Your Best Photos are closer than you think (feat. Simon Baxter)

this episode is sponsored by squarespace whether you need a domain website or online store make your next move with squarespace i think there's this assumption that to take the best images we possibly can we have to go somewhere far away we have to find some out of the way little alley in a in a city we've never been to or we have to travel and hike to the top of a very tall mountain but i actually think that the best photographs we can possibly take are probably just around the corner i have a friend named simon who's a talented woodland photographer and i think he's living proof of this because he says of his own images that the best shots he's ever taken are all within 20 minutes of his house so seeing as i've now moved up and settled in yorkshire and simon lives just the other side of the moors from me or mowers as he keeps correcting me and things are opening up so i can get back to making these documentaries with other photographers that i've so enjoyed it seemed too good an opportunity to pass up to sit down with simon and hear about his process so i'm going to shut up now and let you hear from my friend simon baxter about the benefits of photographing locally [Music] [Music] [Music] i'm not really sure where the interest originally stemmed from because i was too young to remember i was probably only about seven to ten years old something like that and i was on holiday in cornwall in the summertime sort of being around about near my birthday and i must have asked for a camera and i popped into a local argos and picked up this gold colored plastic helena camera which you know probably only cost about 20-25 pounds something like that and that was it really just as a kid in the 80s snapping away with this little thing and you know it was at that time where you used to take the roll of film out pop in an envelope post it back and then a week later you'll have the excitement of opening this envelope of prince and then a few years later i remember receiving a pentax uh fully manual slr it's an old secondhand piece of kit i wish i still had it one of those old ones with the when you look through the viewfinder you've got that exposure needle but back then i was photographing anything and everything you know it was more to sports landscapes patterns on christmas trees even rain on the window just whatever took my fancy really it's something that i drifted away from in my 20s and early 30s because i became more interested in an active lifestyle you know addicted to the rush of adrenaline through mountain biking snowboarding kayaking that sort of thing but then it was um later um probably um at some point in my sort of mid 30s early 30s that i suffered a back injury and that led me back into photography and helped me discover woodland and it became much more serious and all the other very active hobbies that i had they had to take a backseat and just a very slow paced appreciation of nurtures is then what um became the thing that became passionate about so the turning point i think for me and how my interest in photography became rekindled and became my kind of number one passion was actually when meg the our dog came into our lives and it was just perfect timing i was in such a dark place to be honest really struggling with the the chronic pain issues not really knowing what direction to take or what i was going to do even about my career and livelihood and then meg just gave me a reason to smile every day which was which was fantastic and the thing with dogs is that when you have a puppy like that they have to be kind of eased into the world you know you can't just take them out and walk around the countryside for two hours they need to develop as well and it was just wonderful that exactly the same pace that she needed to develop and become stronger is what i needed as well so we kind of slowly rehabilitated together but we were confined to the local area because i have what my car sat on the drive for months and months because it was too uncomfortable to drive it so we'd walk from home i'd get to the point where i could sit in the cat for five minutes and we'd walk from there because movement was you know that was the thing that i needed the most i needed to avoid being sedentary and then i started to take my camera because i wanted to document this puppy growing up so take pictures of meg running through the woods and just looking cute and then we'd go a little bit further and we'd start to enjoy some of the local landmarks or photograph meg within the landscape and it just kind of evolved very organically and very slowly but absolutely perfectly from from that point where you know i enjoyed every single moment with meg but then i started to turn the camera towards the landscapes as well and starting to appreciate yes the company of meg but just being in nature having that contact with nature on a regular basis [Music] shooting local you know i think it was always inevitable because i look back to the past and how i approached hobbies and even going back to you know many years ago when i used to be a freshwater angler the way that i would approach it is to find the most secluded quiet and difficult to fish lake with the most difficult to to catch fish and it was the challenge of that and it was never far from home because we wanted somewhere where we could go frequently to get to know it intimately and it was that knowledge that we built up that allow us to understand the fish how they behaved and increase our chances of catching them the wonderful thing about shooting local finding these great places to to to photograph which are easily accessed you know within a relatively short distance from home is that to witness those and observe those places season to season you learn incredible amount about how the trees behave you know the different tribes different types of trees the different species how we know which ones flower you know which ones turn the first uh in autumn and get that beautiful autumn color and just how the understory behaves and what's going to happen you can quite accurately predict when things are going to happen how they're going to look i can give you an example of an image which has been very successful for me and is a good example i think of lots of the things i particularly enjoy about woodland and i don't think i could have made this image work without that kind of local knowledge of that particular area it's it's actually up on the wall here but the this particular version was taken in september 2017 but i actually found the location in march 2016 and when i first walked into this little shallow valley in this woodland um it's it's it's actually part of an estate um so it's private land but open access so very few people go there because there's no footpaths going into it you're just following deer trails and it led me to this particular shallow valley with this fallen birch tree beautiful big characterful old pine tree in the distance just nestled amongst the much sort of straighter um less characterful pine trees and i just loved everything about the scene i have this thing that if i find something really good and i enjoy spending time there it's almost like this quest to do it justice and i just have this longing desire to make an image which just shows the very best of what that particular woodland has to offer or you know whatever's within my capabilities so it's just becomes an obsession it's not just a case of i'll take a picture you know once i get some nice conditions i'll take a photograph of that and that's it i'm happy it never stops it does i'll keep if if there's a composition that i really like i'll go back for years and try and try and just always work towards a better version so it was actually only a month after i found this particular location and i was there and it's the most unexpected flurry of snow which was in late april and it was just blasting down the valley from behind me creating this wonderful atmosphere it's in there it's around about dawn time so it's incredibly blue and that's when i made i even though i'd made a scouting image of this composition that's when i made my first one which i thought was quite nice but just didn't really kind of communicate everything that i wanted from it and i think some tweaks were needed in terms of the composition i made another version in december 2016 which was in my very first youtube video so it's close to my heart also but like i said it was in september the 2nd of september 2017 i made my ideal version and i think it was just it was very i was wrapped up in the experience because it was the first time that i'd ever seen that morning