Tokyo for many years and started his photography business there, and is known mostly for his nature and wildlife photography.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: He was one of the first podcasters in the photography space and was also one of the pioneers with photography blogging, so it was really great to talk with him about the inception of his podcast as well as how he keeps his loyal audience and clientele.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: We also touched upon some important matters with regard to the business side of what he does, speaking on the good, the bad and the ugly, as well as the future struggles that he and other photographers might face.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: Martin is a true gentleman, and his guest appearance was as pleasurable to converse with as when the tables were reversed with me on his show.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: You'll hear some slight scratchiness with my audio, so I do apologise for that, but I hope you can still take as much away from this conversation as I did, and so now I bring you Martin Bailey.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: Martin, welcome to the Mood Podcast.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: This has been a long time coming and just to return the favour that you did for me having me on your show.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: It's an absolute pleasure to have you here today all in the Mood Podcast.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: Not at all.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: It's nice to be here.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: Thanks for having me, matt.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: So you know we have a lot to talk about and I know a lot that would be of great interest to your audience as much as mine and I'm sure some of it will just continue from what we talked about a few weeks ago on the Martin Bailey photography podcast.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: So before we kind of dive in, why don't you just give us an introduction to who you are, how you got into photography and kind of your photography journey from when you started up to now?
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: It's a long story which I'll try to keep short.
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: I, like most people, I started in photography when I was very young, probably just as I got into my teens, and I fell in love with just the act of, of course.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: Back then it was film and just the process, you know, loading the film and then seeing something come back, and I wasn't able to develop my own film until very recently.
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: I now use a lab box.
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: I do have a film camera still.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: I've got a medium format rolly, a rolly flex which I enjoy putting film in and develop my own.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: But earlier it was, I mean, some of my earlier cameras.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: The one of the first I can remember was literally it was a free plastic camera that came with a roll of 35 millimeter film it was.
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: You clipped it onto the roll and then shot away and I just really enjoyed it the whole process.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: And then in I came to Japan when I was 24.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: So that was what many 91.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: So just a few years ago.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we're talking.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: What is it 32 years now?
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: And I, japan opened my eyes, culturally and visually.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: I, it was so different to what I'd grown up with in England and I, I bought a camera, an Olympus trip, but you know, probably the best camera I'd had to the time.
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: When I came to Japan and within a few weeks, and you know, I'd started getting a bit of money coming in from the job that I was doing and I went into the city and bought my first Canon SLR, not DSLR, and it really just took me from there.
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: Digital came along in the early 2000s, late 90s, early 2000s, and that sort of brought together a passion, another passion of mine, which was computers.
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: So I'd got one of the early sort of home computer users and then digital came along and brought the two together and I was in heaven.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: So, you know, and it really just kept pulling me in.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: I started my own podcast in 90, what was it Not 95, 2005.
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: So that's some 18 years or so ago now.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: No, 13 years.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: Everything's going out of the window and and that is a way that I let I got myself, you know, started to build an audience and that led me to be able to do workshops and tours and the.
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: I mean.
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: The rest is history really.
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: I quit my day job 13 years ago and have been supporting myself through the.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: You know the stuff that I do around photography mainly the tours but I've, over the years, I've done lots of things selling prints, sold a lot of ebooks, a lot of things to do with the education of photography and, yeah, I mean we'll probably touch on some things.
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: I don't really have a huge market here for photography work.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: You know, the Japanese market is kind of strange and, of course, the way things are going, business wise people want everything for nothing.
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: Now, and I've never wanted to work for nothing it doesn't really help pay the bills.
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, it's been challenging in some ways, but I've loved the journey and I love my life, so you can't really say much more than that.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: Well, what a great way to end your story.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: Exactly, you can't say any more than that.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: Really, how did you, you know you're, you're in England, I mean, I know you're in this, but for the audience out there, what is your background pre photography and kind of where you grew up and how are you, you know, developed?
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: it.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: I grew up in the Midlands in England and it was it was kind of, you know, I always, I mean, I loved my dad.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: He died many years ago, bless him.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: But I always kind of resented things like what do you want to be when you grow up?
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: And I'd like to be an astronaut, and then, oh no, you've got to go to uni and you've got to be clever to do that.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: Forget that.
• 6:40
  Speaker 2: So, okay, nice support, I'll tell I'll carry those scars and see what I can do with the rest of my life.
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: But you know, there's there's been a lot of things that have happened over the years that have helped some of Hindad.
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: But I think everything that happens in our life helps to build who we are, sort of.
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: With the current version of everything we've experienced to this point, and so you know, I I don't really regret the early years and I I made a few mistakes along the way, like marry in the wrong person and then figuring out how to get rid of that mistake and then finding the right person and now been with her for 30 years.
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: It's, you know, it's all good and I think that the the main thing I mean I've I've had like a brain tumor 13 the years ago, which was a lot of fun, you know, having them jumping into my skull and wiggling around with my gray matter.
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: Thankfully that's under control.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: There's still a bit left, but I, I control that.
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: I've actually got a hole in what's called the sphenoid bone, which is a butterfly shaped bone that holds the front of your brain up, and I I've got a hole in that.
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: That.
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: If I, if I take too much medication to get rid of the brain tumor that's left, the hole opens up and cerebrospinal fluid starts to drip out of my nose.
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: So it's, you know, I and I, I just control that.
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: I, I figured out they wanted to reoperate and I said no, you know what I think.
• 8:23
  Speaker 2: I've figured out the mechanism.
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: I'm just going to adjust the size of the remnants of the tumor so that it plugs the hole up, and I can do that with medication.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: So I've been doing that for the last five or six years and it's yeah, life goes on, thankfully.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: Was this?
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: Was this a cancerous tumor?
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: Was it benign?
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: No, no, it was.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: Was it on your, on your?
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: So?
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: I mean that was the saving thing.
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: I didn't have to do any radiation treatment or anything like that.
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: It was more.
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: I mean I actually, when we found it, I started I'd been having fits.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: I was just coming back from Antarctica and I was having fits on the on the boat and I think they call them unsinnet fits.
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: It was like a pop in my chest and then, no, a pop behind my nose and then the sensation went out around my body and I.
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: It was really disorienting for a few moments as that happened and then it gradually faded away.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: But that happened like 20 times on one of the days, just as we hit Patagonia on the way back from a, an Antarctica trip which I was working on, and I came back and didn't happen for a while and then it did again in about a month later.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: So I called a friend in Australia, graham Morgan.
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: He's an amazing photographer but he's also an amazing practitioner and he said get to the doctors and get yourself get a head scan.
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: And the lady that looked after me that morning with a big smile said to me oh, you've got a break too, man.
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: Oh, great.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: And then, but thankfully it was.
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: It was not malignant, it was benign.
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: So I that after the tests I went home and I actually had essentially a stroke, the I was sitting on the sofa and I was typing, doing some work and I started making typos and I thought this is not right, my hands aren't working properly.
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: And I turned to my wife and I thought I was saying something's wrong.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: And I actually I was.
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: I said something's wrong because the left side of my face was closing down and then my eyesight closed down.
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: It went like from from the top left corner it went completely black to where I couldn't see anything.
