The ZoomWithOurFeet Photography Podcast

How A National Geographic Photographer Builds Stories That Last!

• Timothy "TMac" McCarty • Season 2 • Episode 34

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 National Geographic photographer Jason Edwards stops by the ZoomPod to unpack a life built on light, discipline, and long-term storytelling. From the “Kodachrome furnace” to his book, "Icebergs to Iguanas," Jason shares fieldcraft, gear sense, and why passion outlasts trends.

• learning to read light on transparency film
• applying film-era discipline to digital capture
• building stories with a core idea and spokes
• lens choices that survive in the field
• growing up with wildlife and zoo experience
• the making of "Icebergs to Iguanas."
• luck versus preparation in award images
• sustaining passion, fitness, and craft
• being kinder to yourself and your work
• practical steps to share images locally

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SPEAKER_02:

Hello and welcome to another edition of the Zoom with our feet podcast, the part about learning photography. With me, your host, T Mack, professional photographer, videographer, and teacher.

SPEAKER_03:

And when I started with Geographic, this is my 25th anniversary with Nat Geo, you know, which is amazing and a privilege and an honor. But I remember that at the time, back in the day, and I think this has been their mantra forever, but you know, I was new at the time, I was the youngest. They said that they want people to go and shoot their suburb for five years and appear with the images to show someone that they could tell a story, even if it wasn't going to be published.

SPEAKER_02:

To say that my next guest is dedicated to bringing our planet to life with his camera is an understatement. National Geographic Photographer and author, Jason Edwards, has been bitten, clawed, chased, chewed, shot at, and stoned with rocks, defecated and urinated on, smuggled, groomed, diseased, lost, injured, and incarcerated all over the world. And in between all of that, he spent the last 30 years capturing the beauty and complexity of the only planet we have. Our guest speaker is in the photo lab. Let's talk to a pro. Jason Edwards, thank you for joining me on the Zoom with our feet podcast. How are you, sir?

SPEAKER_03:

I am very well, my thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you for being here. Much of my audience is aspiring photographers. So I always they they look at people who shoot all the time, who they think make it look easy, and I say that that was never the case when we started. So tell me how your photography journey started.

SPEAKER_03:

So I actually started shooting when I was eight. That's not 18, not 28, but eight. And I started with my mum's showing my age here, my mum's Kodak canister camera. Now, Jim, you're gonna know this. You popped open the back and you put in the little canister at the back, and you've got 24 or 36 or 12, actually, I think at one point, frames. And uh I just I loved it. But and aside from that, is I actually always drew. I drew and I painted. So I worked in pencil until about mid-high school, and then I went to oils. But creatively, I just was fascinated by the moving, uh by the visual image. So my first book from Father Christmas was one of my first letters to Father Christmas was, Can you send me a book with all the animals and the ecosystems they live in? I wound out with The Wonders of the World from Disney and and McDonald's Wildlife of the World, which had all these marvellous dioramas, you know, anacondas coming it down above Jaguars above, you know, Ulysses butterflies in the rainforest, all of these things. And I just I was never very good at drawing wildlife, I was actually just good at drawing surrealism and and uh unusual things like that. But I started at eight, at about 14 or 15, I'm walking to school. So I'm in high school, I'm walking to school, and I wake up to myself, literally, it's it's still as vivid to me now as it was then. I want to make images for the rest of my life. And my grandmother went to Hong Kong three months later. I had$250 in the bank, which I'd saved from delivering newspapers, literally riding my bike, my BMX around the suburbs in the middle of winter. I gave her the$250 and she came back with a casina. Most people won't know the brand, but COSINA, CT7, 35mm film camera. I think at the time, I think they claimed it was the first electronic camera, a 50mm lens, and a small flash for my birthday, which was coming up. And like everyone else, I started shooting friends, school sport, all of those sorts of things. Anything in my background, I live in Australia, there was always wildlife. And I had pictures published off about my third roll of film through the school yearbook. And and once I saw my work in print, I was off and running.

SPEAKER_02:

Um, like myself, you started in the film era. Um what do you I loved your uh you call it the codachrome furnace. What do you think you learned about photography in the film era?

