The Traveling Image Makers

Our guest for this week, Michael Muraz, is an award-winning commercial and fine art architecture photographer based in Toronto, Canada. Originally an engineer, Michael now works with clients like architects and interior designers, documenting buildings and spaces. When he’s not shooting for commercial clients, he’s traveling to photograph architecture and cityscapes around the world. Michael is always looking for the perfect shot, showcasing some of the most beautiful buildings and skylines in the world.Michael was born in France, in the heart of old Europe, which has an immense heritage of ancient architecture, yet he has a passion for modern architecture and recently moved to Toronto. We were wondering whether he was terminally bored with medieval castles, so we had to ask him.Our question lead to a conversation about architectural photography, leaving a full time job to pursue a career in commercial photography, his favorite cities to shoot in, how to handle issues of copyright when photographing famous bu

Not long ago a friend of ours suggested that we watch a movie called “Traveler” on Amazon Prime Video and so we got to learn about the existence of Nicholas Syracuse.Nicholas is a young photographer who has traveled extensively across the USA but, unlike many others, not in search of beautiful landscapes and cityscapes or jumping from a flight to a taxi and to a hotel. Rather, he shared the road with the drifters, the hobos, the train hoppers that are so easy to ignore and who are the main subjects of his photographs.“Traveler” is a documentary, directed by filmmakers Sam Roden and Nick Hartanto, that follows Nicholas in his travels and his encounters, besides giving a glimpse of the uneasy relationship between him and his girlfriend.Nicholas Syracuse is a restless soul whose approach to travel and photography is very much different from that of our typical guests, but the stories he tells are compelling and moving. We hope you will enjoy listening to them.Duration 25m 39s.Music for this episode: “Zanzibar” K

Our guest for this week is Steve Simon.Steve has been passionate about documenting the beauty and drama of the human condition his entire photographic life, working on assignment in more than 40 countries. He is the author of five critically acclaimed photography books, including The Passionate Photographer: Ten Steps Toward Becoming Great, which was chosen as one of Amazon’s Top 10 Art & Photography Books of 2011. He has had solo shows in New York, Buenos Aires, Toronto, and Montreal, and his work has been featured three times at the Visa pour l’Image International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France. He is on the faculty of International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York and created the Editorial Photography course in the School of Visual Arts master’s program. His international awards include the Art Director’s Club of New York Award, Canadian Newspaper Photographer of the Year, Global Health Council Photography Award for his work on AIDS in Africa, an Alfred Eisenstaedt Magazine Pho

Our guest for this week is Dave Bouskill, one half of the Dave and Deb couple who runs The Planet D. Dave and Deb have been married for over 20 years now, and when they’re not on the road, they’re based in Toronto, Canada. They started off in the film industry as a gaffer and makeup artist, respectively, but knew there was more to life than 16 hour days working for someone else.Dave was honoured to win the 2014 and 2015 award for Best Photo Illustration of Travel and 2013 Best Wildlife Photography from the Society of American Travel Writers.He’s travelled to 100+ countries on all seven continents and has taken on adventures such as cycling down the continent of Africa, Driving from England to Mongolia and Kayaking in Antarctica.Dave found his passion for photography working on feature films such as X-Men and The Incredible Hulk and has taken his knowledge of lighting movies to create texture, mood and contrast in his stills photography.Duration 31m 56s.Music for this episode: “Zanzibar” Kevin MacLeod (incompe

QT Luong is a photographer and author known for being the first to photograph all 59 US National Parks —in large format. He is featured in the film The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, and has been profiled in National Geographic Explorer, Outdoor Photographer, and Parks magazines.His photographs, which are the subject of three previous books, have appeared in Time, Life, Outside, Scientific American, GEO, numerous National Geographic publications, and hundreds of others worldwide. Luong’s limited-edition prints are widely collected, and his on-going traveling exhibition of large prints from all the national parks has shown in museums and galleries nationwide. He lives in San Jose, California, with his wife and two children.Born in France, from Vietnamese parents, QT was originally trained as a scientist and made a few fundamental contributions to the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing. In the mid eighties, his life was transformed by the wilderness of m