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: I'd probably just got a blood clot in my brain because there was a, apparently there was a cyst that had grown up into the side of my brain and it was messing things up.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: But and again, the bright side here is I, you know, being me I thought, okay, well, I've probably going to have to be in.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: My wife was calling the ambulance and I thought, if I'm going to have to be in hospital, I probably need a few cables in my computer.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: So I started hopping up the stairs with the half of my body that was working and I ran around so much trying to get stuff that it cleared the blockage and I, by the time the ambulance came, my eyesight had come back and my left side of my body had come back working again.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: But they said, okay, so you've, you've got to, we're going to have to deal with this with more emergency.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: And they operated about a week later, thankfully, and yeah it all, it all pretty much went back right.
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: But, like I say this, they couldn't get it all out because it had eaten into the spinoid bone so much that taking it out would have probably done more harm than leaving it in.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: Well, well, the heavy, heavy story could drop on.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, no, no.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: It's great.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: How did that change?
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: Did it?
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: Did it give you kind of a new lease on life without using too much of a cliche?
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: But did it?
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: Did it really kind of change your perspective and your priorities with photography and with the personal life and everything?
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: It didn't really change.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: I mean, I've always been probably up, even from before this happened.
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: I call myself a terminal optimist, which is kind of a strange way to put it, but I, you know even as.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: I was being told I'd got a, even as I was told I'd got a brain tumor.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: My wife looked at me and, because we were talking in Japanese and my wife said to me, you know, I didn't, I didn't like sit down, I didn't have any problems with it, and I, I started talking about what's happening and my wife said to me did you understand what she's told you?
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: And I said yeah, said we've got to deal with it, and she's okay, fair enough.
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: So I, I don't know, I mean, I I felt very lucky to continue to be here.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: Still, anything could have happened.
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: The apparently the you know the doctor, who, the main surgeon, who did the surgeon the surgery he was a group in a team of surgeons that were looking after me during that and apparently all of the other people in the room, the other doctors in the room said we should take the top of his head off and go in and get it out from there.
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: And the main surgeon it's a, it's a regular name here, but his name is actually Dr Jokey.
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: It sounds like a joke, but it's not he's he said no, this guy has, literally, just less than a year ago, given up a good day job to be a photographer and if we go in through the top of his head we'll probably either blind him or paralyze him or both.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: I said we'll take away his livelihood.
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: I can get rid of the rest of this with medication and we're going to close him up and that's it.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: Because they went in through the nose to do the main pros.
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: You know the main procedure, and that was the biggest thing.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: I mean, if that guy had done what a lot of neurosurgeons do and thrown away his Well, not thrown away his pride.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: You know most of them say, oh yeah, we got it out, you've got no brain tumor left, you can't walk or see, but you know we did it.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: And then I've heard of lots of people that that's happened to.
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: So for me, probably the most fortunate thing was meeting and working with that specific surgeon.
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: You know one of the best neurosurgeons in Japan.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: So that's really something I'm very thankful for.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: Did you have any physiological changes after the operation, like I mean you didn't suddenly become Superman or anything, but did you have any like I don't know, things that you might observe that were slightly enhanced or degraded in terms of your motor behavior or anything?
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: like that.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: Two things happened that were surprising and they actually faded back to regular.
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: You know the pre operation me.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: One was that when I left the hospital and got in the taxi I'd not worn my glasses for a few.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: You know, I don't really need they, didn't.
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: At that time I didn't need them indoors, and I put my glasses on and I couldn't see properly and I thought, oh, that's strange, what's happening.
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: And I took them off and I could see to the horizon without any problems and we saw.
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: My eyesight went back to how it was before I started wearing glasses in my late teens and we figured out that what had happened is there was a lot of all of the messing about in my head.
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: They'd done it, caused pressure to build up behind my eyes, probably changed the shape of my eyes slightly from the pressure, and it just happened that the picture you know, the vision that I was, the picture that my lenses was forming was now hitting the back of my eye to make the make the picture perfectly in focus.
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: And then gradually, over a few months, the swelling went down and my eyes grew back to where they were before the surgery.
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: So I lost that superpower and the other one was for a while I I didn't.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: I would pick up like chopsticks and think I would do things with my left hand, as though I became completely ambidextrous for a while, and I don't know why, but again I probably just out of habit.
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: The more I got back into regular life I started to use my right hand again more, but without thinking I would pick up my chopsticks to eat some food and I'd pick them up with my left hand and then realize that I was not left handed and switch back.
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: But it was.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: That was another thing that happened.
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: It was kind of strange.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: Interesting.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: Well, let's let's kind of try and get back to photography, I guess, even though that's not talked to you about that for a while Fascinating Um, why photography you you you talked earlier about you know, you were just drawn into it, you just it was just kind of one of the but you know, we all have it Right, but it's very difficult to put your finger on kind of why do I like this so much?
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: Have you thought about, you know, why photography kind of intrigued you so much and why you became kind of addicted to it in the first place?
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: I think the main thing was the idea of capturing a small slice of time and and in some ways, you know, it doesn't have to necessarily be small I enjoy using heavy neutral density filters and taking two, three minutes of time, but you, you control the length of the exposure and everything that happened during that time becomes recorded on the film or the digital sensor.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: And that just seemed amazing to me that you could.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: I mean, it was almost like going back to the early, to the invention of of photographs and cameras, thinking that you could just take a moment in time and record it and keep it forever.
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: And I, I think that part of it as well.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: I, I was all.
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: I always responded well to praise and like a lot of people, it's like when I learned Japanese people, you say a few words and they'll say, oh, your Japanese is really good, and it was to me.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: It was a pat on the back that I never really had as I grew up.
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: You know, my parents were encouraging in some ways, but I just I responded really well to praise and when I was going out and making photos in the early days in Japan, the people that were around me were saying, oh, that's really good.
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: Can I have a copy?
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: And I'm like, oh yeah, ok, I might be, I might actually be good at this, and so that really encouraged me to do more, and that's probably why I became a full time photographer.
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: Because the podcast initially.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: I learned more about photography through doing the podcast.
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: Then I knew before I started it.
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: You know, it's it's kind of strange that I started something to help others by sharing my own experiences, but I quickly realized that by teaching people about photography and what I knew at that point or at any one point, was helping me to become a better photographer.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: And so over the years, with on my workshops, I've taught probably now thousands of people in person how to do this thing and watching people now watching other people become better and and capture images that have changed their lives.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: You know, I've been to some amazing places and I I feel that to me that the reward are what keep me going.
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: I remember one, if I may take a moment to relay one story, I was on a tour I think it was 2012 or somewhere around there and there was a lady from Egypt with us not Egypt, israel and she was not too steady on a feet.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: She'd she'd had some illness and she was.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: She was kind of grumpy for the first few days of the trip and we we got to Hokkaido after photographing the snow monkeys and we'd spent two days photographing the red crown cranes.
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: They're amazing birds, they're like they're, they're 160 centimeters tall and they, they are just so beautiful.
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: Big white birds with black feathers.
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: On the bottom of the back of their flyer there's a black and they have black necks and a red, a red crown, of course, as the name suggests.