SPEAKER_03:

I've learned to read light. That's that's straight off the bat. Um I love digital, it's amazing, but the one thing that digital doesn't teach you to do is how to read light. Now I'm sure you're probably the same as me. We can we walk along, we see the light change, and we're probably looking at an eighth of a stop. You know, we're seeing that subtle change in shadow density, highlights, hot spots on leaves, all of those sorts of things. And the wonderful thing about film is that it was so unforgiving, especially transparency film like Kodachrome 64, that if you got it wrong, you blew it out, the hot spots were too bright, or if you got the the shadows too deep, although can you ever really have a shadow too deep in Codachrome? Probably not, then you got it wrong. So for me, I I think I I actually regard that as maybe the greatest gift that I had from photography in my early days once I went to transparency film, positive film, was that I it was so unforgiving that and I had so little money, I had to get it right, and it meant that every frame I took had a value, and I became very, very aware of seeing the subtles using the change because it's a positive image. Because when they when you put the next, as you know, you put the negatives into the lab, the next could be one thing, but someone sitting there tapping away on that screen, lifting up your shadows, your density, all of those things. So the shot you think you got on negative film is actually not necessarily the shot you got, but in transparency it was, and I thought that furnace, without that furnace, I honestly don't believe certain subtleties in my photography would exist.

SPEAKER_02:

Well said, Amen.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, amen to film. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

What part then, which leads me to the next question. What part of that um I call it mindfulness, do you bring or did you bring once we all migrated to digital?

SPEAKER_03:

Well, I still shoot film, actually. I I shoot digital and film. I love film. If you um here's another step back in time for those who are older of us. Um remember the rubbery puppets that they around, you know. So for those who don't know it, you can look it up. But there was one series there that featured President Reagan and and it had the red button, you know, it was during the Cold War. And if I could turn off digital and leave, and I love digital, it's amazing, but if I could leave star photography and medical photography and hit the Ronald Reagan red button and go back to film, I would in a heartbeat. Um, so I still shoot film on my panoramic every assignment. Um, actually, here in the US, I just bought story maybe for later in the interview. I just bought another 50 rolls of E100 VS and 10 rolls of Scala. And if anyone doesn't know what Scala is, it's black and white positive transparency in black and white. So I love film, it's amazing. What did I bring forward? I actually brought forward the conservatism of film. So I shoot a lot. I you know, I I can be in anywhere between 15 and 30 countries a year, sometimes more, to present or to shoot, or both. So I can shoot a lot, but I don't believe in running the motor drive. There you go, an old flashback. That's that's just not my way. I still shoot enough without it, but I shoot conservatively and I shoot as if there's no screen on the back of the camera. So if you don't know the math, you shouldn't be in the game. That's that's a bit brutal, folks. But if you don't understand the exposure triangle, if you don't understand how an aperture affects a is affected by a shutter speed or the ISO affects both of those, then please do yourself a favor, learn the triangle, and it will change your photography. So for me, I actually just came into that going, well, I don't have to shoot everything in a uh a thousand frames, but more importantly, I actually don't want to give up all the things that I loved about photography. Forget how good digital is or how the glass has changed, forget that. That's here nor there to me. It's I don't know anything. We can talk about how little I know in post-production. I am not ashamed at all by how little I know, but what I can tell you is that I am absolutely passionate about the capture, and that's what I wanted to bring forward. Otherwise, I would have just given up and made more money throwing bags of cement or something, you know.

SPEAKER_02:

So, more than any other guest, I'm mixing in a bunch of nerdy stuff too, because I'm the host and I can do that. What's your favorite camera lens combination for your you know, this sort of environmental uh work that you do, nature, work that you do? What's your what's your favorite camera lens combo?

