Finding a Direction for your Photography (feat. Rachael Talibart)

so you bought yourself a camera and you've been going around and shooting anything and everything so you can learn how to use it and you've got loads of different images now lots of different subjects and some of them you like and some of them you don't like and you've gone online and watch numerous tutorials to try and build up a good skill set so that you can take better images in each of those different areas and all of that is well and good it's how you learn but you've now hit that stage where you realize that there's a much bigger puzzle to solve and you can't put it off any longer and that is what are you going to point this camera and these skills at it's time to pick a direction for your work and that's why I chose to make this film with Rachel Talib art I met Rachel through our mutual friend Simon Baxter and after hearing a little bit of a story and looking at her images it was clear that this was somebody who took her time to work out a very specific focus for her photography that she now regularly received critical acclaim for in her work but also creatively fulfills her and constantly energizes her to keep shooting as you'll hear that meant leaving a very high-powered job in the city and trying to explore lots of different genres of photography to work out which way she wanted to do all the while trying to bring up young children and balance a busy family life until that day that the penny dropped and she found her niche and started to plug away and that's why I think Rachel's story is one that speaks to all of us who are looking for that specific direction for our photography and you'll notice I said us because I include myself in there so I'm gonna keep this short partly because I'm sure you can hear I'm losing my voice I'm coming up quite a bad week of flu but mostly because I want you to spend a good amount of time with Rachel's story and her work and in her story I hope you discover somebody who went through a process herself and did it patiently to work out what she wanted to photograph that would fulfill her and reach other people and that that will get you thinking about your direction your niche the project you need to be seen the subject matter you need to be seen the focus you need to put into your photography that were both enriched you creatively but also reach and connect with other people where they're at so I'm going to shut up now here's Rachel Taliban [Music] my connection with the sea goes right back to my earliest childhood I grew up on the west sussex coast and in fact in Bognor Regis to be precise perhaps not one of the most instantly famous places on the coast but my dad was a keen yachtsman and sailing was something we did all the time every weekend that I can remember as a child and pretty well all of the school holidays were spent at sea unfortunately as some people may know I was and remain a bad sailor I I get trouble I can get travel sick on the London Underground so I was quite relieved when when I was about 12 or 13 dad gave up long-distance sailing but I think those years did give me something special they gave me a lifelong fascination with the ocean a lot of it has to do with I think the fact that I was seasick because as anyone who suffers from that or for malady knows you you really have to stay on deck you can't go down below that makes it so much worse so on long sea crossings I had no choice but to stay on deck can't read anyone who's been carsick knows that so I had to just look out and I used to look at the sea because there wasn't anything else to look at frankly the occasional lighthouse but otherwise nothing and I used to or kids or imaginative I was the same I used to imagine see sneer mountainscapes in the ways I used to imagine monsters or creatures reaching out I know used to tell stories to myself so as an adult I would always prefer to go on holiday to a coastal location never been very good at sunbathing so you know I would prefer to go somewhere misty with driftwood and and rough seas rather than somewhere sunny and and colourful that's definitely very much the theme of my work [Music] so my first career was as a solicitor in the city of London and the reason I got into that was because when you're 17 and you're filling in the new cast form as it then was I think or occur you are not old enough to make a good decision and I was very much you know I'm going to be this successful businesswoman and you know everything that I probably wasn't suited to being at that stage and decided to do law because everyone was telling me to do English literature so I went to university Southampton University to do an LLB and about a week in I realized I've made a terrible mistake and I spoke to the English literature department and they said yeah sure you can come but actually loads of lawyers have realized before you that they've made a terrible mistake and we're full but you can come back next year and my parents said to me well why don't you wait until Christmas and see and so I stuck it out and of course by Christmas I'd got a social life I'd made loads of friends and I was fully embroiled in that side of uni and I decided to stick it out and then I stuck it out for another 20-something years the day I realised that I really shouldn't be sitting in a law firm was actually through my best friend Katherine and one day I popped into her office to say hi as I as I did and she was sitting behind a desk looking all shiny and bright and happy and I said oh you're on good form today what what's up said oh I've got a new case we actually used to call them matter so I've got a new matter and I'm going to have to work really really hard and it's going to be really really hard and I'm going to prove to everybody that I can rise to the challenge and it's going to be brilliant and I thought well good for you and I went away and sat at my desk and thought oh no when I get a new matter I think oh no it's going to be really really hard I'm going to have to work really really hard everyone's going to realise that I'm actually no good at this and it's going to be a complete disaster now actually I've been doing really well I've been promoted ahead of some of my peers and that so I wasn't really rubbish at it but the fact that I felt that way showed me that this career was not going to lead to lifelong happiness and that was when I started to think about alternatives and actually the decision to become a photographer happened in Venice of all places I'd gone to Venice on a masterclass with Michael Levin who some people may know is a successful Canadian fine art photographer and he was doing a masterclass in Venice which involved a lot of sort of classroom time with him and also opportunities to