#021: Travel Photography - Technical Aspects, Choosing The Right Equipment, Learning To See Creatively, Finding Your Own Style.

In this episode, we talk with Ella DeAmicis, aka Wanderstruck Ella, about how to explore our most creative side through the amazing world of travel photography. 

On the Show Today You’ll Learn:

• What would be a good start to think about being a travel photographer?
• How do you unleash your creativity?
• How difficult is it to get into the market of selling photographs?
• How much can you earn through photography?
• And more

Links & Resources

Website: https://wanderstruckella.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wanderstruckella/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wanderstruckella

The Why We Travel Podcast website: https://whywetravel.net/

Visit our website at https://whywetravel.net/

Transcript

Claus Lauter: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Why We Travel Podcast. Dave, we want to talk about travel photography. That's basically a topic I know nothing about , and we want to talk there about technical aspects, choosing the right equipment, learning to see creativity, and finding your own style.

So as I have no clue about it, I have a guest with me. I have Ella with me. Ella, also known as Wanderstruck Ella. Fell first for photography when she was in school. So that's a while ago, and she will tell us a little bit more about that. And nowadays she's running a and block and is helping others to discover new destinations and to learn skills of travel photography.

So, hi Ella, how are you today? I'm doing 

Ella DeAmicis: great. How are you? I'm very 

Claus Lauter: well, Ella. Give me a bit of an idea of your first travel memory. 

Ella DeAmicis: I don't know if it's when I caught the travel bug exactly. , I remember, , going to our family friend's house when I was a kid, probably, I don't know, five, six, maybe seven years old.

And we would go in the old station wagon. It wasn't super far away. This was when we lived in Florida. , and my sister and I would sleep in the back of the station wagon. On the way back. That was one of the first that involved enjoying road trips. , after that once we moved [00:02:00] to South Carolina, we'd spend a lot of time on the weekends going to the mountains in North Carolina.

So I would say the mountains of the East Coast are my first travel and adventure memory and outdoorsy pursuits. Nature hiking is something that is often a big part of my travel and my photography in general. 

Claus Lauter: Okay. Sounds great. Now, coming to photography, I already told you that I have absolutely no idea about photography.

I'm the worst photographer on the planet. Specifically, when comes to travel photography, . So you started relatively young in school, so what got you into photography? 

Ella DeAmicis: I liked the mystery of it because this of course was back in the day when it was on film, so you didn't have that immediate feedback, and it was just a really very.

3D way in the moment of being creative. And when you're that age, this was in middle school when I first started using it, you're learning how to express yourself, you're exploring your creativity. And even before that, because my mom, , was an art history major and an art teacher at the time [00:03:00] growing up.

We would experiment with different types of artistic expression. It might be pastels or watercolors or just drawing in general, and I enjoyed all of those, but the photography was just the one that really felt like it W clicked, and it was always so exciting to get the film back and see if your idea had worked out the way you thought.

And also you would learn, oh, I need to do this differently. Whether it was a creative idea that you needed to adjust or a technical aspect that you now knew. 

Claus Lauter: Okay. Now with the interwebs, obviously it was Instagram, travel photography has become a huge topic. Everyone is out there making photographs, influencers, and so on and so forth.

If you wanna get into this, what would be a good start to think about it and to get an idea where you want head to 

Ella DeAmicis: head to? For myself personally, or just on the topic in general. 

Claus Lauter: Maybe start with your personally, how you got started and then maybe in general, 

Ella DeAmicis: I didn't really start using Instagram much until, maybe 2011 or 12 when I first started posting [00:04:00] anything, and I had no purpose for it.

I just did it kind of the same way I came to Facebook where it was like, okay, I guess I'll try this out, and then, Probably around 2015 I decided that I wanted to use it to more specifically share my photography. And I actually keep two accounts. , I have one that is about the travel and the travel photography.

And then I have another one that is strictly for what I call my artsy fartsy stuff . So that's more conceptual abstracts, just sort of me having fun with it. And I don't actually post all that much on that one anymore. Partly cause it's just so hard to keep up with so many channels. if I'm brutally honest, I would say that everything has its good and its bad, or its pros and its cons or however you wanna put it.

