Hello everybody, and welcome to episode five. I've been there, Dean that.
I hope you guys enjoyed the last episode. I have been considering having guests on the podcast that I've traveled with, because there's quite a few.
I know, I've done quite a few alone.
It's probably like fifty to fifty fifty percent friends or family fifty percent solo. And even before having hand on last week, I had been reaching out to some friends, like my friends that I went to India with, or my brother who I've done a lot of cool trips with, or some of my other travel friends, whatever you might have,
and they're all down. So hopefully you guys like that format of having them on and sharing their experiences and their tips and tricks, because I do feel like if it's just me every single week, it'll get a little stale after a while. So I'm gonna sprinkle those in every once in a while and keep it going. But if you really don't like it. But if you really don't like it, just keep it to yourself, because I'm gonna keep doing it anyways.
No it don't keep it to yourself.
You can comment on Instagram and maybe let me know what you like what you don't like, but.
Yeah, let's get to it.
So this week I want to talk about not traveling per se, but I wanted to get into photography a little bit and talk about my journey with photography because while I don't necessarily think I'm a good photographer, it's something I really enjoy and it's something my lovely wife always compliments me on. So I figured I would share my journey from start to current and maybe discuss a little bit about where I want to go with it too. It's just so interesting because the age of social media
has changed things so much. There are there's such an overload of incredible photographers, video makers, content creators that do things that I.
Could only dream of doing.
And well, I might look like a talented photographer to someone, I feel like I'm the least talented photographer of anyone that I follow.
So it's just a weird thing.
And I think that kind of just goes back to like an inferiority complex that I always feel, where I just never feel like I'm gonna be good enough. But here we are, we're trying to figure out as we go.
Photography is something I really enjoy. It's something I got into specifically because I knew that I wanted to travel a lot, and I wanted to be able to take good quality photos or videos or whatever it might be on a trip to a place that you know, I knew I was going to want to take a lot of photos, like Machu Pichu, for instance, And.
That's where I started. I took a long.
Time for me to even learn how to work at camera, but I bought my first camera on my way down, I guess, right before I left for Patagoon.
Yeah, the first time.
If you go back to episode two and listen to that, that's the trip that I took my first camera on.
It was a thirty five hundred I.
Remember that because I bought it from Best Buy in Los Angeles. It was maybe like four hundred dollars for the camera body and the lens, and I thought that was gonna be good enough for me forever. But on the trip down there, on the flight, I was like learning how to use a camera via YouTube videos, and I'm so bad at learning that way, Like there is just so much information. It's like trying to learn Spanish or French or Mandarin from zero and then diving into it.
And they instantly start speaking that language that you're trying to learn. Because it just everything was going way over my head. I had no idea what they were talking about. And I think on that trip I just ended up shooting an auto the entire time. Anyways, But yeah, I was a D thirty five hundred and I just used the kit lens, which we'll get to it later about how I if I could go back, I would encourage
people to start differently than that. But I watched a bunch of YouTube videos got to Patagonia, and I'm so stubborn. All I wanted to do was shoot manual mode because that's what my photographer friends said I should be doing eventually, and so I was like, oh, I'll just do this now, be bad at it for a few days, and then I'll figure it out and be good at it.
And I just wasn't. I was really, really, really bad at it for a long time.
I think even on that entire trip, I probably used my camera I don't know, a dozen times over the course of two or three weeks. So I think all of this stuff that I, you know, ended up posting online or pictures that I showed my friends or whatever, it was were just taking on my on my iPhone, and I was really discouraged from that trip because, like I said, I wanted to pick it up and be pretty good at it right away, and it's just I
mean people. I'm sure people can do it and have done it before, but I was not one of those people. So I use that D thirty five hundred for a while. I think I eventually reached out to my photographer friend and I said, Hey, do you have any advice for me on what I could do? He said, get a
prime lens. So I jumped online and tried to figure out what a prime lens was really quick and for the and I'm going to try to explain some of this stuff, but I'm probably gonna be wrong on most of it, or you know, not entirely right on a lot of it. Prime lens is just a fixed focal length, so I think he told me to get a fifty millimeter the nifty.
To fifty they call it.
It's just a fixed focal length of fifty millimeters, and the benefit of it is the aperture can can open up a lot more so the aperture on a fifty on this specific fifty Milli lens was one point eight, which is typically what you'll find with these prime lens is the one point eight is really good aperture at
a pretty good price usually. And the nice thing about having that lower aperture or higher apperture, I guess I never really understand what to how to refer to it, but lower apperture just because the number is lower is how I'm going to refer to it here. The nice thing about that lower aperture is it gives you a lot better boca and boca for those that might not know what that is, is kind of like that background blur.