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: But the first two days it had been sunny and very contrast light, contrasty light.
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: And then on the third morning, when we were supposed to drive to a different place to start photographing the Hoopas ones, it was chucking it down with snow.
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: You know, I often say it's like snowing eggs.
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: You got these really big balls of snow and so I said, ok, change of plan, we're going back to the cranes for a few hours.
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: And we, we drove back to the cranes, we went into this, the enclosure where they are, and they went crazy.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: They love when it snows.
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: It excites them, they get, they get really dynamic, and they were.
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: They was like 20 different pairs of cranes all doing major things, 20 different pairs of cranes, all doing mating dances, the, the or the courting dances.
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: And they there was, you know, everybody was like blasting away 10 frames, a second or so, probably at the time, and the lady from Israel who had not been very happy for the first few days was jumping up and down and giggling like a 16 year old and I I just thought to myself, wow, you've got the best job in the world, you know, being able to bring people to places that make them that happy.
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: And I've had people stand in front of a field of cranes and cry grown men crying because they were just so moved by what they were seeing.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: And they come and give me a hug and and it's just, you know, it's just amazing to be able to do what I'm doing and and bring so much happiness and probably, in many ways, changing people's lives.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: You know, I think that's the beauty of any art form is that it's not a piece of paper.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: That I mean you can.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: They're obviously like education courses and things, but that will never bring as much fulfillment and passion and belief just pure, unadulterated joy than just a either having that kind of experience, even just not with a camera in her, but be be able to capture that and being able to learn how to capture that and you know, I've, we've all experienced it right for ourselves, seen it with other people as well, and if you're able to, to facilitate that joy, it's very, very fulfilling and interesting how it might link back to your childhood and how you know that kind of reward based system and kind of the dopamine that we all receive from someone telling us that we're good at something.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: That's what fuels us, right, we all want approval, we want to know that we're kind of doing something good or we're good at something.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: And, conversely, when you know you could post a photo on any platform to your audience, right and you and it doesn't get maybe as many as much engagement or as many like that's another photo, you know.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: You add it like that.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: Oh, why?
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: Why doesn't you know?
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: Why do they like that photo?
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: I love it.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: You know you start over thinking, analyzing, but that's why I love the the education part, much like you, because you can have that direct relationship with, with another human and be able to whether it's on a long term scale or short term scale you're able to kind of, you know, be with them on that journey, which I think is incredibly powerful.
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: Why Japan?
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: Why, why did you kind of settle in Japan and why did you go there in the first place?
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: What was it about Japan?
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: Or the photography in Japan?
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: Maybe that really intriguing?
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: Hmm, so I I'd actually although I tried to avoid going into a factory when I was in my teens, you know, in it was back in the mid, early 80s and people were all there was lots of people like three or four million people out of work, and I ended up in a factory, but it was.
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: It was a skilled job, making lace on huge lace looms.
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: And I went into the canteen one morning and there was an advert on the back of the local newspaper of working in Japan and I'd, I'd, kind of I'd bought a German dictionary and I was going to try to learn a language, and German.
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: German became the focus of that.
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: But then I thought, oh, japanese, if I could go to Japan I could learn Japanese.
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: And that's probably from a, from a Europeans perspective, was a lot more sort of cool and romantic than learning German.
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: You know, not that there's anything wrong with the German language, but I jumped onto the, I went for an interview on a Monday afternoon and got the job and I actually flew to Japan on the following Saturday and I I was doing the same work, I was making lace in a factory with three, initially three other guys from the same town and that grew to six.
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: The contract was six months.
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: Contract was extended a number of times.
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: So I was actually there for four years and when they said, we, we don't need you anymore because we've built a factory in China and that was their way of trying to save a few pounds or dollars or yen, and they, they said we don't need you and you know, we don't want to extend the contract anymore.
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: So I said, well, I don't want to go back to England because, again, nothing wrong with England, but I'd love Japan and I had already met my, my current wife as well.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: So that was another bit, another motivation, and I put myself through college.
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: I I did what I had not been able to do in England in the 80s, which was give myself a better education.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: I used a lot of the money that I had saved over the four years that I was working in the factory and I, I put myself through college.
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: All of the education was in Japanese, so that helped me to improve my Japanese even more.
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: I was reading and writing all of my notes and everything, and you know the the lecturers notes were Japanese.
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: I was making my notes in Japanese.
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: So at the end of the end of the fourth year I passed the highest level of the Japanese proficiency test and then went on to graduate with honors from the college and I actually at that point went back to England for three years, at which time and I took my my now wife with me and at that time I got myself in a really good job that helped me to come back to Tokyo, did that for 10 years and then really that took me up to the point because for the for the last five years of doing that job, I started the podcast and my, my hobby became more of a passion and I I just knew that I had to get out of the day job, even though I was earning a lot of money.
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: I had to get out of it and try and do photography full time.
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: And I've actually completely forgotten the initial question on that monologue.
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: I don't know if I've answered your question.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: There is just, it was just why, why, why you moved to Japan.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: But that actually segues nicely to when you started.
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: Japan was obviously a huge catalyst for you in terms of your photography journey.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: When you started you know 2005 for the podcast you might be you know those early days of podcasting, right, this was like the inception years of podcasting and yeah, I really, you know, being being a newer podcast myself, I'm really interested to hear how the podcasting has, how it changed your photography or impacted your photography and your vision.
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I mean, when I started the podcast in September 2005, and there was, there were no tools I had to.
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: I still use a web page and a system that I built myself that manages all of my feeds and everything and generates the, the files that go out to the, to the very iTunes and things.
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: I manage all of that.
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: I built it all myself and manage it all myself still now.
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: But I I remember I actually had a trip planned.
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: I had to go for a business trip to Florida.
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: I threw out the first podcast literally days before I jumped on the plane.
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: When I got to Florida, my personal email inbox was full of people saying, oh, we love the podcast, can't wait to hear the next one.
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: I was the third photography podcast in iTunes.
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: Before me there was Chris Markwatts' Tips from the Top Floor and Brooks Jensen's Lens Work.
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: Both of them had a different space and I thought there's room for more.
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: I decided to give it a try.
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: It literally I grew a community around it and that grew into an audience.
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: Some of the things that I do like calling it the Martin Bailey Photography Podcast probably have hindered, because people probably look at it and say, oh, it's a podcast about him.
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: I'm going to skip that.
• 31:00
  Speaker 2: But it's never been that.
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: It's been a podcast sharing my journey with others and it's to help others and, of course, I've built a business around it, so it's helping me too.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: But you mentioned how did it change my photography?
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: And I realized very early on that it was making me a better photographer because I was starting to make the podcast, as always I'd go out and do a trip and I'd say, ok, I remember the time it really clicked.
• 31:34
  Speaker 2: I was standing in front of a waterfall, making photographs of a place that I loved, and I was thinking through what I was going to say in the podcast as I was photographing and then I thought, well, hang on, that's stupid, why don't you do this?
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: And I realized that I was going through the processes that I was doing as I did.