We’ve been following David duChemin‘s work for a long time (Ugo actually owns three of his books) so we’re not exaggerating when we say that he’s one of our photographic heroes. He is a constant source of inspiration and his writing invariably compels us to look at what we’re doing with a critical eye and go beyond our tendency to simply take pretty pictures and strive to take image with meaning. It was therefore a great pleasure and honor to have him as a guest on the show.David duChemin is a world & humanitarian photographer, best-selling author and lecturer on the art and craft of photography, and the accidental founder of Craft & Vision. His work focuses on the beauty of cultural diversity and the natural world has taken him to over 50 countries across all seven continents.Duration 47m 04s.Music for this episode: “Zanzibar” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Links* Website* Craft & Vision* The Soul of t

Our guest for this week is Susan Portnoy, who let us know everything about her recent trip to Mongolia, how it’s like to take part in a Kazakh wedding and how you can dance non-stop for 8 hours.Susan is the creator of The Insatiable Traveler, a blog celebrating world travel and her adventures at home in New York City. Her work includes award-winning photography and original storytelling, in addition to photography and travel advice. Her images and tales transport, immerse and excite readers, inspiring them to seek adventure and connect with the people and places they visit.The Insatiable Traveler has been featured in The Associated Press, Mashable, Travelpulse, Travel Babbo, Luxury Travel Blog, USA Today, and Yahoo! Travel, among others, and was recently named one of Discover Corp’s “17 Top Travel Blogs to Follow in 2017.”Duration 35m 45s.Music for this episode: “Zanzibar” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Links* The

In this week’s episode we interview our long time friend, Ibarionex Perello.Ibarionex is a photographer, writer and producer/host of The Candid Frame podcast, an interview show which features conversations with some of the world’s best established and emerging photographers. The show has featured hundreds of photographers including Mary Ellen Mark, Dan Winters, Eli Reed, Elliott Erwitt and Joel Meyerowitz.Ibarionex has authored hundreds of magazines articles and over 5 books, including Chasing the Lighting: Improving Your Photography with Available Light.He lives near Los Angeles with his wife and his dogs Spenser and Zooey.Our conversation revolved around the importance of being focused and present at all time, which is a very important factor of making good and interesting travel and street photography. Ibarionex explained the practices he uses to stay “in the zone” and alert when he’s out shooting and his techniques for photographing people in the street.Duration 39m 58s.Music for this episode: “Zanzibar”

This week’s edition of the podcast is a bit special. Unlike our typical episode, where we have a conversation with a guest, what we’ve done this time is to contact some of our previous guests and ask them one question. We’ve already done this twice in the past, when we published our “expert roundups” but this time we’ve also asked them to record their answer, so you can hear it in their own voice.The question we asked was the following:What is one thing you know now about photography that you wish you had known when you started out in your career as a photographer?We received and collected answers from 18 of our guests, so there’s a lot of information here for you to consume. They shared some great stories and we hope that listening to them will better equip everyone who wants to take up photography a little bit more seriously to avoid some mistakes at the beginning of their journey.We also have a transcript of all the answers, that you can find below the fold, if you’d rather read them than listen.Stay tuned

