The Travel Photographer: Why We vDo What We Do (Someone has to do it)

Good Lord! Has it really been 49 years, 6 months, 9 days, 3 hours and 12 seconds, since I started my travel photographer career off with a bang selling a black and white print of a bison in Yellowstone National Park to Natural History Magazine?

I was 14 at the time. I had been a photographer-in-training since age 8, when I discovered the magic of developing and printing my own negatives of a pony named “Charlie” that loved to shatter my daydreams of being an old-time range cowboy by dumping me in the dust, and heading for the hills (visible across the loess hills in Eastern Oregon, oh, 30 miles away). When he did cooperate, it was glorious. I used my pony to explore ramshackle homesteader cabins, where I loved spending my precious film budget on “artistic compositions” of what was then junk, and now, antiques.

Selling that first photo was a fluke. I read somewhere that magazines needed photos, so I sent one. Two weeks later, I got a check. Simple as that.

It took a few more years collecting rejection slips before I was able sell my first article —photos and words by— and sixteen years of trying to reach my boyhood goal of selling seven pages (also as a photographer/writer) to LIFE magazine.

Doing that took a stint in the U.S. Air Force as a photographer in London (packing a Speed Graphic), which gave me a chance to go to the prestigious Ealing Polytechnic. Here I was able to cover up my self-taught photo schooling (primarily from magazines, not to dissimilar from what I am attempting here) with the practical knowledge of using an air shutter (no speed settings) to expose glass plates in a view camera, that were large enough to be retouched by making endless figure 8’s with a lead pencil.

What a distance I have come in photography. As a contributing photographer to San Francisco Magazine (and freelancing the Sunday roto sections) in the 1960s, I acquired a name for natural light coverage of restaurants by leaving my 4x5 view camera (and accompanying flood lights) behind. Loading my rangefinder Lieca with a hand rolled recording film so hot it had to be loaded inside a black-bag with sleeves, I was able to reach ASA 2000! What a far cry that was from Super XX in 1954, of ASA 64.

In the late 60’s I remember visiting with a friend, who happened to teach graphic arts, that asked for a little help setting up a darkroom for ‘clip file’ purposes. I could afford to be benevolent to the photographically challenged in that I had just sold a full article (again photos/words by) to HOLIDAY. Less than a year later, ignoring all that boring technical stuff because he bought —gasp— an automatic exposure camera and shot Kodachrome, he came out with the first of many very successful coffe table books.

The 1970s saw me playing around with two Kodak carousel projectors connected by a homemade dissolve control. This, because I was convinced that the future of the professional freelance travel photographer lay in providing live entertainment with a multimedia lecture circuit. It was fun being a “personality,” and I did snag a “show date” on a cruise ship transitting the Panama Canal from New York, to San Diego. That was fun.

I also remember the day, in the mid-1980s when I saw computer justification of type output on a laser printer. Photographers (given our curious mix of technical and artistic) were the first, I think, to understand the importance of the computer having a graphic interface. Of course I bought one of the first MacIntoshes in 1984. I used it to pioneer a database for cataloging slides. If someone had told me then that it would be possible —one day— to put a “thumbnail” representing said slide, I would have thought them totally daft.

Imagine then the surprise in the 90s when publishing my own magazine (Economic Currents)

then I decided to pioneer electronic pre-press. I used my “editor speaks column” to apologize for the experiment of outputting scanned halftones from Photoshop 2.1, direct to lith negs. I fully expected the quality to suffer. Instead, the square pixels left the round dots in the dust, and I was off to other adventures, as developing that early database into a full-service digital library as www.travelstockphotos.com.

It wasn’t until last summer, while waiting, and wondering, and waiting, beside a wilderness river, for an Alaskan bush pilot to come and pick me up (when all aviation was grounded due to the 9/11 disaster) that it really came to me. My life really had come full circle. My “pony” had dumped me in the middle of nowhere, again, but I still had room on my flash card to spend my time, clicking away at a curious caribou that wondered what in the world I was doing, sitting on a sand bar, staring at my belly button.

Was I really in this field for the adventure? After all I have traveled by horse pack train, kayak, buckboard wagon, dog sled, dugout canoe, river raft, ocean sailing yachts, four-wheel drive jeep, 18-wheeler, cargo ship, bush plane, smokejumper transport, helicopter, tugboat, fishing boat, and luxury cruise liner. Or was it the thrill of taking my hard earned $3.99 brownie Hawkeye, photographing my pony, or a grizzly close enough to smell his BO, or ‘topless’ Choco Indian maiden of Darien Province of Panama?

The truth was, that one needs the other. The full circle of my life is that the pony was used (YI Yi Yi —for the adventure) to travel to interesting places to photograph. Put it another way — my creative spirit is best kept alive and vital by adventuring to far away places, with strange sounding names, that inspire me to life my camera to record, or interpret, the scene.

How does this lead to publishing a magazine about my two passions? Add a third element. I have been married, three times, to women who seemed to feel that the travel arrangements were more important, than the assignment.

Enter Dianne, Roberta, Lisa, Elizabeth, Brunhilda (the same person, different personalities) otherwise know as Bobby Murray. Our first date was driving about photographing the fall colors of the Mt. St. Helens area of Washington State I would hand her a lens to hold for a moment, and she would want to know what a 90 MM was used for. Finally, to shut her up, I loaded a spare body, snapped a zoom in place, and said; try to photograph your feelings.

Wow! Inside of a year we were having trouble separating who took which, and what. To simplify matters, both of us have been signing our work as “Murray.” This way, I can take credit for her best stuff — as the cover of this magazine, while at the same time ducking the less than wonderful as the work of someone, “still learning” The joke there is, after 50 years, I am still learning. Thank God!

Bobby took the lead into the wonderful world of digital. A couple of years ago I took her along on a catalog shoot for

a rock crusher manufacturer (hey… they paid great), and suggested she might learn something by “playing” with our newly acquired digital camera. I was curious to see what an apple to apples test would show. The surprise was that the mid-tones where far better than the film duplicates, and due to the phenomenon of “short-lenses-being-longer,” the depth of field lead us to using the digital duplicates, in a print brochure.

I also have realized that sharing the excitement of adventure travel+photography with Bobby has truly been an exciting time that has kept me fresh, interested, excited in what I see (and hope I capture in my camera). It is our hope that in sharing the adventure with others, and opening these pages to contributions from photographers excited by what is possible, that I can continue on, and on, and on as a self-proclaimed “elder of the wondering tribe.”

Thanks to Bobby’s attitude, I do this sharing with what I used to call “competition” in the realization that today, more than ever, there is a real need for good travel photographs. We are using this web site and sister puplications as www.MotorHomeTraveler.com, as a laboratory of what the media should be (read will be) all about. The freelance photographers dream; a place where the concept of PHOTOjournalism is fulfilled.

The appetite for photo graphics on the web is developing to unheard of levels. It is hard and dangerous work feeding this creative monster. It also takes a lot of traveling. But someone has to do it. How about you?