mist with the sunlight trying to break through so you get a wonderful contrast of that warm glow the cool tranquility of the mist and everything about it just felt perfect i don't think i would have been able to you know nail that image if it wasn't for that prior knowledge because i didn't even have to think about the composition it was okay i know what i want to do here i have always known what i really want to get out of this scene now i just need to make it work and i adapted things ever so slightly because there was these cobwebs just through the bilbrey which was just all the morning jew was sat on there um and that added this sort of fourth dimension so the the end result very very happy with it but it never would have come to be if it wasn't for that dedication to keep going back time and time and time again until i got to the point where i thought the conditions are never going to get better than this this you know this this is this is it [Music] [Music] [Music] i became very precious and quite protective about these places because they were helping me in a profoundly positive way so i didn't want to kind of throw that away by telling people where i was photographing because as i started to build up a you know an online profile to do videos on youtube etc people started to ask you know where where is this and i said you know i'm sorry i i can't i can't tell you you could potentially have an impact upon the environment upon woodlands if you started to broadcast where these particular places are we need to avoid creating footpaths we need to avoid you we can see the devastating effect on some places which receive a huge amount of footfall and to put this into perspective if i go to a particular woodland on a number of occasions in one given week i can start to see my impact i can start to see me alone starting to form trails through the understory so if you can imagine dozens of people day in day out and the damage that would create then i just think what originally made these places special would be would be lost so what i tend to do is then step back give it time to recover it recovers very very quickly if it's not getting any footfall whatsoever um and then i kind of feel as if you know i want to feel as if i'm leaving no trace yes through my youtube channel i'm broadcasting these places i'm celebrating their their beauty but that doesn't mean that i have to post coordinates of where i took a particular picture because you know i feel you know i have a huge amount of respect for these places and love for these places deep-rooted emotion emotional connection with these places which you can't help but have when they've had such a positive impact upon your own health so um i would hate to be the person responsible for these being affected in such a detrimental way i remember saying on a video some years ago that i don't live in tree mecca people don't come to the north york mirrors for the woodland and i still don't think that they do mainly because there's just uh you know lack of understanding of of what's actually there um so did i think in a million years i'd find what i've been able to find nearby absolutely not i baffled myself you know even years later i stumbled upon something think wow you know however not found this in these past several years and it's there and you can go there on a sunny bank holiday when you'd expect these places to be busy and you won't see anybody for hours so it's just it's just that willingness just give it give it a shot and you'll you'll be even if you thought you knew your local area well and i thought i did i've spent years mountain biking it um i've still become extremely surprised and i really want to kind of encourage other people to do that you know to find their place to go into their local landscape if they can and find that thing that they have a true connection with because if you can find that and find that very place where you ha you know that you're emotionally drawn to as well and you have the ability to frequent there witness its changes observe how it behaves through the seasons and connect with those changes and also build up your knowledge and that knowledge which is much easier to build up when you're able to visit these places on a regular basis then i genuinely believe that has a massively positive impact upon your photography and how you see the world because it's not just about you know walking through the woods and looking at something and taking a photograph because it looks nice it's built up of lots of different pieces of knowledge of the subject matter but you take a very nuanced view as well so it becomes you know the understand you know being able to look at something in the woodland and say actually i know that if i come back six weeks from now the color of that will change and that small change there is going to make a big difference to whether this composition is successful or not that attention to detail like nuanced view that connection and that long-term view and long-term goal that's what's made a big difference to me it's not nothing to do with location it's nothing to do with famous landmarks it's nothing to do with that whatsoever it's just finding your little piece in nature and those scenes that you connect with and those are what you make pictures of i mean i've found things that i can walk to from home which are beautiful hidden little gems and i know people who live in this town have been here for 50 60 years never knew they existed and you know i show them pictures and it baffles them so i think it just shows even if you think there's nothing close by you'll be surprised as what you'll uncover if you're just prepared to invest that time which can be months and months of exploring and sometimes in fact you find nothing and other times you find the next best thing that you wanted to spend invest years of your life to as a [Music] photographer [Music] so [Music] now simon obviously talked more about his specific genre of woodland photography but i think it applies to all of us and especially in the last year where we haven't been able to travel as much as we'd like i think a lot of photographers have put their photography on hold because they think well if i can't go somewhere i can't take good images however in that last year i've taken that challenge to shoot locally because of the circumstances we were in so i went over the road when i was living in london and took loads of photographs just around ones with common when i was going for my daily walks and i was surprised how much great stuff i came away with and it made me question my mentality the one that i had that said i had to get on a bus and go into central london if i wanted to have a serious day shooting photographers like simon challenge my assumptions that i have to go somewhere to get good images and remind me that if i'm willing to take the time and dig deeper in my local area and learn its rhythms there's probably a great depth to be mined right there and that goes for street photographers and landscape photographers and everybody in between i'll leave a link to simon's youtube channel and his instagram down below please go take a look and follow along and subscribe because i think we can learn so much from photographers like simon who have a laser focus on one subject much like the film i did with rachel talabart and she just focuses on seascapes and digs deep simon just focuses on his love of woodland and i think when we view a photographer's work like that and the immense amount of time and effort and detail that they notice it shows the rest of us how deep our work can go if we invest time and now i'm going to leave you with a selection of simon's images that he's captured in his local area but before i do that i want to say a quick thank you to squarespace for sponsoring this video if you need a new website or a domain they're a fantastic option i've used them myself as my website of choice for almost the last decade personally i need a website to do two very simple things i need it to look super clean and minimal so it's my work that draws the attention not the design and i need everything just to function easily because i'm no web genius and thankfully squarespace have a beautiful selection of minimally designed templates that really make your work look good and if you get stuck at any point which you won't because it's all just click and drag stuff but if you do they have an award-winning customer service team that are ready to help you start your free trial today at squarespace.com and go to squarespace.com forward slash sean tucker to get 10 of your first purchase [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Sean Tucker

