Anna Mazurek on Making It as a Travel Photographer and Digital Nomad | Hacker News Reader

Anna Mazurek on Making It as a Travel Photographer and Digital Nomad

petapixel.com

I loved flying, but the headlines of how oil extraction destroys communities and wildlife, burning it warms the globe, and flying everywhere tears apart communities, families, and cultures, creating craving and dissatisfaction . . . I couldn't do it anymore. My excuses that flying only contributed a little, that one day planes would be electric, etc collapsed as they became so clearly self-serving, ignoring the actual effects, not just the ones I wanted.

Once I accepted I couldn't see everything I wanted, I learned to appreciate where I was more. Now, not having flown by choice since 2016, I've learned to appreciate different cultures more, gain more control over a career I thought required flying (again, self-serving specious logic disappeared as I overcame the addiction), and spend more time with family. I experience more variety of food and more connection to culture.

Past experience tells me this community values flying and devalues reversing course from technology solving everything, but I'll take the downvotes if you disagree: the values of the lifestyle the article, however beautiful the images, cause most of our environmental, social, and cultural problems, even as people living those values profess to want to solve them.

A vanilla article, about a vanilla photographer with vanilla journalistic photography.

Seriously - these photos don't bring anything new to the conversation. Might as well be inspirational OS wallpapers.

None of the insights on 'making it' are anything new either - saving half of your income, living cheap, committing to a nomadic lifestyle. Blagh. I'll take the downvotes as well on this one.

If you are expecting every article you read to have new insightful information you're going to be pretty disappointed with the internet friend. They may not be new to you but they may be new to someone who just got interested in this field. Clearly they are interesting enough that someone felt they were worth publishing.

I guess my gripe is less so with the quality of the article itself, and more with it’s presence right here on the front page of the orange site.

There might be places online where all sorts of people find all sorts of content worth spending their time on, but I like to think that the rules by which this place operates, and the kind of crowd it attracts, should generally weed out this kind of content.

Committing to being present and engaged with wherever you are seems to me to be the secret to happiness.

The happiest, most stable people I have known were happy and stable no matter where they were. This showed up most obviously as grace under pressure in not-great situations, whether traveling or on an adventure.

But it also showed up in their willingness and happiness to bop around locally. They didn’t look down on, or disengage from, a day hike they’d done a dozen times just because it wasn’t a grand adventure. Same level of enthusiasm and fun.

I don’t have a secret for how to be this way. But once I noticed it, it seemed like something I wanted to try to work toward.

I know I'm extraordinarily biased in this situation, but I really hope that sailing makes something of a comeback as an eco-friendly means of international travel. Not flying shouldn't mean no more travelling, just that travelling happens at a bit more of a sedate pace.

The act of sailing doesn't harm the environment at all, and even now some yachts have eliminated their marine diesel engines altogether in favour of a sail/electric setup which I imagine could scale up as massive battery banks get more and more feasible. There's also been nearly a century of innovation in materials science since the last clipper ships and even they were pretty fast.

There's already a viable-but-not-utilized intermediate step, which is travel by motorized ship. Queen Mary 2 travels various transatlantic (and other international routes), but rates are rather high. One can also book passage on cargo ships, but price comes out to $100-120 a night, which, given that passage includes room and board, isn't unreasonable.

Ship travel trades off cost of fuel (and aircraft) for cost of accommodations for the duration of the voyage. Add in that most people who can afford international travel cannot afford to take off 2-4 weeks from work just for the travel.

Satellite internet might be able to obviate this for some employees, but even novel smallsat-based approaches have bandwidth limitations and latency that is too high for useful video calls.

A transatlantic trip on the Queen Mary 2 is more carbon intensive than flying[0]. Absurdly, the only green way to get across the Atlantic at the moment is hitching a ride on a cargo ship.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2006/dec/20/cruises.green

The kind of fossil fuels used by modern ships still aren't great from a climate change perspective though, which is usually the motivation for not flying. Having said that I expect it'd still be better in terms of grams of CO2 per person!

If you're burning fossil fuels for travel anyway, burning bunker fuel is actually pretty good from a global warming point of view. Because it contains so much sulphur, which has a cooling effect, it contributes a little less to warming that the CO2 tonnage suggests. Compare this with flying where the warming effect is magnified by a factor of two or three, because the emissions happen high up in the atmosphere.

Of course acid rain is a concern, so the picture is more complex than my two sentence comment makes it seem.

Also for cargo ships, adding one person to the cargo load really adds very little to the margins. the ship was going to "sail" regardless of whether you were getting on or not.

Aren't margins the only thing that matters, per passenger? It's not free, after all.

Huh, that has piqued my curiosity. How do you go about finding and booking passage on cargo ships?

Wow, this would be so amazing. The supposed problem with sail is that it takes "too long" (what, 2-3 weeks NY to London?). But if you could work remotely that whole time, you haven't lost the time.

This would be such a beautiful future!