So if you're taking a photo of your subject, they're perfectly in focus, it looks all beautiful, and then the boka is how much the background blurs behind them. And I'm sure there's a better explanation as to what boka is and how it applies to photography and all that stuff, but that's my understanding of it. It's essentially the background blur.
It kind of reduces the plane that is focused within the focus area, and it just even just getting that camera and I don't even think I was shooting on manual at this point yet or I'm sorry even on getting that lens having not even been shooting on manual. If you can maybe set to like aperture priority mode, you can keep the aperture at one point eight or whatever you choose to keep it at one point, it's
wide open, so it gives you the best boka. It instantly makes your photography just look better in terms of like more professional but obviously not professional, but it just looks better when you have these kit lenses. I am so anti kit lens. Whenever anyone asks me, now that I have maybe a more general, better understanding of photography, I say, if you're gonna buy a camera, just buy the body and then buy your lens separate, because every kit lens more or less for a lot of these
cameras are going to be rubbish. It'll be like, I don't know, thirty to eighty millimeter and that's not right, but something like that like F four and a half to F six, and so with the aperture so high, you get basically noboka, and it just it's easy to get discouraged when you're taking when you're investing money into a product like that in order to up your photography game, and then it's not yielding the results that you want it to like if you use great photographers could use
a kit lens and get in fantastic photographs. But for the normal person like me, you spend all this money, buy a camera, buy a kit, get the kit lens with it, start using it, and then you start looking at the pictures and they look just as normal as your iPhone pictures. And in my case, it just discouraged me because in my head, I was like, well, I just spent four hundred dollars on this camera. Don't don't really notice much of a difference between this and my iPhone?
Why would I keep using this camera when my iPhone takes just as good as photos as much smaller, and I already have it with me no matter what. Anyway, So I had that D thirty five hundred for a while. What I ended up doing, what really made me go from very beginner, very new bish to at least semi adequate, was I would go on trips with my friends who are photographers or no photography well enough to be able
to explain things to me a little bit better. And so I went on a trip to I think it was Japan, was maybe the first trip that I went on with one of my buddies, Elliott, went on a trip with him. He's a talented photographer. He and I spent two weeks together just driving through Japan taking pictures. We were working for like A and A Airlines at the time, so I was like, come with me, I'll pay for everything, just kind of like help me get
shots and teach me photography along the way. So he was kind of like helping me understand the book, the apperture, the shutter speed, all that kind of stuff that at first I was so completely perplexed by. I had no actual understanding of what any of that stuff was. Like, I generally consider myself a pretty smart guy, but learning a new skill in your late twenties is it can be challenging. So he was doing his best to explain it to me like I was five years old, and that's kind of when.
It started to click for me.
And then I went on a trip to Egypt with my with my friend Elliott different Elliott though separate. Elliott, and he is a He's so talented. He is big on social media, travels all these amusing places and take some of the most beautiful photographs I've ever seen.
In my entire life.
I remember we were standing behind like this iron window and we were trying to shoot through it, and I had my little fifty millimeter on my D thirty five hundred crop sensor camera and he had this, you know, standard twenty four to seventy f two point eight lens on his nice full frame Sony A seven whatever it was. And I was like, why does your picture look so
much different than mine? He goes, Oh, I'm shooting at a different focal length than you are, And I was like, what the heck does that mean?
Different focal length?
And then so then on that trip, we spent about a week together there, and he was explaining everything else to me in terms of not everything else, but just kind of driving home a lot of the information that the other Elliott had taught me in Japan not too long before that, And that's really how I started to
understand it. Those YouTube videos are tough. It was hard for me to get like a baseline understanding of cameras and lenses and shutter speed and aperture and ISO and all that stuff until I was able to talk to my friends and kind of see them use it in the field. So if you are interested in getting into photography, definitely see if you can take that route and like
learn from someone rather than learn from the internet. I use YouTube for everything and anything from anything within home repair to DIY stuff to basic car stuff that I want to work on without having to take it to the mechanic or certain travel tips too.
When it comes to me, be like a drone or something like that.
But when it comes to photography at least I needed to learn a little more hands on. So then I upgraded maybe a few months. I probably had that D thirty five hundred for like two years, and Kaylin and I started dating, and we were going to Hawaii for my friend's wedding, and I decided to upgrade my body from a D thirty five hundred to a D fifty three hundred for no other reason than I thought the number was bigger, so the camera had to have been better,
and to be honest, it was. It was a significantly better body, but not a huge jump up.