The pendulum has swung a bit far into a rather messy zone. When you talk about specifically photography. Even more specifically travel photography on a social platform like Instagram. Anybody who does enjoy photography of any sort knows very well the, , drama [00:05:00] surrounding Instagram over the last several years, moving away from becoming a platform for visual artists.

, particularly still visual artists, whether you're talking about photography or painting. And then of course just the juggernaut of social media and a lot of that sense. Of needing to jump on trends or be somewhat formulaic simply to get the views and kowtow to the algorithm a bit. So I think that Instagram or now there's a trend to actually start doing sort of like photo slideshow on TikTok.

That started very, very recently. You know about to start playing with that, just outta curiosity. , my TikTok channel currently is still focused a bit more on the travel part of it than the photography. I think I'm gonna be moving that over to YouTube, either traditional or shorts. , but I think that the challenge is twofold.

and it depends on whether you are wanting to use a platform simply to share your stuff and put it out there with no particular goal, or whether you're trying to gain followers so that you can sell prints or get hired. Sell a [00:06:00] product related to it doesn't really matter. , but I think the battle is finding what you enjoy, photographing and learning how to do that well, and not falling into the trap of regurgitating the same composition, the same editing style, the same mood, , the same trope.

There's entire Instagram account dedicated to. The repetitiveness of these things. You know, the person on a kayak and a yellow jacket in front of mountains on a lake, or several other very similar tropes where there's not a lot of diversity anymore. People tend to be repeating the same thing over and over, , which maybe it's own conversational together.

So I have mixed feelings about social media and as it relates to photography and travel. 

Claus Lauter: Very good point there. I'm getting also a little bit tired about the person walking through an apartment and jumping into a pool, which is sort of a recurring theme on Instagram all the time. Now let's get a little bit more in the technical aspect.

Again, I have no idea there. lot of people obviously use their, , phones [00:07:00] for the iPhones whatsoever. If you wanna really do it very well, you need to have good equipment. Tell me a little bit on how your progress or how your history is there and what you are using nowadays. , 

Ella DeAmicis: , the advantage that I have, or anybody that progresses in a similar way to what I did is, you know, when I started photography, digital photography didn't exist.

I'm gonna date myself a bit here, . so I had to learn the technical aspects of photography. I had to understand how light. Why things were exposed the way they were. I had to really understand how all of those things related to each other and were connected in order to create the shot or the image that I had in my head, and to capture it accurately or again, the way I envisioned.

the disadvantage there, of course, is that It could get expensive and it was slow because you had to get the film developed, which could get costly. And of course you couldn't try as many different things cuz you were sitting there going, oh, well I only have these many shots or these many roles, and then I had to pay to get them [00:08:00] developed and then you had to wait.

So the learning curve took longer. And I do think that the wonderful thing at the advent of digital and as it became more affordable and more accessible, whether in a snapshot camera or. The more expensive and advanced DSLRs is, you could get that immediate feedback. You could try a lot of different things, and I think that's really wonderful, , because it also made it accessible to people who maybe didn't have access to film developing services or even more so, didn't have a dark room where they could do it themselves and play even more with that, which is where I would say a lot of the editing pre-digital era happened.

You know, people think, oh, I don't like to edit my photos, which. Is a myth. All photos are edited, always have been, always will be. It's just how it's . , which again, we can circle back to that or save up for another time. , but it really is ultimately far less about the fanciness or the expense of what you're using to capture the image.

You simply. A receiving medium, whether that's film or a digital sensor and something to [00:09:00] focus and control the light, thus a lens and knowing how to control manipulate those and how they work is going to be far more important. You can put $10,000 of equipment in somebody's hands who doesn't understand these things, and sure the resolution will be nice and you know, but if you ask them to shoot in manual or even in like aperture priority mode.

They're not gonna understand the scene in order to achieve the desired result, either there's gonna be a lot of trial and error, or they're gonna have to spend a lot of time in post-production, fixing mistakes, fixing errors, and even that can only do so much. So understanding how photography works in sort of more a scientific way to me, and most photographers would agree.

is far more important than what it is that you're using to take the photo. 