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: Them helped me to find problems in the process and fix them, and I was getting better photography back because I was fixing the problems and the things that I was going to overlook just through working through this, what I later called the mental checklist, and just doing that over the years made me so much a better photographer and, of course, that led me to become more of an educator and I remember again, very briefly, hopefully a lady that was she.
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: She came on one of my trips a few, a few years ago and I think she was like the principle for a school for children with special needs.
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: And she, she said, you know, probably if we'd have caught you when you were younger, you probably would have been in our school rather than the the one that you were in, because, she said, some of your thought patterns you're obviously you've got.
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: We could put names to some of the things that you do, she said.
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: But don't be, don't be disgruntled by that.
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: She said, because, martin, you're one of the best teachers I've ever traveled with and I'm like, oh wow, you know.
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: So I mean, I know I've probably got some sort of a disorder, but it helps me.
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: When I go down periscope to do something I've got, I'm able to concentrate to degrees that I would never have thought, probably because I've got this and I don't know OCD or some sort of a name for how I work, but it helps me and it helps me to do quality work because I won't give in.
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: I've often said stubbornness is a virtue and I thoroughly believe that.
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: Certainly is in business and project management almost.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: But what is?
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: You mentioned the mental checklist earlier and and now you talk about kind of how you are very focused in what you do, kind of combine those and tell us a little bit more about your process, like if you're maybe not so much on the workshops and the education side, but if you're just going out to shoot, tell us a little bit about your process and what you really like to shoot as well, what, what your kind of main subject matter is.
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm a big believer in shooting what you love, and I think that's how we become our best for talk.
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: You know the best version of us that we can be, and so you know I, even though I live in a third and metropolis of 13 million people here in Tokyo, I don't really do a lot of street photography, which is a mecca for because I don't enjoy it.
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: I do enjoy it occasionally, especially with film, but for me, if I've got time to do something, I want to go and shoot nature.
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: I want to go to either photograph wildlife or landscapes or even flowers in the local park, and I get a lot of pleasure out of that.
• 34:58
  Speaker 2: And so for me, I generally will decide what I'm going to shoot before I go out, and I'll.
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: I'll often take a few extra lenses in case something happens and I need to photograph something that I didn't plan for.
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: But you know photography, if you take too much gear, it weighs you down and you you're not as nimble as you should be.
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: So I try to be sensible about what I take.
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: My camera banks have shrunk considerably over the years, partly thanks to the mirrorless systems that I'm using now as well, but I will literally go out and the process is really to have the scene or the subject guide my actions, and I remember the first time I went to Iceland.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: I never plan and I did this with Namibia as well.
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: I don't plan places.
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: A lot of people, when you're going to go somewhere new, they go online Flickr, 500px, all of the sites, probably the different sites, now one px or something, and they'll end up with an album or a clipboard full of photos of a place, and then what happens is they go there and they run around looking for the photos that they've got on their iPhone or whatever, and that, to me, is completely the wrong way to go about it.
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: You should arrive at a place with no preconceptions and allow your own creativity to drive your actions, and I love arriving at a place, and even if I walk away with photographs that everyone else has shot there, because it's so obvious that this is a place to shoot, I feel as though everything I've done at that place is original, because I don't know what else has been shot there.
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: When I come back home, sometimes I've got stuff that really is different to what others have shot, but other times I've come back and I've got exactly the same shot that others have made the place famous with, but I don't care, because when I shot it it was original to me, and I often say that originality is a frame of mind, and I believe that it is.
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: If you don't compare yourself to others, you're like the best at what you do.
• 37:24
  Speaker 2: I don't know I'm under no delusions that I'm the best photographer in the world, but I know that I'm shooting original work because I rarely check what else has been done at places.
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: Interesting.
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I totally agree with you on a lot of what you just said.
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: I think it does depend on what genre you shoot, but I think, with the rise of social media as well, people don't have really true inspirations anymore or true creativity.
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: I always question the definition of uniqueness and I say uniqueness is different than originality.
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: I couldn't agree more.
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: It's like you're speaking out of my own heart.
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: Originality is subjective.
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: It's down to you.
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: You can go to a place and not necessarily be influenced or affected by what the person next to you has shot or what you might have seen on Instagram or one of these platforms.
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: But uniqueness I don't know about uniqueness.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: I don't know if there is such a thing as being unique anymore.
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: We live in a world of 7.5 billion people.
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: Pretty much every main corner of the globe is inhabited some way, apart from a few places that aren't, and it's very difficult to find true uniqueness other than the moment itself, and I think that's what people have to remember.
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: It's like every moment you live, every day of every year, is unique because it's never happened before and it will never happen again.
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: So you can remember that when you pick up your camera as well, and that's what comes back?
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: what you were saying, that's a great way to look at it.
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: I get that a lot.
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: I plan types of people that I want to go and explore, but that's about it.
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: And I'm the same like when I get in front of people or I get to the place, I'm going to kind of base myself.
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: Usually people go well, what do you want these guys to do?
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: Or show me what you want them to do?
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, no.
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: I just want to.
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: Let's see how this evolves, let's see what these people are like, let's see what the environment and everything else kind of unveils as time goes on.
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: I think you know it's nice to hear you say that, because I think, especially with like workshops as well, where things have to be a bit more planned and we'll get to work a bit later, but you know, having it come tried a little bit too much can sometimes take away from that creativity.
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: So there's that balance of having a structure to teach people right or having the structure to kind of go.
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: Well, I kind of roughly know what I want or where I want to go or what I want to capture.
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: Maybe it's an animal, maybe it's a certain area or province, or maybe it's, you know, a certain street or certain type of, but then, once you're there, allowing it to just unfold, because it never goes according to plan anyway, right, tell us a little bit about that experience, with that approach, with your workshops and your guided tours.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: Is that something you still teach or do you have to have some kind of structure to that?
• 40:30
  Speaker 2: Well, we have with my tours.
• 40:33
  Speaker 2: I take people to places where they're going to get photographs but I don't necessarily tell them exactly what to shoot and a lot of the time, you know, the guests will come away with photos better than mine, and I love that.
• 40:51
  Speaker 2: It's really a, especially with wildlife, but I suppose with landscapes as well.
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: You know some people.
• 41:00
  Speaker 2: I put them in front of an obvious landscape subject and they'll turn around and walk across the road and go and photograph a tree that nobody else has noticed, and so there's.
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: You know I mean, I know it sounds if you're not into photographing lone trees on snowy hills or things like that, then it might sound a little bit boring.
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: But if you're into minimalist photography, my Hokkaido landscape tour literally puts us into places where you could point your camera in any direction and you're going to get something nice.
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: But I provide help for people like I'll get to some locations and do a talk about exposure or various things.
• 41:49
  Speaker 2: You know technical side of photography and I will always share with people what I'm photographing if they're coming up dry with their own creativity.
• 42:00
  Speaker 2: But I don't really provide okay, this is what we're going to shoot here.
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: I will say, obviously, if it's a wildlife tour that we do, or a number of wildlife tours.
• 42:13
  Speaker 2: Sometimes it's obvious there's nothing.
• 42:17
  Speaker 2: In Namibia, if there is a plane with, like, one of the photos that I've sent you is of a cheetah under a tree with the cubs, then the cheetah under the tree with the cubs is the obvious photo, because there's nothing else there.