If you're worried about the environment, though, think of all the consumption and waste generated by people traveling at sea for two to three weeks.

Comparative reasoning seems valid here. It’s not like consumption and waste are zero for a person sitting at home for two to three weeks.

Exactly, these people are emitting CO2 24/7 regardless.

It takes like 3 weeks on average to make a one-way Atlantic transit by sail, only retired people / gap year / independently wealthy can swing that.

The above isn't suggesting that it remain that way, but instead become more available.

You can do it in less than a week but it's going to be a terrible uncomfortable and fast ride as you skim across the top of the Atlantic at 20-30kts.

As someone who has been sailing for 25 years since the age of 10, this sounds like an incredible way to travel.

You do have some measure of control as a conscientious traveller (apart from voting, obviously). Not (or rarely) flying is one part of the equation; using your money to support more sustainable travel alternatives is the other. In Europe a slow but gradual resurgence of sleeper trains is happening in part because a sizeable group of people is willing to use them (me included).

I would argue that doing this (i.e., increasing market demand for more sustainable modes of travel) helps pave the way for more structural solutions that require a lot of political will-power (such as taxing air travel much more heavily), where the availability of alternatives forms part of the decision making process.

I think you have some kind of strange internal experience to lead you to think that flying and travel is the cause of most of the world's social and cultural problems. Surely flying contributes a fair amount to greenhouse emissions.

I'm sure recreational flying is the cause of cultural oppression in China and the middle east, the cause of ISIS, of the rise of authoritarian regimes in eastern Europe and the US, etc.

And if you are going to try to tie that back to environmental, you'd have to make a big stretch on some of those issues.

I care a lot about the environment. I'm a Bernie hippie grew up in the middle of no where guy. But the plane is taking that trip with or without you. The world you want to see might not be there or look remotely like it did when you wanted to see it.

I'm all for helping the environment but continuing to fly and instead campaigning for a local/state/national politician who supports helping the environment by investing in renewable energy might actually accomplish something. The plane is taking off with or without you.

> But the plane is taking that trip with or without you.

Really? You think airlines will fly half-empty planes long term?

More like, 1/300 empty... (At least in a world where it's 2019).

I agree with grandparent poster, individual action won't save the planet, governments should increase CO2 taxes (extremely, if they're serious about saving the planet) and apply it to things like fossil fuels or meat. But then they'd get voted out of office, ah, God bless democracy! /s

Yes. Unless airlines fail the planes will continue to fly. They fly empty if no one if on them. Airlines have to continue to fly routes or risk giving up that route to another airline. We've seen that the government will prop up airlines.

Or just buy the commensurate offsetting carbon credits, just like Larry Page does for his 747, and you're good to go.

if that is weighing you down, there are people who live and travel around the world on sailboats.

I'm a digital nomad and amateur photographer. (coding pays for my glass)

making it as a professional photographer is super difficult in my experience. Its not enough to be a good photographer, you also need to have the right connections and negotiate situations on the fly. On top of that. there's a glut of people with talent so the competition is damn fierce. Plus glass is expensive af. I make due with the kit lens which was an extra $300. The one I plan to upgrade to costs a cool 1k

Don't let that dissuade you from pursuing a lifestyle as a digital nomad however! if you're a software engineer, its easier than ever.

also: plug for my photos > https://www.flickr.com/photos/193526747@N04/? > https://www.instagram.com/cultofmetatron/

I think you have to be a bit of a shameless self-promoter to be successful as a pro photographer too. And I don't mean shameless in a purely negative sense either - I think a lot of introverts like myself unjustifiably feel shame when selling themselves at all. The photographer in the article has a travel blog at travellikeanna.com and I simply can't imagine myself registering a domain name like that. What business do I have inspiring people to do something like me? And why would I want to share so much about me, personally?

But she's not only a talented photographer and writer, but she's built herself a confident yet approachable online brand, so if you were hiring someone to take photos of a far-flung place, she'd seem like an easy choice for the job.

There's also the endemic trend of tech shilling, not unique to but particularly endemic in photography due to its inherent consumer-oriented ecosystem. Many of the most popular online photography personalities are tech reviewers who happen to focus on cameras.

100% agree as a former 'pro' photographer. The market is totally saturated now, digital plays a part in that. Like you've mentioned, you've got to be brilliant and have qualities that extend far beyond your creative aspects. Ideally you have better than good business skills because being a bloody good photographer means more than selling your images, you need to sell yourself.

Kind of tangential, I had an idea for an app that brings together photographers and people who want their photos taken, for casual photo shoots. This could provide additional revenue for (travel) photographers.

I realize this plays further into the commoditization of photography, but that's happening regardless, so might as well make the best of it.

https://yunusabd.de/ideas/#3-casual-photo-shooting-app

I'm not a digital nomad (anchored by wife and three kids) but I branched out from web development into tourism photography/videography in the last few years. The period since COVID hit has probably been my most successful because I've been confined more around home where I have most connections to sell my content, rather than going overseas where I don't.