go out and shoot and on the last morning we had fog now I love Venice I've been to Venice six times I will hopefully go many more but never ever how I've been lucky enough to have fog until that final morning and I looked out of the window before sunrise as we do photographers and saw fog yippee I thought grabbed my gear and rushed out and there was a group of photographers and they were photographing gondolas in the mist which is an obvious and rather nice thing to do but standing with them I just felt awkward I think it was partly the knowledge that probably whatever I would do would look a lot like what they were doing and I hate that so I know in Venice very well by now six visits I pulled off on my own to a quiet corner that no one would consider worth standing to make photos and I made a picture there called five it's not about Venice at all it's it's five of those sort of mooring posts that you have in the Venetian Lagoon and it's just a photo really that it I hope expresses not location but how I felt about being there in that moment because in that moment I made my decision that I was going to see if I could make it as a full-time photographer and I made that decision standing there in that beautiful moment before sunrise in absolute quiet slack tide top of the tide fog no tourists no vaporetto ZnO gondoliers it was really peaceful in the gave me gave me space and there's lots of space in the picture as well gave me space to make the decision and I immediately felt a tremendous sense of relief well when I was in Venice on the Masterclass with Michael Levin that was organized by Jonathan Critchley another well-known fine art landscape well not landscape fine art photographer with the sort of black-and-white style and Jonathan offers a distance learning or mentoring kind of arrangement and when I came back having made this big decision that I wanted to to go for it as a fine art photographer I decided to invest because it was expensive but you get what you pay for with these things I decided to invest in Jonathan's mentoring scheme and he came and we had a chat in this house about what I wanted to do and he then started the whole thing with a questionnaire a lot of the questionnaire was quite weird it had questions in it that were unexpected anyway the big question I suppose on this questionnaire was he asked me to imagine myself somewhere where I felt very contented to be completely on my own and I was there with my camera in this space but I was alone and I was very very content and I was to describe that place to him and maybe slightly oddly also describe what I was drinking so he said don't think too long about it just go for it and the first thing that occurred to me was what I wrote down which was that I was on a promontory on the coast into the ocean looking down and on one side in the Lee of the promontory where there was no wind there was a beautiful calm sandy beach with lovely calm sea and on the other side there where the wind was there were rocks and big crashing waves and on the the drink question I said well if it's fantasy I'm having a margarita but if it's reality it's probably water and he said well why are you photographing anything else you obviously need to be working at the coast which sounds obvious but at that point back in 2014-15 I did very little coastal photography and that was largely logistics driven because I'm raising a family in Surrey inside the m25 as well not sort of South Surrey and you know you can't just head to the coast for sunrise and sunset if you're raising a young family Union you've got other demands on your time and I didn't resent them my goodness you know the most important thing I've done with my life is raise kids but anyway Jonathan's question was great because it showed me actually what I I really wanted to be doing and the timing was fortuitous because by now my youngest was was 13 or 14 and she needed me a lot less and my son is older so this was a wonderful opportunity and everything just came together and I basically gave up photographing with the other things and just started going to the coast and [Music] [Music] [Music] I guess when typical photography day begins actually long before the day in that I do have like everybody I have a busy life you know I'm running workshops I've got a lot of admin I'm writing and preparing talks and I've still got a family and a household and a husband and all of those other things so I think for me it's really worked to Dyer eyes photography days which does sound rather lacking in spontaneity but the reality is if you don't do that or at least if I don't do that I'm probably not going to get out very often a lot of professional photographers can blame that it's come at the cost of their own photography they don't make time for that so I have to die rise it now the important thing is once I've done that if the forecast for that day is then terrible I go anyway forecasts are endlessly wrong especially at the coast actually to be fair it seemed really impossible to predict coastal weather accurately and and you've just got to go in anyway sometimes the worst weather and the worst light makes you more creative so planning a day and then on the day getting up if I possibly can if it's not the middle of the summer when frankly when I've got an hour-and-a-half Drive as well I don't do dawn but the rest of the year I might try and get down for sunrise just because on in this busy south coast where I work that's your best shot at an empty beach and I really do like being alone when I make my pictures so I will get up early head down to the beach and then I just don't put myself under any pressure there is no pressure to get a portfolio picture I've tried to work like that and it's a disaster as soon as that's there in your head it's messing with your head and you're not going to relax and you're certainly not going to experiment and experimenting is really important to me so I'll go down to somewhere I know really really well I love going back to places and I will just spend all day there sometimes ice you know I can see on a beach all day watch the tide through a whole cycle maybe wave had a friendly sale you know and then obviously chat to the odd dog walker and make not many pictures because the lights terrible sometimes I would just be really really busy or don't make far too many pictures and come back with very full memory cards and a job on my hands so that's how I'd spend the day and then when the day is over the light is over come back home and I then put those memory cards aside and I don't look at them if I can avoid it I don't look at them for weeks I've got a queue at actually on my desk upstairs I think I've got 15 memory cards waiting to be uploaded this is really important for me now this