Claus Lauter: that makes perfect sense. you have this one battle field of understanding the technical aspect of . being a photographer, and obviously you can learn that and with experience of getting better. And then you have, the other part is more [00:10:00] in realms of up creativity, finding your own style.

What's the process there? How would you approach that? 

Ella DeAmicis: It's a fine line between looking, and this is true of any artistic or creative endeavor. You know, whether you're a writer or a painter or any of those things, you study people who are successful at it, and I don't necessarily mean financially successful because that's not always an indicator of talent or skill or understanding.

Sometimes that's just a really good PR system. . , and when learning to see creatively, it combines the technical and also understanding a bit of human psychology, , and what our eye is drawn to. Our eye is going to be drawn typically to the brightest part of an image or the darkest part of an image.

If the majority of the image is very. and there's one bright point or one bright section. Your eye is naturally drawn to this kind of plays, applies the same way with color, where if it's a fairly muted scene and then you have a splash of color, your eye is going to be drawn to that and that can be expanded further with [00:11:00] shape and things like that.

You have concepts of leading lines and patterns and shadows. , understanding the balance of an image, which is where you get into what's called the rule of thirds and. Other compositional rules. , I hate using the word rules because I would say guidelines actually, , to quote the Great Jack Sparrow , it's more like guidelines rather than rules.

But you have to understand the guidelines before you start pushing against them or going against them and making a decision to say, you know what? I'm not going to follow the traditional rule of thirds composition and place my subject. In this way that follows that guideline. I'm gonna break that, but I think that if you're going to break a guideline, break a rule.

You have to have a reason or you should have a reason. Why are you doing that? What, what is that choice that you're making? And even that doesn't necessarily have a right or a wrong. , it's more about effective or not effective. If you think that breaking the rule of thirds and placing everything that you want attention on exactly in the center, which is breaking the rule of thirds, [00:12:00] and you've thought about it and you've made the decision to do that, it might not be effective.

And so it can be very hard when you're being creative to separate out your emotional attachment to an image from the way that people respond to it, because they may not respond the way that you would hoped. And then you have to decide, well, how much does that matter to me? How important is that to me?

Do I need them to respond in a certain way? Then you may have to adjust how you're creating or crafting the image. , I have favorite images that are not other people's favorites and. Fine. I print those and put them on my wall, and then I sell other ones that have a different type of appeal because art really is in the eye of beholder.

Claus Lauter: . , you just mentioned you sell images. If somebody is thinking about getting into that as a business concept to finance their travels to be a digital nomad, , all can see how difficult is it to get into this kind of market?

Ella DeAmicis: I frankly would not ever recommend to somebody to take off on a nomad journey with the idea that they're going to [00:13:00] make their living quickly and easily from their photos. It is very difficult. It's a flooded market because everybody's a photographer. Now, whether that's fair or not, whether they're talented or not, is moot.

It's just simply a flood of content in front of people's eyes. So the accessibility is wonderful. , but the absolute avalanche of options is also going to work against you. , and a lot of people think, oh, I'll put it up on a stock site. Hmm. That can work. But it, that's a volume game typically. me, my photography is first something I do because I just enjoy it. I enjoy the different types, but particularly I do enjoy travel photography. One of my favorite things is simply walking around a place with my camera and just sort of going into a flow state. It feels really good. And then coming back and going through the editing process and recapturing that feeling in a visual but also emotional way.

, Editing again, is a whole other part of it that I do think about while I'm shooting. but is also its own entity as [00:14:00] well in terms of creativity and vision and guidelines, that exist. , but it is truthfully extremely challenging if. Someone is wanting to exclusively make their income, their living from just selling travel photography.

And whether you're thinking of that in a gallery context or in a licensing context where you , use others to use the images for blogs or advertising, or any number of possibilities, , I would not present myself as an expert in that arena simply because I haven't hardly dedicated myself.

Making my income that way. , but the main thing is understand it is going to be a lot of work and you need really good business acumen and sense for that to be successful. You're not an artist anymore at that point. You're not a creative anymore at that point. I mean, you are, but that's not really the important part.