Web development had increasingly felt like a treadmill, but with added bonuses of decreasing budgets and growing competition. I love travelling, and the photography aspect has been great complement to that. Good excuse to get away from a desk as well.

So far this year I've been paid well to go on two $15k pp cruises, and paid to go on Australia's most famous train trip. My wife is a photographer and has joined me on two of these. I had a job for all of last week filming whales with a drone. If I don't have work lined up, I usually plan a trip camping with my kids and then sell the content afterwards to the state tourism authority, regional tourism authorities, local operators (accommodation, tours, etc), etc. I can't recall a trip in the last couple of years that hasn't paid for itself.

It's funny, but I realised at some point that I was doing things in this enterprise which are always pushed in the startup community - do things that don't scale, talk to your customers, etc. I don't do those things with my other side hustles, but I have done them with this and they've worked. Must be that they come naturally when you have a strong interest/passion for something.

This is so inspiring to read!! Congrats! I'm a hobbyist photographer. I don't want to go pro, but feel like I should be able to squeeze some (tangible) value out of this skillset.

You should go for it. I've really enjoyed diversifying where I earn my money. I have always been one of those people who have a million side hustles and used to castigate myself for never focusing. At some point I decided to just embrace it, do everything, and see what worked. A few things have: https://www.isaacforman.com.au/

I think my tips would be to think of what content people will buy. Lots of people near me focus on beaches or random public places which have limited commercial opportunities. One of my focal points has been wineries[1]. You can sell the content to the winery, to the local wine association, to tourism authorities, to wine trade, wine tours, and so on. And there are ways to do it where you come across like a helper rather than a salesperson. Then you persist until people are approaching you to commission shoots.

[1] https://serio.com.au/wineries/

> There is no freedom like living below your means.

I agree.

I've been theorizing of a tech-art switching point wrought by the deluge of information and content: as technologists must become more specialized (e.g. programming > machine_learning > deep_learning > specific_application > specific_model), artists/creatives must become more generalized (having to deal with marketing, self-promotion, logistics, etc).

This theory is barely graduated from a shower thought, so I'd invite any takes from people on either or both sides.

I think you’re looking at different groups of people here who are employed differently.

Developers who are working for companies may become more specialized, but what about start up founders? Don’t they have to deal with marketing, promotion, finance, etc.

I think you’re missing the group of artists that work in house at companies. For example, the company I work at has photographers who specialize in taking photographs of products for marketing or e-commerce purposes. There is a different team that handles video recording for events. I have seen examples on Reddit of people saying they work for a production company employed as a 3D videographer for niche adult products.

> I’ve been to 52 countries and lived in five—Australia, India, Thailand, England, and the U.S.

Do people really live in multiple countries easily? They immigrate and get citizenship over and over. Or does this just mean they're just staying on tourist visas for a long time?

There's no standard length of time to say you've "lived somewhere" so peoples' definitions vary. One blog post on the photographer's website says she studied abroad for a semester in England. If that's what she's referring to when she says she lived in England, some folks would say "you didn't live there, that was a temporary arrangement", and others would say "that was a much longer experience than just a week's vacation, that certainly counts as living there".

On the other hand I'm sure she didn't attain citizenship in 4 foreign countries, that's an extremely high bar just for someone to say they "live there".

ok yeah citizenship is a high bar.

i guess the phrase "live somewhere" is pretty useless, seems a lot of people have their own definition. personally i wouldn't call study abroad living. i went to school and dormed somewhere, idk if I would call that living there.

Don't need citizenship, and most long-term permanent residency type visas are fairly easy to get, at least for passport-holders from certain countries.

You don’t need citizenship to live somewhere. That usually takes 5 years or so of residence which I doubt fits into a “nomad” lifestyle.

tourist visas aren't usually that long though? i looked at austrailia, you need to apply and wait for a decision to stay longer than 3 months and only up to a year.

If she moves around a lot she could do 90 days of Australia, 90 days of Thailand, and then she might be ok again to stay in Australia. Or go somewhere else, e.g. Indonesia allows 30 days stay and it resets whenever you leave, people can just fly to Singapore and back every 30 days (although after a few times the authorities do ask to check that you're not working in the country without a work visa)

For the EU (I think Schengen, but don't quote me) you're allowed* to stay as a a tourist 90 days inside 180 days (so if you stayed for 30 days, and stayed away for 50 days, you're allowed to stay another 60 days the rest of the 100 days)

* For "first world" people who can come Visa free.

Japan also allows 90 days for first worlders...

Obviously this is all info which were valid as of 2019..

A family member (from the US) moved to Australia gradually - first on a tourist visa, which I believe he reset a couple of times by taking short trips to Thailand and Vietnam, then found a job that enabled him to get a temporary worker visa and I believe now a more permanent form of residency. It did seem like a stressful process though. And this was all pre-COVID, no idea if any of that is feasible at the moment.

The last line of the article -

>> There is no freedom like living below your means.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com