Views: 90,182

Keywords: woodland, photography, woodland photography, yorkshire, north york moors, forest, simon baxter, photography documentary, meg, dogs and woodland, dog in the woods, labradoodle, photograph local, local is best, ancient woodland, english woods, uk woodland, sony a7r3, sony 24-70, arca swiss, landscape photography, landscape photographer

Id: V-DN0v2ZR4M

Length: 22min 25sec (1345 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Blueberry_Mancakes]

A good episode. Though I enjoy the videos where Sean just talks. He has a calming effect on me and often he says things that make me reflect on my own life and relationships. I think it'd be really awesome if he did a series where people could submit questions about personal issues they're having as it relates to being a photographer or artist and he could sort of talk through them. He's good at addressing the psychological and philosophical side of things.
The dude is a positive force.

[u/AcePiCer]

Sean always puts out great content. I feel that he's one of the few photography content creators on YouTube that puts real soul into his content and always has something fresh, inspiring, and thought provoking to bring to the table. I've learnt so much from him both technically and philosophically when it comes to my craft.

[u/SodaCanBob]

That forest looks vastly more interesting than any of the ones in or around Houston.

[u/llondru-es]

I can relate to that. Despite to covid lockdown, I made a surprisingly year in terms of photographic production around a radius of 50km from home.

[u/sitheandroid]

Great vid, Simon is really interesting!

[u/RB_Photo]

A good way to achieve this is by having kids. I have three kids and it has basically limited my photographic outings to midday and locations close enough to get back in time for school pickups/dinner. So who needs sunrise or magic hour, when you can try and work with harsh noon light!

[u/Just_Eirik]

I take all my photos locally. I’ve never gone further than I can get with my bicycle and get back the same day, for photography.

There’s a lot of photos waiting to be taken all around you!

[u/jaykayenn]

Sigh. I live in a concrete jungle, and we haven't been allowed to leave our neighbourhoods for most of the year now.

[u/1cyb3rwolf]

I have heard this from various photographers in wildlife/nature photography. I'm a bird photographer and I was visiting the same garden during the lockdown, which has improved my photography quite a bit I believe. Mainly due to knowing where the light is going to be at specific times and by also watching the same few birds I have learnt quite a lot about their behaviour. Less time spent on the road is another bonus, as you can sneak in a session before work.