Today we present you an interview with our friend and fellow photographer Rosh Sillars. Rosh is the founder and host of the Photography Business and Marketing podcast, a really great show about how creatives of all types, including us photographers, can more effectively market ourselves. Not only that, Rosh is an expert at optimizing social media channels, so we spent some time talking to him about the best way to do that.He also co-authored, along with photographer Lindsay Adler, The Linked Photographers’ Guide to Online Marketing and Social Media, as well as One Hour Photographer, both of which are available on Amazon.Enjoy!Duration 38m 42s.Music for this episode: “Zanzibar” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Links* Website* Photography Business and Marketing podcast* YouTube* TwitterPhotos by Rosh See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is special episode, for which we have no guests. It’s just Ralph and Ugo catching up with all that’s been happening in 2016, travel and photography wise, and talking about what’s to come in 2017.We have some colorful stories to tell about our respective travels and some interesting announcements about what’s coming up, so be sure to give this one an attentive listen. We will resume interviewing great guests next week as usual.Duration 35m 33s.Music for this episode: “Zanzibar” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Links* Ralph’s website* Ugo’s website* Tour Organizer Training* Mediterranean Photo Tours* Discover Oman: Oman Photography TourPhotos by RalphPhotos by Ugo See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We are incredibly happy to have our good friend Chris Smith on the show this week.Chris is the founder of Out of Chicago Photography. Each summer The Out of Chicago Photography Conference attracts some of the world’s greatest photographers from around the globe for an amazing weekend of photography. In 2017 they are also taking the conference on the road to Acadia National Park to bring the Out of Chicago experience to the world of landscape photographers.Chris is also the author of The Photographer’s Guide to Chicago and host of the Out of Chicago Photography Podcast. Chris specializes in photographing the city of Chicago at night.Ugo will be presenting two talks and leading a photowalk at the Out of Chicago Summer conference from June 23rd to 25th, 2017. That would be a wonderful opportunity to meet in person. All listeners to the TTIM podcast can get a ticket to any of the Out of Chicago 2017 events (Winter, Summer, and Acadia) at the same price as the Early Bird attendees by using the TTIM coupon code at

To say that our guest for this episode of the podcast has a few stories to tell would be a huge understatement. With a career spanning 60 years and having been a direct witness of some momentous episodes of the 20th century, including the Vietnam War and, from very close, the Cuban Revolution, Roberto Salas is an old school gentleman who has a surprisingly modern attitude towards photography.Roberto Salas has documented the revolution from the Sierra Maestra to the Bay of Pigs, as well as the only known meeting between Castro and Ernest Hemingway. He served as a U.N. correspondent and war correspondent in Southeast Asia, including Cambodia and Vietnam, spending a year behind the Vietcong lines.If you have ever seen some of those black-and-white photos of Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara from the heyday of the Cuban Revolution, chances are you have seen some of Mr. Salas’ photographs. We have put some of his best below the fold, to freshen up your memory.Ralph regularly visits Mr. Salas in his home in Cu

Anthony Pond has a story of traveling and photographing that goes back several years, having been to Timbuktu twice and to the rest of Africa a few more times in a very adventurous way, across the Darien Gap, the jungles of Borneo, and more. All of that he did with film cameras (before the advent of digital) before moving to a digital system. He’s now shooting a mixture of digital and film with Leica rangefinders because of the slowing down and the deliberation that the system affords him.A retired criminal defense attorney, Anthony Pond explores the human condition with his photography. He shoots with a Leica M system, both digital and analog, favoring its simple manual workings. Tony enjoys the whole process of photography which has led him to develop his own film negatives at home. He works primarily in black and white, finding it to be timeless while cutting right to the essence of an image. He travels mainly in South and Southeast Asia, returning time and again to better understand the culture he is phot

Dear listeners, this is the first episode of 2017 and what could be more fitting for this one than a conversation about one of the hottest trends in photography and that will become even more relevant in this and the coming years? Like it or not, mobile photography (or iphoneography if you like) is here to stay and few people are as qualified to speak about it than our guest for this week, Jen Pollack Bianco.Jen is an award-winning Seattle-based travel photographer and blogger. She runs the luxury travel blog My Life’s a Trip. Her mobile photography images have appeared everywhere from magazine covers (including TIME and Mobiography), popular websites (Buzzfeed, Mashable) to the Apple Shot on iPhone 6 campaign. She is a graduate of USC’s Peter Stark Producing Program and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her photographs have won awards from NATJA (the North American Travel Journalists Association), the MPA (Mobile Photo Awards), and IPPA (iPhone Photo Awards). She has worked on social media campaigns for luxury