is just how I work everyone's different right so some people it has to be much more spontaneous and quick for me I've learned that I get very very excited when I'm out at the coast with the sea and I just love making photographs there I love it too much and when I get back I'm still tripping from that wonderful experience and sometimes if it's been really good I may be tripping for a very long time and I am in absolutely no position to assess the photographs first off if I look at them too quickly I'm almost always disappointed because I'm still tripping no my photos can be great but they're never going to match up to the high that I'm on so that's a disaster I want to avoid that and the other thing is that I'm absolutely unable objectively to edit those photos so for me there needs to be a gap and then I can come to the pictures and I'll upload the memory card and I'll probably pick two or three pictures from that I really don't delete much at that point if they're completely out of focus or you started a long exposure and then changed your mind or switched off the camera and you've got a black you know black rectangle then I'll delete those but the rest I will leave which is why I have to have a very big hard drive but storage is quite cheap these days and I strongly think that our aesthetics develop over time and there are certainly pictures in my portfolio that I can think of that I didn't find for six months a year two years because I was looking something different when I first when I first reviewed them I was looking for something I had a preconception in my mind of what I wanted from the day two years later I go back I've forgotten all of that and now suddenly I might see something different in a picture so if you can I would generally recommend delete as little as possible just the real disasters the job's not done when I finished editing a picture the next stage is to print it so if I think right this is the Edit this pictures done then I print it I've got an a2 printer in my studio I'll run off a print on the fine art paper of my choice I have a range of papers that I know I like and I will then stick it on the wall of my studio and I will come and go in my studio every day over a period days weeks occasionally months and I will live with that picture it's amazing what you notice actually once you've printed a picture I mean the obvious thing you know that awful dust spot dust bunny that despite your careful scrutiny at one to one you've missed it but there can be other things you know a little detail on the margin that drags the eye away from where you want it to be or you don't quite like the color there all the tones whatever if I find something like that which is quite common I will then re-edit to deal with it print it again the same process if a picture's withstood that sort of scrutiny then it's ready to be published and so by publish I I include social media so I'm not going to be throwing pictures up on on for me instagrams my main account not throwing up pictures on there just because I need a new picture I don't think you always need a new picture if your followers change anyone who looks will see followers change constantly so after six months I figure it's fair to post a picture again anyway what I don't want to be doing I think it's far more damaging to be posting stuff that I then look back on later I think Oh cringe then to be posting stuff but I posted six months ago so so my Instagram is a much slower slower burn if you like you know I'm not dying the life of a jobbing landscape photographer their portfolio pictures that have withstood scrutiny and it's just how I work and I think it is it works for me I often get people say to me things like I'd love to do what you do what advice can you give it's alright for you sometimes people say but I have a day job I have a young family or I have other commitments I mean in reality there are always going to be reasons why it's hard for all of us I mean I have a 90 year old father I need to spend time with now I have done this with younger children I have all sorts of other things going on in my life that private yeah you know we all have stuff that's the reality of it all I think don't put yourself under too much pressure here you know I think part of the reason it starts to seem really hard is because people set themselves unrealistic goals unfair goals they're not being kind to themselves let it happen slowly let it happen organically don't just give up the day job and say right yesterday I was a whatever your job is today I am a full-time professional photographer I you're going to be really lucky if that works for you I'd be amazed frankly for me it happened really really slowly so although I talked about the sort of epiphany if you like the epiphany over being in Venice and deciding to become a photographer that was a really slow process in reality behind the scenes you know it had been a passion and a hobby all through my city years as a lawyer took a bit of a pause when the camera bag became a nappy bag but then started to come back and as I said you know I was photographing what was available to me within my lifestyle I'm gonna be honest it's easier for me at the stage of life that I'm at then it would be if you were in your 20s you know I have had another career a pretty well-paid one so I'm on a solid financial footing I sorted maybe to talk about money but that is the reality and photographers need to pay the bills so you know I now earn more than enough that I could live on very comfortably but it didn't happen overnight and I didn't take a massive leap into the dark so you know just be kind to yourself if you want it it can happen but let it happen slowly you maybe need a bit of life experience behind you if you're in your 20s how are you going to know what your own voice is yet you don't even know what you like yet you know so just go out and live and do the J job and use your holidays and your weekends to enjoy photography if you can and if you can't do that because family commitments maybe you've got half an hour nip outside find something to photograph and just enjoy it and that will make you a good photographer over time [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sean Tucker

Views: 191,773

Keywords: coastal photography, wave photography, rachael talibart, photography, seascapes, bognor regis, the beach, direction, your niche, choosing a photography project, subject matter, finding your niche, choosing your subject matter, finding a direction, what should i take photos of, photography mentoring, venice in the fog, storm imogen, sirens, fine art photography, becoming a fine art photographer

Id: SN2x2ChobQg

Length: 25min 27sec (1527 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 08 2019