The important part becomes the business skills and the marketing. Whether that sounds romantic or not, that's just simply how it is. . No, I appreciate. I know that might not [00:15:00] be what a lot of people wanna hear, but it's . 

Claus Lauter: I appreciate your honesty , and your insight there. , so a fair warning, it's not an easy game to get in there.

Whoever thinks not 

Ella DeAmicis: impossible, but it's not impossible. Neither is going to the moon. 

Claus Lauter: Quite true. So I understand you're running a block bun. Tell me a little bit more about your block. 

Ella DeAmicis: , well I originally started. Writing under the name of By fork or by lens? Because at first it was the concept of. I love travel and I love food and I love photography, and if I can't do one I'm doing the other and often combining them.

, but I realized I mostly really enjoy just eating the food for myself and didn't wanna make that part of my job. So I pivoted into Wonderstruck Ella to really focus not just on travel. Oh, here's a place that I went, and it was amazing. Don't you wanna be like me? My goal with the travel side is to either inspire people, and I don't mean inspire.

In the context of to be like me, , which if someone wants to do things the way I'm doing them, that's wonderful. And of course your tribe is gonna [00:16:00] have similar interests. I do a lot of solo travel. I tend to do sort of epic trips in the sense that they're longer or perhaps things that not everybody would feel comfortable attempting, although to me, I don't think they're that wild.

, but also helping people to make better decisions. their travel to overcome limiting ideas about it. Again, particularly in the context of solo travel and of course particularly for women because there's a whole extra layer of factors and concerns that come in there. as I'm going forward, I'm sort of in a mid revamp of the website right now.

, but going forward I really do wanna share more of that, how to. Feel confident in your decisions so that when you are traveling and something goes awry and it will eventually, something's gonna go wrong, that you have the skills and the knowledge to deal with that effectively. That when you're trying to figure out where to go, instead of doing something like trusting TikTok or Instagram, because I gotta tell you, I wrote a whole post about it.

Please [00:17:00] don't get your travel advice from TikTok and Instagram exclusively. It's great as a starting point. Most people are there to get followers to create a certain impression, and they're leaving out a section of reality. And so I really do want to bring the whimsy and the joy of travel, but also have one foot remaining on the ground so that you don't get caught on wars.

And then of course, the travel photography. It's kind of the same concept so that you can really make decisions that are best for you. I don't particularly have any interest in being in a lot of my photos, , while others may actually want to be in a lot of their photos, but again, coming up with ideas that feel good to you and aren't just, oh, well this is what everybody else is doing, so I guess it's what I'm supposed to do.

And whether that's a photo or a travel choice, don't do it just because everybody else is saying it's amazing or you feel like if you don't, you know, don't fall into the FOMO trap. So my goal is to help people not fall into the FOMO trap and make the choices that are best for themselves. 

Claus Lauter: I [00:18:00] like that approach, , saves the world from more similar photos or videos.

So where can people find out more about you? 

Ella DeAmicis: , so I have the blog, which is wonderstruck ella.com. And then I have the same Wonderstruck Ella for Instagram and TikTok. And I'll be expanding into a YouTube channel, which will probably skew a bit more into photography as well. And that's actually gonna be under the wanders struck lens, which is both literal and.

Figurative. , so we'll still talk about travel and perspectives. , I'm really hoping to. Encourage people to think about the impact of their travel as well. , whether that's not going to a destination that simply can't sustain the level of tourism that it's receiving, or how to find a way to make sure that your money is going to a local business or a small business, because I think that's really important.

Those of us that have the ability and the privilege to travel in any extensive way, , to me, we have a responsibility to. Take a moment and pause and think and do our best to educate ourselves and make [00:19:00] decisions that ideally will add to somebody else's life and not take. 

Claus Lauter: Very good. Cool. We're coming to the end of our talk today, 

I really appreciate all the nuggets that you gave out, and I will put the links in the show notes that you just want, click away. Thanks so much for your time and have a great day. Awesome. 

Ella DeAmicis: Great. Bye.