We’ve always admired the work of Ken Kaminesky, his personality and his cheerful attitude, so we tried many times to have him as a guest on the show. Unfortunately he is also a very busy guy and recently was even busier launching his new company, Discovery Photo Tours.When we finally got a chance to make him sit in front of Skype for an interview, we didn’t want to let the chance slip, even if this happened when Ralph was traveling from Tokyo to Chicago, so there is only Ugo on the show this time.Ken Kaminesky is a veteran commercial travel photographer, Fujifilm Global Ambassador, Zeiss lens Ambassador, writer, consultant, and entrepreneur with over twenty years of experience in the photography industry. His work has been featured worldwide in numerous commercial and editorial publications, including the New York Times and on the cover of National Geographic. His passion for travel and the incredible landscapes and people he encounters along the way are the inspiration for his popular blog, and the other pub

India, often referred to as the sub-continent, is a location one can’t hope to capture adequately in less than a lifetime. TTIM co-host Ralph Velasco just spent a month there, scouting the place for one of his upcoming tours, and he tried to get at least a glimpse of its beauty, amidst the chaos of its cities.We caught up with Ralph while he was in Tokyo, on his way back to the U.S. after a two-month long trip (he’d also led a tour to Vietnam), and we discussed for half an hour his impressions of this great country and of its people. Listen to our conversation if you’d like to know more about India.Duration 31m 38s.We want to hear from you! What are you struggling with in your photography? What parts of the world would you like to know more about? Do you have any guests to suggest? Please leave us some feedback in the comments. Thank you!Stay tuned for our next episode, to be published a week from now and featuring an interview with Ken Kaminesky.Music for this episode: “Zanzibar” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.c

With some past guests of the podcast we discussed ways to avoid clichés and the challenges travel photographers have to face in order to come home with images that are novel and interesting. The guest of this week, John R. Milton, has taken the idea of straying off the beaten path to the limit and adopted a style and an attitude that he indicates with the acronym SCRU, as in simple, candid, raw, and unapologetic.A former investment banker, he has recently taken up traveling to far flung places like Taliban-infested Afghanistan, Somalia, and the jungles of Nagaland, amidst armed insurgents and the last surviving tribe of head hunters. It was great fun to listen to John tell his adventurous stories and, I have to admit, a bit unsettling as well, for when he says unapologetic, he really means it. We hope you will get something out of our conversation with John, no matter what your preferences with regard to travel and photography are.Duration 33m 43s.Subscribe on iTunes or join our newsletter!Music for this epis

Black and white landscape photography has a long and honorable tradition and, in a sense, it is the purest form of depiction of natural landscapes, where everything is reduced to its basic shape, where the interplay of light and shadow and textures dictate the rules of composition and the viewer’s eye cannot be distracted by attractive colors.The lineage of black and white landscape photography runs from Ansel Adams, who was maybe the first to elevate it to a true art form, to nowadays’ digital photographers, who exploit the digital darkroom to carefully convert images that are naturally born in color, to monochrome.Andrew S. Gibson is a writer, publisher, traveller and photographer. He started writing articles about photography while travelling in Bolivia, and has been published in several prestigious photography magazines including EOS magazine, where he worked as a Writer and Technical Editor for two years.He recently published an ebook, titled The Black and White Landscape, that is all about rediscovering

Travel photography is not a very well defined genre and if meant to encompass every photograph taken while traveling, then millions of travel photos are created every day. How can a serious travel photographer stand out from the crowd and produce work that goes beyond vacation snapshots?What about choice of subject, composition, light, and gesture? How can we exploit those factors to create truly compelling photos and not just snapshots?These are some of the questions we asked of our guest for this episode, Brenda Tharp.Brenda is an award-winning photographer, and educator. Her photographs have been featured in major magazines, and accepted into the journals of NANPA Expressions. She has written several books, and is working on a fourth, and still finds time to present frequent lectures on photography, and lead international photography tours and workshops. Her passion for outdoor and travel photography is infectious, and she openly shares her insights and tips to help others improve their photography skills