SPEAKER_03:

Can I give a couple of answers and it'll make sense if I do? So I built my career, so uh I've always worked in over the years with Nikon and Pentax. And Pentax back in the day, and they still are amazing now, incredibly amazing. But Pentax had a whole series of indent lens, what in Australia what we called indent lenses, you had to buy them out of Tokyo, and I bought at the ripe old age of about 21 a 250 to 600 millimeter f5.6 lens that had focus tracking in about 91, way ahead of Canon and Nikon or anyone, and um it focused, I think, for memory, down at 600mm down to a couple of meters, and it I still own it and it's amazing. And here's here you know, here's the here's the shock value for fans at home. It was the quarter of a price of an inner city house in Melbourne at the time. But if there was ever a workhorse, a lens that I literally slept with that lens, I slept on that lens, and I built my career. I would uh I would go as far as to say all of the signature images that got me in the door at National Geographic came through that lens. So, as far as a lens that changed my life, the Pentax SMC FA 250 to 600mm f5.6 um was was goal. Um fast forward uh now I think it's hard to be a field photographer, it's hard to be a photographer who travels a lot without running dual bodies, and on one, and it's so cliched, but on one you'd run a 24 to 70mm f/2.8, and you'd run a 70 to 200 2.8, and you can't be walking anywhere without those two lenses permanently hooked onto bodies. There's so many other combinations, but every working photographer will have those two bodies. Um, they're fast in the aperture, they're brutal. I've destroyed so many of them. Um, but um, but you know, the that that they are the workhorses, and then of course, depending, like I just returned, I bounce all the time every month, but um I'll run 800 mils and you know, other long glass, of course, if I'm doing wildlife work. And um, you know, they call me the human tripod because I can hold an 800mm at one sixth of a second. So um I hate tripods with a passion, so over the years I trained myself. I can run a thousand mil at a sixth of a second if I you know uh you know on an average day. So um, so I do like long glass, but um, but as workhorse lenses, if you were going to do travel or you know, anything social commentary, reportage, you can't go past 24 to 70 or 70 to 200, but run them on two bodies, you don't want to be changing.

SPEAKER_02:

Even in sports, uh, I shoot a bit of soccer here in the States. Uh I have a 300 and a 7200, and that's pretty much covered.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, the three the 300s have been the icons for about 50 years, haven't they? You know, I mean a fast 300 for sport, you you wouldn't even walk away from that. You know, it's just the they're just gold. They're not too long that you're cropping in your final frame, and then you've got enough in them that you can work, you can work through them. Yeah, no, 300s are gold. The only reason I never used the 300, I've never done I've only ever done sport a couple of times, but the only reason I never used the 300 because in the early days I had a 250 to 600, so I didn't need it. And then I had the Nikon 200 to 400, which was a wonderful way. I can't remember what they were when they came out about$40,000 or something. So when I when I pointed one at Wild Horses once in the in the outback, and I heard all the inner lenses roll back down the barrel, I realized that it was you know, that wasn't a good sound, but you know, those whole mid-range zooms for me were just more useful for for that kind of work. But a 300 in sports, you know, amazing, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

So at a young age you were seeing the world in pictures, and then you gravitated towards capturing the world in pictures. How did um the nature and the and the passion for animals and the environment, where did that come into the picture for you?

SPEAKER_03:

Great question. So for me, um, there's all these urban myths about Australia and wildlife, but a lot of them are true. When my mum and dad um bought their first house, like any new couple that was out in areas that were still hobby bush before the suburbs arrived, we were only the second house. There was literally a swamp at the backyard, snakes coming through, the fans, frogs, all of these things. Ironically, some of those frogs are now critically endangered. Um, and so I never knew an upbringing without wildlife. My dad was a long-haul truck driver, one of these, he had the biggest truck in the state of Victoria in Australia, heavy lifting truck. He would find owls and kangaroos and all of these sorts of things and tortoises. He'd bring them home. So my whole upbringing was never devoid of wildlife. And then, as I said, uh right through high school, I took art and art history, but I also took the sciences, you know, chemistry, physics, biology, maths. And when I finished high school, and some people are going to be in the next sentence, they're gonna go, oh my god, really? That's not fair. I got a position as a zookeeper at Melbourne Zoo. So, statistically speaking, uh allegedly in an OECD country, the two most sought-after jobs are zookeeper and that geophotographer. Um, I'm thinking it's about time for me to become an astronaut or something, maybe that's the next thing. But um, so three months after finishing high school, I started with Melbourne Zoo, which is the second oldest zoo in the world, to London. And I started with native mammals initially, not for any other reason that they were just short. Six months later, I moved to carnivores, became the big cat and bear keeper and small cat keeper, and I was there for probably eight years, and then I did about another four years on primates, gorillas, orangutans. So during that 12-year period, I I actually um how would I put it? I I did three degrees. I guess I did three of my tertiary courses during that 12 years, with none of which were based on photography or based on sciences or applied science or animal sciences, as we call them. So that passion was interwoven for me from basically birth all the way through to suddenly winding up in the Ed Melbourne Zoo. Um, but the other it the other interesting thing, mate, is that um I think if I've spent more time in my life probably with non-human species than I have with humans, with our own species. Um so I never grew up with that fear of snakes or wildlife or spiders or anything. I had a healthy respect and I never wanted to hurt, or I have some certain cardinal rules about working with wildlife and with people. We can talk about them at some point if you want to, but but um I didn't grow up looking at things as if there was a if there was a an instance where I was going to be hurt or something like that. Have I been? Yeah, of course. But my knowledge and the way I handle myself was so ingrained in who I was as a person. Uh, and and then once I started the zoo, I actually started a photo, I started a stock agency during my time at the zoo. So that was based on wildlife photography and natural history. So I formed my own company at about 18 or 19 whilst I was at the zoo, which was all based around that genre. So I've never known anything different, to be quite honest.