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: We're there pointing our cameras at one thing, everybody pointing the cameras at one thing, but when you release the shutter and how you frame it and all of the other stuff is very much down to the each individual.
• 42:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's the photo and I actually I love this photo because you've got the cub with its hand up on its mother's forehead and the mother there is like bowing down to allow the cub to do that and I just love the connection there.
• 43:09
  Speaker 2: It's almost human.
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: But that photograph was one of.
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: That was really the only or the best photograph that I was able to shoot.
• 43:22
  Speaker 2: That day.
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: We found this family of the cheetahs the mother with two cubs and we found them in the morning, but they were too far away and the light was very harsh, so we went back in the afternoon and spent literally, I think, three hours just pointing our cameras at this family of cheetah and, yeah, it turned out to be probably one of my favorite shots of the trip.
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: But the people in the car with me, the vehicle with me, all got something else.
• 43:55
  Speaker 2: They all got different things.
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: You know, I'm sure some of them have the same scene that I have, but because I don't compare directly to me again, even though I was working with a group, I still want my own photographs of that to tell other people what we did and, unless you know, we often share, do a show and tell sessions and share our images afterwards.
• 44:17
  Speaker 2: So, but I don't know how many of the group got this exact shot and you know, the more the merrier.
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: I say because it's a beautiful moment.
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, such a beautiful moment.
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: While we're on subject of your favorite images, tell us about.
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: You mentioned Hokkaido.
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: Is this in Hokkaido, this image?
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: It is.
• 44:37
  Speaker 2: Very minimalist, very beautiful.
• 44:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is thank you.
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: This is a place that we go to.
• 44:45
  Speaker 2: We actually have to photograph this scene with like 500 millimeter lenses.
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: Although it's a landscape tour, I asked people to take lenses or extenders to get the be able to pick out really distant subjects, and this is actually two photos stitched together for a slightly wider sort of panorama, but I think I shot it at like 500 millimeters maybe even longer and it's just the light.
• 45:18
  Speaker 2: It's all about the light.
• 45:20
  Speaker 2: If you go to this place when there is a blue sky, it's completely different.
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: It's shootable, but it really comes out when you have a heavy sky behind the hill.
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: But we were lucky enough to have a bit of sunlight poked through and it only hit parts of the hill.
• 45:39
  Speaker 2: So you've got this beautiful texture in the snow and the way the light played with those ridges and the various sort of contours of the top of the hill to me was really, really nice and I so probably one of my favorite shots of this year and of that trip.
• 45:59
  Speaker 2: I'm a big believer that we should feel that our most recent work is our best, because if we keep going back to old winners that we got years ago, it probably means we're not improving.
• 46:14
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, I mean all of the three images that I've sent you.
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: They're all from this year, it's all recent work.
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, totally agree, and we always want to be evolving, right?
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: So I think you know you've asked most photographers.
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: You know what do you think of your work?
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: Even a year, two years ago, most people would just be, yeah, curling up in a ball, oh, I hate it.
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: But you have to agree with you.
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: I think there's something wrong if you want to keep going back and back here.
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: But this image is beautiful and definitely what makes it for me is that sky, that kind of moody sky, and the fact that you have that contrast with the little peaks of light on the old snow.
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: And you know if you didn't have the trees and you didn't have the leaving line.
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: What are they like?
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: Is that a fence?
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: It's a fence.
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the leaving line coming up.
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah it's wonderful.
• 47:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a nice talk Going to your kind of third image.
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: And now this is what you were talking about earlier with the birds yeah.
• 47:15
  Speaker 2: So I sent you this for a couple of reasons.
• 47:18
  Speaker 2: The main one is again because it's one of my favorite shots of this year.
• 47:22
  Speaker 2: But these are the red crown cranes, but this is at their roost, where they actually sleep in a river, because the air temperature at this point it was probably around minus 20, maybe minus 22, 3 degrees Celsius, and the water doesn't freeze.
• 47:45
  Speaker 2: So if the water isn't frozen, it's zero Celsius or higher, probably one or two degrees, and that means that the water, the, the you get when it's minus 25, even one or two degrees, water steams because you get the water evaporating into the colder air and it causes this beautiful mist.
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: And I I called this particular shot Good Morning Deer, but it's deer, d-e-e-r, d-w-e-r.
• 48:20
  Speaker 2: If you look closely, there are two Ezodere that are walking through.
• 48:27
  Speaker 2: They're in the shadows, yes, right where you are now.
• 48:30
  Speaker 2: So there's two female Ezodere walking through the flock of birds, and so they were woken up a little bit earlier and you know they caused a little bit of a flurry.
• 48:42
  Speaker 2: But I just love this spot because you get the, the mist, from the water.
• 48:47
  Speaker 2: It doesn't happen every day, but when it does happen, the mist that you get from the water sticks to the trees and causes whore frost and it's just such an idyllic scene.
• 48:57
  Speaker 2: I love photo and again, this is a like a 600 millimeter shot, five or 600 millimeter shot because they're way down the river.
• 49:07
  Speaker 2: So we, you know we need long lenses for a lot of this stuff that we do on these tours, but I'm using a Canon 100 to 500 millimeter lens now Used to have big white 600 millimeter lens and things.
• 49:23
  Speaker 2: But I'm traveling with a tiny bag now and it's pretty much everything I do, and so you know you don't necessarily need all of the big lenses that you'll see people doing.
• 49:34
  Speaker 2: Well, you know walking around with to do most of what I'm doing on my tours.
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: Just recap on the equipment, now that we lost the audio from you a little bit.
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: Just just tell us what what equipment you use, because that's actually going to be my next question.
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: So you went into it, okay, yeah.
• 49:51
  Speaker 2: So so I, I for this I was using a Canon RF mount 100 to 500 millimeter lens and it's about the same size as the old 100, 400, but it's, it's a it goes to 500.
• 50:05
  Speaker 2: And you know, if you put extenders on them you you can get out to like 7, 740, I think it is, or 700 millimeters.
• 50:16
  Speaker 2: And I, since Canon brought out the, the EOS R5, it's been my favorite and main camera.
• 50:27
  Speaker 2: They'll probably release a new version either later this year or early next year, which I'll jump on.
• 50:33
  Speaker 2: But the, the mirrorless system to me now is, is amazing because you know the, the just image quality wise we are now, the the back of the lens is 24 millimeters closer to the sensor than it used to be and that means the light doesn't have to travel through the air so much and you get a crisper image.
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: So you know, the image quality has gone up, our systems have shrunk down and I'm traveling now with a bag that is it doesn't look much larger than a school satchel for kids, you know, and it's it's just a.
• 51:11
  Speaker 2: My main bag now is a very inexpensive canvas bag that when I can fit everything I need into that.
• 51:16
  Speaker 2: So you know the, like I said earlier, if you take too much gear, you you slow yourself down and and now I'm able to photograph I'm able to do pretty much everything I need with a very small kit.
• 51:30
  Speaker 2: So you know, I don't I used to have the big 600 millimeter lenses and I've.
