The Traveling Photographer
For some years now, I’ve been doing online training via the lynda.com website. It’s a gold mine of informations and covers several subjects such as 3D animation, audio and music, business, CAD, design, education, e-learning, web, marketing and guess what.. photography and video. There is more than 3500 videos courses for different levels and you can watch them from your computer at home or on the go with your mobile phone or tablet as they also have iOS and Android apps. Take advantage of your time spent on the bus and just learn the cool way. This is really something I’ve been doing for years now. I’m not paid by lynda.com to write this by the way 😉 This is not the point of this post. The point is, I wanted to emphasise something I came across in a specific course I watched recently.
I have been watching the course series “The Traveling Photographer” of David Hobby where he gives some excellent tips and views on traveling with a camera on specific locations in cities such as Paris, London, Dubaï and New York which happens to be places I’ve been visiting too. He ended the course “The Traveling Photographer: New York” with a bonus video where David explains “why we travel”. Though I don’t have this video here to share with you, I’m going to copy the transcript of what he said because it is really something I’ve been trying to do all those years (I hope I will not have copyrights issue with this ;). But this was like the fundamental statement of all I’ve been experiencing while on the road and it is something I want to teach to my childrens and also, why not, share it here with you guys. This is what he said :
“All throughout this series, we’ve tried to stress the fact that we’re travelers, first and foremost, and photographers second. Our cameras are there to record and preserve our experiences. But travel is costly, both in terms of time and money. Fun fact: For what it cost me to travel just to Paris for a week this year, I could have easily bought a really nice bag full of cameras and lenses. So that begs the question: When you invest in travel, what do you get in return? Immediately, you’ll notice how things are different in other places. But just as important, you’ll learn to notice the things and experiences that are universal.
There’s a common experience shared by people around the world that we sometimes conveniently forget when we fear or demonize people because they happen to be from a different place than us. When you travel, your previously restricted view of the world will be challenged. If you let yourself, you’ll be flooded with new ideas that you can apply to yourselfand your environment back home. It might be something as obvious as food or it might be an idea for a new business or business model. Looking at something being done differently abroad, ask yourself, would this work in my hometown? Why? Why not? My mind is always cataloging these possibilities when I’m on the road.
This is why using my camera as a visual note-taking device is so important to me. Over time, travel, especially international travel, changes you. You get a broader viewpoint on nearly everything. You get a chance to step outside your culture and see it from the outside. This is a perspective you can slip into later, anytime you want. And when world events happen in a place you have been, they take on an entirely new layer of meaning. Looking at the democracy protests in Hong Kong this year, knowing we had stood right in that same spot, made it so much more real back home to me in the U.S.
Without realizing you, you become a world citizen. Over the long term, the benefits from travel are addictive and the transformation is cumulative, it keeps happening. So to earn the biggest benefit, the ideal time to travel is as soon as you can possibly do it. You don’t wanna wait until you’re retired to learn all of the ways travel would have affected your life if you’d only done it much earlier. Finally, your life and your perspective will be enriched in ways that no new toy you could have bought would have accomplished, and that benefit is frictionless going forward.
You never have to dust it or move it or pay to store it. Andrew Tomasino, the videographer who was my partner in this series, was 27 years old when we started this project, and he had never traveled outside the United States before that point. A year and many thousands of miles later,he’s a different man as a result of the experience. There’s a measure of confidence and perspective that comes from having existed, even if just briefly, in different cultures and environments, and no one can ever take that away from him.
So right now, I’d like to say something especially to those of you who have never traveled internationally: Just do it. Find a way to make it happen.”
– David Hobby