SPEAKER_02:

How did your how did your book Icebergs to iguanas come about? Why did you want to write that book?

SPEAKER_03:

Wow, great questions. We can go all night at this rate, mate. Um, but um, look, I mean, I sat down and for many years, so my collection of images at National Geographic is the equal largest of any shooter. Not because I shoot a lot, but the way I shoot, they like to archive work. And I I worked with the book department there for many years in different book departments, and they they wanted to try and do a series of books based around stories. And I was in there, I was in the mix for that, which was lovely. But after several years, the the funding just wasn't there. So I decided, well, okay, with the support of some friends who just stepped up and said, You've got to do this, you know, we're gonna help you do this. And and and and as a side to the US, this is one of the things that I love about America, and I've been connected with the US for many years. You you get up and get things done. Forget all of the political turmoil and everything now. You want people to succeed, and you want to encourage people, you want to connect people with each other. I know it gets lost in the in the noise at the moment, but but so many of the things in my career would not have happened if it wasn't for people doing that. So I got motivated, and and then I sat down, I'm Australian, with a bottle of wine one day, and I and I wrote a list, and that list was stories that had meant something to me personally. That was the only criteria. I could go through and do here's my favorite images, here's the most commercial images, here's the whatever. I wasn't interested in that. I'd run a scholarship, I built a scholarship for National Geographic. Uh, I wanted to tell stories. So I wrote a list, and then I went round and started finding people, some of which had worked with Nat Geo, others were new to the game. I built a team by myself, and then they said, Where do you want to start? We well, you must do the the heart, the stories that are really linked to your heart, the decades-old stories that you still haven't finished. So Serengeti's a story like that, Antarctica, the Amazon. There's several that will be books in their own right, hopefully at one point, and then we added from the list over a bottle. Well, I I did I think I wrote 40 on the list without looking at a frame. So I did not go to a frame. I sat there with a bottle of red on a winter's day, and I wrote a list of 40 ideas, and then we picked the first three, and then they came up with another set, and I did the drafts for 16 stories, and and when we laid out those first 16 based on the draft, it looked like the Gutenberg Bible, it was about you know it was about seven inches tall, and and then we cut it in half, and my team came back to me and said, no, we need to do multiple volumes, and here's where we're starting, which is great when they're not paying for them, but that's a that's a future me problem. And and so icebergs to iguanas became the start of that, and here's you know how I'd wrap that up is here's the problem. Storytelling, which I've done for my career and I never shut up as you're gathering. Storytelling is difficult. It's so much easier to pick your favorite frames or trees or whatever the case might be. It's still complex and it's still a personal journey, and it's still fraught with failure and self-doubt and self-flagellation. But when you're sitting there and you can only show some stories went for two weeks, some have gone for 30 years, and you can't have all the images. Sometimes you can't even have your favorite images because there's a gutter in the middle of the book, and maybe the book needs to be a landscape format to show that picture or whatever. There's all these storytelling battles that came in the two years, two and a half years of that process.

SPEAKER_01:

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SPEAKER_02:

So two and a half years.