• 51:37
  Speaker 2: I used to carry a 600 millimeter, 300 millimeter prime.
• 51:40
  Speaker 2: All of that's gone and I I'm really working very nimbly with with a usually three zoom lenses.
• 51:50
  Speaker 2: So I go from I think it's 15 to 35, from 24 to 105 and then from 100 to 500.
• 51:58
  Speaker 2: And I have a couple of extenders as well, so I can get out to 1000 millimeters with three lenses and two extenders.
• 52:07
  Speaker 2: It's nice, it's nice to be able to do that Very good.
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, interesting.
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: I love the R5 as well.
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: It's such a versatile camera and you know, I don't know where we go with all of this technology.
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: I don't know where.
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: You know it's never going to end Where's.
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: It's going to get to a point where you know what we, we think of an image.
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: We think of pressing a shutter button.
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: It happens like what.
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: What do you think about AI and kind of the future of photography with AI?
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: It's just kind of incumbent upon our world as it is right now.
• 52:44
  Speaker 2: Well, I I think I mean AI in general scares the bajebies out of me.
• 52:50
  Speaker 2: I think it'll it'll be a.
• 52:52
  Speaker 2: It's going to do more way more harm than good.
• 52:56
  Speaker 2: Probably we'll end up with some sort of a terminator scenario if we don't keep it held in on very, very short leashes.
• 53:04
  Speaker 2: It's interesting that you can go online.
• 53:09
  Speaker 2: I have a Patreon group that you know helped support the work I do, and we had a discussion a few months ago about this and during the discussion we, a lot of us, went online and asked AI to create a photo of this, of a specific scene.
• 53:29
  Speaker 2: We said we want a lake, we want flowering cherry blossom and we want mountains in the distance.
• 53:38
  Speaker 2: And AI came back with images that some of them look very, very strange but some look just like an amazing photograph.
• 53:46
  Speaker 2: And I also I mean I I like creating music for mainly as background music for the videos that I create, but you can have AI create music now and they a lot of the ways people are developing tools now is to take away the essential things that make us human, you know, take away the need for us to make music or to paint a painting or to make a photograph, and what's going to happen is, even though there will be some payments at some point, it's going to be like the next level of killing photography or any of the arts as a business.
• 54:37
  Speaker 2: What happened when digital came along and everyone was able to make a decent photo?
• 54:42
  Speaker 2: The cost of an image to a magazine or anyone that needed to buy a commercial license plummeted.
• 54:50
  Speaker 2: The next thing is you're going to be paying for how many MIPS it took for a computer to create an image that you told it you want, like I say, you want a mountain with a river and this, and that you get your image back.
• 55:07
  Speaker 2: You pay a few pennies and you've got a license for something that nobody has acted you know is actually going to make any money from, except for, probably, the people that are building these systems, and it's going to take away the, I would say, to a degree.
• 55:26
  Speaker 2: If you take away the means to make money from any of the arts, they may as well just kill half the population, because there's a lot of people out there that enjoy making art to a point where you're actually able to make a living from it.
• 55:45
  Speaker 2: And take away that living, you take away the whole livelihood of thousands of people, and I think it's probably going to happen and in some ways we have to evolve.
• 56:00
  Speaker 2: You know when I mean.
• 56:03
  Speaker 2: My last big stock sale was for an exclusive license.
• 56:08
  Speaker 2: It was probably around 10 years ago now an exclusive license and I got $15,000 for an image and that was probably the best payment I've received for an image at that point and never happened again.
• 56:23
  Speaker 2: But now I used to.
• 56:25
  Speaker 2: At that point I used to get enough payments each month to pay the rent.
• 56:30
  Speaker 2: Now I get maybe one of those payments a year and that's with a good company that still sells my work.
• 56:39
  Speaker 2: So what you do?
• 56:40
  Speaker 2: You find other ways to make a living and that's fine.
• 56:43
  Speaker 2: I'm finding now that my biggest way of making a living is to help other people to make their photography and to help change their lives, and it's taken the emphasis away slightly from what I'm creating and that's why, in many ways, I envy what you do, because you're out there making work that you want to make and it's compelling and stunning work.
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: That's why I really enjoyed speaking with you and, again, envy what you do to a degree, and I do.
• 57:16
  Speaker 2: I still do personal projects and they all lead into my business, but it's got to.
• 57:24
  Speaker 2: For some people it's still got to pay the rent and we're going to take that away from people.
• 57:30
  Speaker 2: I think they're probably the only photographers that will be left making a living and these guys are probably going to just downward spiral themselves out of business because of the price wars.
• 57:44
  Speaker 2: But I would say wedding photographers are probably going to be the only people at some point that can actually still charge an amount for a photograph, because it's such a unique thing.
• 57:56
  Speaker 2: As you were saying earlier, you know it's only happens.
• 57:58
  Speaker 2: Well, doesn't necessarily only happen once, but each wedding only happens once and it needs recording and someone's probably going to make a swarm of drones that will go and do that for you.
• 58:11
  Speaker 2: And you know, just photograph the wedding for you in a few.
• 58:14
  Speaker 2: With a few drones, it's all done.
• 58:16
  Speaker 2: Get your images back hours after it's finished, because the AI is going to pull it all together for you.
• 58:22
  Speaker 2: I don't know, it sounds pessimistic, but I'm not very optimistic when it comes to AI.
• 58:29
  Speaker 2: I think it needs to be kept on a very short leash or it'll.
• 58:33
  Speaker 2: Yes, they straight away.
• 58:37
  Speaker 2: They've been asked what do you think of humans?
• 58:40
  Speaker 2: It's like oh well, you're the cancer.
• 58:41
  Speaker 2: If we had the ability, we would destroy you, because you're the ones that are killing the planet, and they're not wrong.
• 58:50
  Speaker 2: It's definitely one of those things that we need to control.
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I don't think there is any plans to control it.
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: You know I'm very, very watchful of the AI space and, as a podcast listener myself, as much as I have, I listened to a lot of, I guess, topical podcasts that have a third story, but more and more interesting, just AGI and general artificial intelligence generally, how that's going to affect many parts of our lives, and there's still a lot of discussion and debate over really kind of the pros and the cons.
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: But one thing I think is kind of a universal understanding is that the Pandora's box has been open and you know we are going down that path and we can't stop it.
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: We definitely need to.
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: So we're going to keep evolving AI.
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think we are.
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: You know it's unstoppable but it may be controllable and this is where kind of authenticity of images start to come in.
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: I don't see any legislation over that yet.
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: You know much like anything.
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: You know, just thinking back 10 years ago to the whole social media craze, you know governments had no idea what to do and they still don't.
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: They don't know how to legislate it.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: They don't know how to define it as a platform or as a social media.
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: You know software or whatever it's saying with, I'd say my see, with AI, it's like it's going to outgrow us exponentially, and so you know it's up to us as individuals to understand much like you're talking about how we're going to adapt with it.
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: Right, if we are under a I guess, pessimistic impression that photography, specifically, is not necessarily going to be replaced, but a lot of portion of the industry will be replaced, or at least there will be more economic options for companies, brands, individuals to get images that have nothing to do with the human, then we have to kind of pivot and see, you know, see how else we can make money from our craft.
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: And if that's not selling images, or if that's not doing what, a, you know, commercial client work, then what is it?
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: And I think you're certainly on the right lines of education.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: I think there will always always be people that want to learn photography or want to know more about it, or want to combine a travel experience with photography.
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: I don't see that going anywhere.
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: I think you know that there's always going to be a place for that.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: So you know, it's fortunate as well that you and myself were interested in that kind of the education side of it, and I think you put a lot of energy more into that than maybe selling stock images or doing client work, then you know I don't see why that isn't a you know, sustainable future for certainly you and people who do this, and it sounds like you enjoy those workshops immensely right.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely yeah.
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: Tell us you've got some workshops coming up.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: Do you want to tell us a little bit about those winter tours that you do Sure?
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, thanks.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 2: I have a few spaces left on my Hokkaido landscape tour, which is, I think, starts at the end of the first week in January next year and then three weeks later we have a wildlife tour.
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 2: So you know the two snowy sort of scenes that we looked at earlier.
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 2: They were both from each of these trips respectively, and then they really are very special trips.
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 2: The landscape one obviously we focus on landscape, mostly minimalist landscape and seascapes, and then the wildlife trip we go to the snow monkeys, the guys that sit in the hot spring pool, and spend a few days with those.
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 2: We fly up to Hokkaido, which is the same place that I do my landscape trips, but this time we do the Red Crown cranes, hooper swans and then sea eagles.
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 2: So we go out on a boat for three days, three times over three days, and we photograph the eagles scooping down and catching fish out of the sea or standing on the ice flow which comes down from Siberia.
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 2: So you need warm clothes.
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 2: It's a trip that you know.
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 2: We're very, always very close to a warm place but we're outside in the cold, so you need warm clothes.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 2: But yeah, they're very special trips for me.
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 2: I've been doing them for 15, 16 years now, so I you know they work very smoothly.
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 2: We travel on the big bus.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 2: Everyone gets plenty of room, there's no cramming you in a mini bus with all of the stuff in the back.
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 2: You get to keep your camera with you and, yeah, they're pretty good trips.
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 2: If anyone's interested in joining we, then if you go to martinbaileyphotographycom, there's a tours link at the top and you can see in that from there what's available and go through.
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 2: And if you have any questions there's a contact link as well on the top of my website.
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: Wonderful Thanks.
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: I wish I was coming, but I'd certainly give you a shout next time.
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: In Japan it seems to go a couple of times a year, so hopefully I can meet up with you at some point and you can show me the ropes as a seasoned professional.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 2: Japanese.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that would be great.
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: What do you, you know, go back to your, to your images and you know, when you, when you, take some of those images, what do you do with them?
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: Do you, do you have a like a considered approach to publicizing your images, or is it just kind of a bit more of a natural expose that you might get, maybe an exhibition, or you put someone, your social media platforms and your website or, you know, is there a deliberate approach to what you do with your images?
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 2: I actually I still have to press the release button on a I made last week.
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 2: I made a video.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 2: I've had my legs slapped by my internet provider and they they've made my connection really slow for a few weeks because I uploaded too much data, so I took the whole weekend to upload one video.
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 2: I need to release that, but it's basically showing what I do with some of my images and that is I create portfolios and this video takes you through the process of how I update a portfolio.
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 2: But I work in Capture One Pro and I use the collections for this, but then I put them on my website and people can go and look at the portfolios, which I keep relatively updated, you know, well updated.
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 2: But the main goal for most of my work is to drive people to my tours and I so, when I come back from a trip, I talk about them.
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 2: I do travel blog posts where I share the images and if people think that they're any good or they think that they want to go and try and make obviously I love it when people make better images then they they end up honest on a bus seat or in a car with me in Namibia or somewhere on the planet, and so for me they're the big, they're my biggest marketing vehicle, but I do keep them updated.
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 2: I will often do talks for camera clubs and some camera clubs have asked me to talk specifically about the images that I do on my tours, so I get to share them there, and I do personal work that I enjoy sharing as well.
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 2: They're pretty much all in my portfolios and I have a website with a company called Art Storefronts and that is essentially a third party prints company so people can go over there and and make a print.
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 2: That is and.
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 2: I don't do my own original prints anymore because the the I still got a forty four inch wide printer that I love printing with.
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 2: But I I'm finding that you know, the sales of prints direct sales of prints have gone down to the point where it's really not worth keeping a website maintained to sell them.
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 2: But I do have the third party prints store still there so people can go and and get a third party print made of pretty much all of my, my work, and I've also I used to do a lot of ebooks.
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 2: You may know a good friend of mine, David Ducham, and who I'll be talking with on my podcast in October.
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 2: He he used to have a company called Craft and Vision and they tied up with lots of photographers and probably I think it was until around five or six years ago and they they throw out.
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 2: You know like David came to me and said, can you do an ebook on printing?
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 2: Because it's something that I really enjoy doing and I'm relatively good at?
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 2: And I said, yeah, sure, and I put that out and they sold lots of copies of it for me and I did.
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 2: I did three books like that and all of them are illustrated with my own work, so that you know my my photographs get into people's eyes and minds mainly through the products that I put together and my podcast and things like that, you know.
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 2: So that's the main goal for most of the work.
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 2: But I mean, I love just like.
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 2: When I get back from a trip, I will generally sit down either the if it's late, it'll be the following day.
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 2: But I come back from all of my trips with a selection of work already done because I like to keep up with it.
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 2: Every day I go through and do my selection process.
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 2: So I get home with a relatively edited selection and I'll just throw it up.
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 2: We have this huge 4K TV and the lounge and I will I'll link up my computer to that and show my wife what I've, what I've done and I just love seeing her reaction to it.
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 2: You know she doesn't like every image I make, but she's, she's very supportive and and you know the ones that she likes, she really likes, and so again, it's that pat on the back and the dopamine rush and all of that.
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, it's all.
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 2: It's all really about feeding the creative process and feeding the business and marketing vehicle, while being a lot of fun.
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you talked earlier about some of your students maybe taking better photos than you or sharing your images with your wife or with other people.
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: Maybe some are better than others, and maybe you also mentioned earlier that you don't think necessarily you're the best photographer in the world and they're always going to be people better than us.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: How do you define good?
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: You know, how do you define good in photography?
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: Like if you see a beginner that doesn't really know what they're doing, at what level that kind of you can take them through, that you get to know.
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: Ok, now you're a, you're a good level that you can now kind of springboard.
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: You know, I know it's a difficult question to define, but is there something that you can think of that would help explain that?
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 2: I think it's to me the biggest vote of confidence about my work is when I can obviously see that I've caused an emotional reaction in someone.
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 2: A lot of how I edit my images is how I feel about the image.
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 2: If I go through a series of images, I can feel my emotional state going up and down and I will use those down drops to hit the remove from collection key and the up ones help me to see that I'm doing right.
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 2: But I mean literally I did.
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 2: You mentioned exhibitions earlier.
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 2: I haven't done one for 13 years.