SPEAKER_03:

So the in the in this in this book, Ice Breaks to Iguanas, we focused on eight stories. And so given that I wrote 16, that means, in my mind, rightly or wrongly, that we had the second book first drafted. But then that didn't happen. What happened was we looked at that eight stories, we looked back at the list and went, oh my god, what if we brought this into the rainbow serpent that's an aboriginal in Australia? The rainbow serpent carved the landscape, and then we pulled them apart. So we pulled apart the next eight, and then we started adding in, and then what we realized was that there's one of the stories that will come in. One of the books is called Death of the Antipodes. The Antipodes is what the British called Australia, the antipodes, the opposite side of the planet. And it's maybe got five or six stories in that one story of critically endangered species, plant and animal. So that becomes one. And so for icebergs to iguanas, I've been in the Serengeti since probably '92, I think. And I'm not there every year. Sometimes I'm there a couple of times a year, sometimes for three weeks, sometimes three days. It just depends how geographic of moving it. But that story in itself has got thousands and thousands of images shot towards it. But it's going, excuse me, it's going into a book that has seven other stories. So that is the complexity of storytelling when you're doing multiple subjects. So I don't know if I answered your question, but we the stories have lots of locations in them as locations themselves. I mean, the Amazon story begins in the and travels down through Antarctica. The Antarctic story starts, excuse me. So, you know, the the story on Antarctica doesn't begin in Antarctica, it begins in the Andes. Goes through interculture down below the Drake Passage, where the Andes flow under the ocean, comes back up on the peninsula. So no one had ever done that before. But my actual Antarctic story in the future will also have sub-Antarctic islands and humans on the ice and everything. So it was. But does it happen? No, not often. And if you want a long-term project, which I always suggest to photographers is the way to learn to tell a story, then you have to disregard that, and then you say, okay, how am I going to tell this story? What is the process by which I'm a storyteller? And you have to have a core idea and then you have to build spokes around it. I have a whole methodology in my brain that I that I teach people sometimes about, okay, what are the spokes we're going to build? How are we going to hold that foundation of that core idea up? And when I started with Geographic, this is my 25th anniversary with Nat Geo, you know, which is amazing and a privilege and an honour. But I remember that at the time, back in the day, and I think this has been their mantra forever, but you know, I was new at the time, I was the youngest. They said that they want people to go and shoot their suburbs for five years and appear with the images to show someone that they could tell a story, even if it wasn't going to be published. That's how you got into the door back then. And by the time I was contracted, I'd already been in the field for 15 years or something. So there's there's a lot of this misconception about how much time on the ground you need to do. And digital has shrunk that perspective. People are so good at post-production. But if you actually want to have longevity in the industry and you want to have uh you want to be in a scenario where your stories have some depth, or you are willing to just keep going and see what evolves, then you need to knuckle down. You need to knuckle down and say every day's not going to be a rose and and there's going to be mistakes and you're going to get these heartbreak and knockbacks and everything like that. But if the story really means something to you, then just get into it. You know, don't complain, don't bitch. Just get into it and chip away at it. Because that's how in in and I'm I'm knocking on wood here because I am so nervous about, you know, I I work, this is my job, but I'm very aware that if I don't knuckle down, someone listening to this is the next me. You know, so you you go hard or go home. That's how it should be.

SPEAKER_02:

This is sometimes hard for photographers when I ask them what I'm gonna ask it on your how do you define your aesthetic in your images?

SPEAKER_03:

Wow. So when I started shooting, and you would remember this, we all bought photographic books and magazines, especially magazines, and we'd read the F-stop settings and the shutter speeds and what the film was and everything. That's how we learned. There was no internet. And what I found though early in my career was that I started to get really, really stressed because I was seeing people with better lenses, better destinations, or better's not the right word, definitely better glass, but you know, interesting locations that I wanted to go to. Uh some of them were filter stacking, you know, back in the day. And for those who don't know, that's where you can stack filters on lenses to cut out light and everything like that, and each to his own. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it's just not my way. Um, and people were really processing their images and so on and so forth. I stopped buying books and I stopped buying magazines hard, just cold turkey, absolutely cold turkey. And I think it was probably if I look back at the old magazines on my bookshelf versus when I started buying photographic books again, the gap would not be less than 10 years. Probably longer, because I just didn't want to be influenced by what anyone else was doing. When I started buying again, and of course I wasn't bombarded with Instagram, and we didn't have that. There was film, you would go away with 60 or 100 rolls of film, whatever you could afford, a bag of 100 AA batteries, and you just shot. It was just a gift, like an absolute gift. At night, if you had alcohol, you drank it, and then you worked through the night, and then you got up in the morning at 4 a.m. and you started shooting again. You didn't have to look at anything, you didn't have to download anything, you didn't have to worry whether you performed. You were just relying on your skill at reading light and knowing your equipment. They are the two things you need as a photographer. Forget everything else. It's a box with a hole in it. Don't spend your money on the box, spend your money on the glass that focuses the light into the box. Don't get sucked in. I'm on a I'm on my pulpit here, man. I don't know. But you know, you preach it. Preach it, preach it, baby, preach it. So basically, what you want is you want to you want to know how to read light and you want to just know the math. And so that's so when I finally started buying books again, I actually didn't buy books in the genres that I photographed. I wanted to see how other Photographers saw the world. So sometimes they were art books, or they were, or they could have been reportage, purely reportage. You know, I've done documentary for very many years, but you know, newspaper type reportage, you know, magnum type work, things like that. And and eventually, I don't think I ever went back to buying natural history books. I don't think I ever, you know, like obviously, if I saw something that was spectacular, it was someone I knew, of course, I support them. That's what you want to do. Um, but I had enough distance then to be able to look at the shot and still go, oh my god, oh my god, that's amazing. But here's the thing for me, humbly, I also know that so many people have won awards, and awards are can be positive or negative. But I know, because I've won awards, that when people see those shots and then they write up some story, oh, you know, Tim sat there for like seven hours or whatever. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, you know. But the thing is, is that, and I'm gonna really annoy some people here, and I can say this because I'm a judge in competitions, I can guarantee anyone who's listening that I reckon 90% of people, including myself, we walk into that scene, we give ourselves the best chance, or it just happens right in front of us, and we're lucky. And so, and I know this from friends at Geographic, I know this in all genres of my photographic career. When you see these shots, sometimes people have put in incredibly hard yards to get that frame, including myself. And then other times you turn around and it happens. And you know, you might have been going on holiday and shooting wildlife or whatever you shoot for the last 20 years, and you get great shots, but then all of a sudden the god of photography throws you a bone, you spin around, or whatever happens, and then next thing you're a rock star. Now, yes, do you need to know what to do in that moment? 100%, absolutely 100%. But um, but the reality is that uh quite often the tortuous whatever's not necessarily as tortuous as some people like to think they are, but you know, I mean, if I I gave a presentation at the University of Pennsylvania last week, could have been the week before, and so many of those frames that were flowing up on those screens were on the last day, on the last minute. I had I mean one of a couple of those frames were different shoots where I had the propellers spinning on a plane on a dust airstream and everyone screaming at me, get in the get in the plane, get in the plane, and I got that frame. Um, so you just don't know.

SPEAKER_02:

You are literally and figuratively a world traveler. Um, but I always ask all different genres of photographers what's the one accoutrement, not gear, that you bring with you that you have to have when you work? Could be anything.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, okay. Um personally, it's just an unbridled passion for for learning and experiencing. I mean, I have been on the road for 40 years, more than 40 years, because I started so young. And if I have to walk out on my wife and my son, which I you know I've had to do, uh, if I am not passionate, and if I don't believe that I can make change, and if I don't believe that the images that I may create, because I don't have enough ego, I'm just lucky to be doing what I'm doing, seriously, mate. You know, on a good day, I've got a modicum of skill, and I was fortunate enough at 14 or 15 to be a teenager, especially boys whose brains are just all over the place at that age, maybe forever, but to wake up one day and say, I have a clear, functioning desire to do this, and I had enough skill and I'd worked a lot on composition to make a career out of it, and I am blessed. If when people say, Are you blessed? Yeah, 100%. My whole life, my whole career. I'm grateful every day. But I know as a teenager I was very blessed because I had some direction, and most teenagers, male and female, don't, but I did. Um, so when I turn up, I'm full of passion, I'm full of energy. I I will not go to bed for days on end sometimes, you know. But my standard day will start at about 4, 4:30, and it will finish at whatever time. And depending on the role I'm doing, sometimes I I might have to shoot all day, and then I'll work with people who are part of the team or they're sponsoring the shoot or whatever, and we'll have earlier nights. But that that is the thing that for me, I think if I am not a curious, passionate individual, I wouldn't walk out the door on my son or my wife. You know, that that is the number one thing. Um, and and you know, I don't want to hear it. You know, you know, it's like if you don't want to be tired, you don't want to be diseased, you don't want to be miss out on meals or have meals that make you get dysentery for days on end. I mean, you know, I have had lava living behind eyeballs, lava living in my ears, I've broken most so many bones in my body, head in my back of my head's been stitched on multiple times. You pick a disease I've had at Bilhazia, brucellosis, malaria, MERS, which is 85% fertile, you know, leptosporosis, you know, malaria, you name it. I've had fingers cut off, I've had disc punch out of my neck, all of these things, and they all make great war stories as long as you recover. But, and for anyone listening, it's an amazing life, but it is not for everyone, and it doesn't mean you can't create in a whole raft of ways. So, unless you are willing to walk out on that person, that partner, when they are, and my wife is very different because you know we we married later. Unless you are willing to walk out on that person who was sobbing because you are disappearing, especially in my early career, there was no mobile phones. I'd be gone for months. Months. They didn't even know where I was for months. I'd go to Latin America or Africa or wherever, I'd be gone for months. They're crying, you don't spend the weekends with me. Can I come with you on a shoot? Okay, yeah, that's great. But if you were on a holiday, getting up in the morning and doing a golden hour, maybe sitting by the pool and having a few cold beers during the middle of the day, keeping the partner happy, male or female, it doesn't matter. You know, so many women are amazing photographers, and and then you turn around and go, let's go for a wander in the afternoon, and then you come back from Bali and you say, This is the story I've shot. Maybe you've got it in you, but I guarantee you that's a holiday. But you also might have more furniture because I've had my house cleaned out a couple of times because I've uh broken relationships.

SPEAKER_02:

So I always tell people that uh the photography is good for my soul. That's kind of what what drives me through much of what you just talked about, only at a lot lower level. Um but having traveled the world and and written books and really seen the world, how does photography make you feel?

SPEAKER_03:

Even after all these years, it it's the equal thing with my son that gets me out of bed in the morning. You know, I I've never lost the passion for it, I've never lost the desire. Um, I've been walking around shooting all day, every day. I didn't have time to bring my gear here. I'm I'm here for another purpose in the US at the moment. And and but I was still shooting on my phone. Phones are amazing, there's always something to see. So, you know, if some if you said to me after 40 years or longer, 50 years or whatever of shooting, what do you do in your downtime? I photograph, I surf, you know, I exercise, of course. That's a different element. I'll say something on that in a second. And and I love to turn world music on when I'm at home. I don't want to leave the sofa, I'm there with my family, I'll open a glass of a bottle of wine and I'll read a book, photographic or whatever, it doesn't matter, architectural, something visual that stimulates how how someone else sees the world, with music on and a glass of wine and some cheese and biscuits. And and I never tire of shooting at all. I I think um and and also too, it is it is it's a soulful experience if you allow it to be. But you can't fight it, it's like fighting the tide. So if you are there as a photographer or you want to be a photographer, or you're just doing it because you're passionate about it, don't fight it. It doesn't matter, it really doesn't, and and I know you can I can hear the voices now. It's alright for Jace to say that it doesn't matter how many likes or whatever you get. It messes with my head too. It messes with everything. Social's amazing, we get to see all these things, funny, beautiful, whatever. But if I put up some critically endangered species, I get five likes, and I put up a kit and I get five thousand. The psychology of that is no different for me than it is for you. Other people a bit more thick skinned. So, what do we do? You take, you try and take that out of the equation and ask yourself those late-night questions. You know, why do I do this? Why do I want every frame to be better or different? And this is what I do. So my model is my motto is better or different. If I go back to the same location, I don't have to be better or different than the rest of the world. I'm just trying to be better or different for myself. So I set myself as the benchmark, and then I punish myself if I don't step up, you know, if I feel like I've had a slack day. But I also turn around and say, Wow, you know, that actually works. And I and I'm okay with that now. You know, it's um um just to say it's okay, just enough to get me through the day. But it's uh I think in the book I I said this more eloquently than you know, I speak to McGonas. I said, you know, photography was probably the most selfish pastime I could have ever chosen because it was all about making me happy. You know, because it makes me happy. And if my work makes people happy or it educates people about conservation or biodiversity or climate change, all the things we've been working on here in the US in the last couple of weeks, then that works for me. You don't have to agree with me, that's okay. You know, I mean, be think differently. I don't I don't mind, you know, let's try and find some common ground and move forward. But if I can have an opportunity to go somewhere that someone else doesn't, and I can make their life, you know, better or more interesting or well nothing, you know. I mean, that's that's a bit egotistical, I think, but but but but basically show them something that they haven't seen without ego attached for my end, I think that's a win for me. I mean it's the butterfly effect. You don't know the impact of a picture, and um yeah, uh and and if you're shooting and you want to get your work out there, we're all psychologically destroyed by showing our work publicly. There's a handful of people who go, I'm completely at ease with this power to you. But if you want to put some work up and you don't know how to do it, grab one frame that means something to you. Go down to the local cafe, go down to the local gym, whatever you want to do, I don't know where you live, and say, Would you mind if I put this up on the wall? You don't even have to put it up for sale. Just put it on the wall and put your name under it and write a little caption. You know, it could be something local or whatever. Just get it out there if that's what you feel like doing. But if you're just shooting for social or or you're shooting for your family or anything, that's cool too. You know, there's no rights or wrongs. There's all these people that think there's all these rights or wrongs, but there's not, you know, creative people are doing it hard. You know, they're doing it hard, they're emotionally connected to who they are normally, who they want to be, or maybe the question mark who they want to be. And photography is often the portal through which we communicate to the world. And you have to at some point say to yourself, This is this is okay, this is enough today, or this one-sixtieth of a second is enough. You know, that's all it has to be: one sixtieth, one thirtieth, one eighth, one four thousandth. Who cares? It's about you and the camera and what you create. Don't don't get don't get buried down in all that other stuff. It's it'll it drives you insane.

SPEAKER_02:

So well said. All right, a final question. I always try to uh um pay it forward. So uh what would you tell uh a young Jason um that he needs to know about photography and and storytelling um as as he moves forward? What what would you tell aspiring folks uh uh who want to start their journey?

SPEAKER_03:

Can I say the first thing that popped into my head?

SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03:

Be kinder to yourself. You know, just you know, we are all so and I probably have waxed lyrical about that, folks, and and I'm happy to come back, mate, and chat about tech stuff or something if you ever want to go again. But um, because I've gone down the rabbit warrant a bit tonight, but but be kinder to yourself. Allow yourself to make mistakes. Allow yourself, not too many, because otherwise you don't grow, but allow yourself to make mistakes. Take take more time to be proud of your successes, and if you get a good frame, look at it and say, Well, that actually works, and then look at it again a few months later and see if you still think the same. But um, the journey is as much yours as it is the person who's looking at your story, and so many of us um through our career, especially when we're younger, some when they're older, don't take that journey themselves. And and um uh that's that's probably what I'd say. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Jason Edwards, I can't thank you enough for being a part of the project. Very well done, sir. Thank you, mate. Thanks for having me. Thanks again to the amazing explorer with a camera, Jason Edwards. You can check out all of his work at nationalgeographic.com slash expeditionslash experts. And on his IG at Jason Edwards NG. Are you looking for gear or a cool photography t-shirt? You can trick out your kit and your wardrobe at the zoom with our feet shop. Use our affiliate links from Small Rig, Adorama, and Printeak. Remember, anytime you purchase using our links, we get a small commission that doesn't affect the price of your item. The Zoom With Our Feet Podcast is a production of TV Commando Media. Our theme music is by Novembers and their funky groove Cloud10. Be sure to take a peek at the other great episodes of the Zoom Pod at zoomwithourfeet.com, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Until next time, creators, like Jason said, do what you love, but love what you do.

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Timothy "TMac" McCarty

Host