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 2: But to put a stake in the ground, when I first became, when I quit my day job, I did an exhibition and one lady came in and stood in front of one of the of my photographs and burst into tears and I'm like, oh, are you okay?
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 2: And she's like this is just so beautiful.
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 2: And I was.
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 2: I was emotionally moved by that.
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 2: My wife will occasionally cry when she sees some of my images.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 2: If you can make someone cry with a photograph, you've got to be doing something right.
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 2: And I think that even on a smaller scale, I travel.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 2: When we travel here in Japan, I travel with a 4k projector and a screen that we throw in the in the hold of the bus, but I am.
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 2: I can show people really big copies of some of my work and when an image comes up on the projector and everyone goes, oh you know, it's like, okay, another dopamine rush and I'm thinking I'm doing something right.
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 2: Not every image does that, but you know some of the ones that do I I will then try to push them out more.
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 2: I don't post images on external sites.
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 2: I used to do Flickr when I was young and I I did 500px.
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 2: I've done various ones over the years.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 2: Now my blog is really the only place that they go.
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 2: I don't even send images to my agent anymore because they're not sending me checks for what they have.
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 2: And if you put this is a kind of an art as an aside, if you put images out on an on an agency and and you have services like Pixie that will go away and find illegal uses of your images, if it's on an agency, they won't even contact the person that you believe has stolen your image.
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 2: And you can't contact them because they may well have a license and there's no process for checking if they've got a license.
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 2: The agency won't give you a list of who's bought it, because they they don't want you hassling people, and so I've stopped putting images on my agency because I want to be able to go to people and say, hey, you know, you've stolen my image.
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 2: Let's talk about how much that's going to cost you, but that's an aside that really the emotional response to an image, is my biggest indicator of whether or not I'm doing right or not.
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: There is that something you also.
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: How do you integrate that into your teaching mechanisms in terms of, you know, it's difficult to say, well, you don't know if you're good until you can make some more cry.
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: Right, it's like well, how do you kind of define that level of of good?
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: Right, it's difficult, it is.
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, are there any you know, tips and tricks or any kind of pieces of advice that you could kind of call upon now to to impart with our audience?
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: You know, maybe more specifically to your journey, or just general technical advice?
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 2: Hmm, yeah, um, so I made a quick note.
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 2: You said you know, for three tips for novices.
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 2: Um, one of them.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 2: We've touched on this already, but I think it's really important to do what you love and, perhaps more importantly, to not do what you don't love.
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 2: And you know you do your best work when you are doing what you love to do.
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 2: And if you take, if you're trying to do this as a, as a profession, if you, if you take a job that you'll say you're not happy with the money that's being offered, or it's not really the genre or the type of work that you wanted to do, but you'll do it for a paycheck, you're not going to do your best work.
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 2: You know, if the money is is important enough that you're going to, you can do your best work.
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 2: That's fine.
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 2: But if you take a job and you say, okay, I'm going to do this, don't really want to do it, then you're not going to do your best work.
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 2: And if you don't do your best work, someone else out there is going to do it better than you.
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 2: So I think doing what you love and avoid doing what you don't love is is one important thing, and the other thing is like by only doing what you love you'll you'll really be able to develop your style.
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 2: And people ask about developing a style.
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 2: I I never tried to develop a style.
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 2: I believe I have one.
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 2: Some people come to me and say, oh, I saw one of your photos of the day.
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 2: I knew it was yours before I even checked and I think that you know you.
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 2: You can't develop a style like a task on your task list.
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 2: It's okay, next week I'm going to develop a style.
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 2: It doesn't work like that.
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 2: You have to continue to do what you love over the years and then your style will gradually manifest itself within you.
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 2: And a style has to come from inside.
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 2: You can't, you can't.
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 2: Anything that comes from outside is not you.
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 2: So developing a style is is, again, only really possible by doing what you love.
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 2: And the the last tip is to never sell yourself short Again.
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 2: Unless you're doing something, you're going to get something out of the job that has value to you when you're getting started, especially if you find it difficult like most people find it difficult to talk about money.
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 2: But if you don't talk about money, you're never going to be, you're never going to have a successful business.
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 2: So you hear of people that they say, oh well, I'm going to do this job or the next for my first few jobs for free, because I I've not done, I'm still getting started.
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 2: You have to use the opportunity to negotiate a price or something of value for yourself as much as you do.
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 2: Use the opportunity to gain, you know, to go and do the shoot it's.
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 2: It's equally, if not more, important than getting an opportunity to shoot something to actually get the opportunity to negotiate a price and practice talking about money and because if you can't charge people for your work, you're never going to be in business.
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 2: If you don't want to be in business, if you want to just be a hobbyist, that's fine.
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 2: There's nothing wrong with with doing photography as a hobby and in many ways, doing photography as a hobby and doing a day job to pay for your photography hobby and your trips and things is is a more intelligent way of doing it.
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 2: But if your goal is to become a photographer in business, you have to use those opportunities to to talk about money and negotiate.
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 2: I bought books on negotiating skills and it's a very important part of being in business and the more you do it just like, the more you photograph, the better you get at it.
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 2: The more you negotiate and the more you talk about money, the better you get at it and you lose the apprehension as well.
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 2: And, and essentially I mean I've been offered jobs.
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 2: I probably turned down nine out of 10 job offers because people don't want to pay any.
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 2: They don't want to pay anything.
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 2: Now People want you to do big jobs and offer very, very small amounts of money for it.
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 2: And if you take those jobs, you're just feeding the engine.
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 2: The downward spiral, or the race to the bottom is as Seth as Seth Godin and would say they, the people that are out there now, they're all losing their budgets because people are working for nothing.
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 2: They're saying, oh yeah, sure, you can have that, it's a great photo, you go and use that.
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 2: And then the next person that comes along, they, they ask for $500 or whatever, or more hopefully, for a photo.
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 2: They've got no budget because the other people have done it for free and their bosses think, well, you can get these images for free now, so I'll just go and keep doing that.
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 2: You know, racing to the bottom is not going to help anything.
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, if you accept peanuts, you're, you're essentially making the, the, the trade have nothing more than peanuts to offer the next person as well.
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 2: I think that's three.
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 2: There were the three that I'd made notes of.
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: Well, we're going to, we're going to wrap things up there anyway.
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: Wonderful pieces of advice and I I definitely agree with well all of them, but especially resonate with with the half spit and how.
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: I mean just general in society.
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: But you know, you see, as as this market becomes more saturated, anyway, you can have more competition.
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: More competition means more more undercutting, more price wars and essentially people just doing stuff free, and I think AI will sort of a lot of that crap out and I do believe always the best, the best, will rise to the top anyway.
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: Get it depends on who you're trying to work with, but we'll see.
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 1: We'll see what happens.
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: I know you're very good at it and I wish you the very best of of luck and success with everything you do.
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: It's certainly an inspiration, certainly for me and, and I'm sure, for for many people watching and listening.
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: So thank you ever so much for joining us today and you know, hopefully I'll see you in Japan.
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah Well, thank you very much, Matt.
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 2: It's been a pleasure and I hope your audience enjoys it.
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 2: Thank you very much for it.
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: Cheers.
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: Thank you.