It was a slight jump up.
And what I did with my old one was I gave it to Kaylan and I said, hey, you know, if photography is something you're interested in, here's this camera. Try to you know, have some fun with it and see what happens. And so for the longest time she was shooting on that D thirty five hundred, I was shooting on my D fifty three hundred. I'm looking at my lenses because I kept most of my SLR lenses and it's so funny to look at the collection between my old ones and my current ones, because I had
a few primes. I had like a one hundred and five millimeter prime, that fifty millimeter prime, the thirty five millimeter prime, which I ended up liking the most, and then like a fourteen to twenty four you know, four point five sigmal lens that I got for super cheap too. This was back before I wanted to really invest any money into it, because I wanted to make sure it was something that I enjoyed enough to sink a little
bit of money into it. So we shut on those two cameras for a while, and Kaylin is like, she's so talented and so creative, but she was still learning the basics of the camera as well, so she was kind of like leaning on me to teach her things. And it's kind of funny because I was always kind of like one lesson ahead of her, So if she asked me about something, even if I had just learned it like a week prior, I could at least share
that information with her. I do think she's kind of surpassed me now in her skill set and her ability, although there are certain things where maybe we like ask each other questions, and I guess I kind of understand the whole technical aspect of the cameras a little bit more.
But I got super lucky.
What happened was I wrote a blog post on my blog, Danebabies dot com about how much I loved my Nikon D fifty three hundred, what lenses I use the most, how I got into photography, what I like about photography, wrote that didn't even like reach out to Nikon, didn't ask for anything from them. They somehow got a hold of it and that little blog post it didn't get a lot of us, but enough they reached out and they were like, hey, we saw your blog post. We
love that you're a Nikon user. Would you like us to send you a mirrorless camera? Because they Nikon kind of came late to the game with mirrorless versus like Sony or Canon. The Sony was kind of the pioneer and the mirrorless camera world, and Nikon obviously knew that it could compete, so it started making some marless cameras. This is probably like four years ago, maybe a little more for yeah, I know, four years ago sounds about right.
So they reached out and they said, hey, we're coming out with this nice new mirrorless line, the Z six and Z seven.
Do you want one of them?
And I or in the Z fifth and so I said yes, absolutely, I would love that. They sent me a Z seven. They actually offered to send me the Z six and I said, again foolishly thinking since it was a higher number, the seven would be a better camera, and it probably is. I think the sensor is a little bit bigger, more megapixels, but the Z six is would have been a better option for me at the time.
And they also sent Kaln to Z fifty. So we both got these nice, fancied new mirrorless cameras from Nikon free of charge, just because we started kind of promoting it and telling people that's what we were using. As we got better, people started asking us questions about like which camera brand we use, So I guess it was kind of like they're a marketing a marketing angle from them.
So she got a Z fifty.
I got a Z seven, and it was the first time that I had used the what's probably widely considered the flagship lens in most cameras is the twenty four to seventy f two point eight. It covers a great range. You can go wide angle at twenty four and you can get real close with the seventy millimeter full push on zoom and two point eight. You know, it's not as good as like a prime one point eight, but it's still. In order for it to be a one point in all the way through, I think the lens would
have to be massive. I don't even know if that's a possibility, But so you lose a little bit of the bookuet, but you get a lot of a lot more range with it. You know, you can take one lens with you on a backpacking trip and get everything from the whole landscape to tight shots of your friends hiking or whatever it is. So they send us those cameras,
we start using them for a long time. After a while, I forget exactly how it happened, but I think I was just like pestering nikon, Hey, I love you guys so much. The Z seven is great. I just see you release the Z seven two. Would you guys mind sending me one of those? And I think after like enough pestering, they eventually were like, fine, fine, let's get this guy off or back. We'll send them a Z seven two. So they sent me the Z seven two.
I gave Kaylin my Z seven and so then we What was nice about that too, is the Z fifty is a crop sensor. Z seven is a full frame sensor, which doesn't make that big of a difference. Honestly, like you know, if you're just a hobbyist shooter kind of like I am, it doesn't really make that big of a difference. A crop sensor pushes in the focal length one and a half time, So if you have a fifty millimeter prime on a full frame it's really seventy five millimeters on a crop sensor camera.
Not that big of a deal.
If you want to get a wider shot, just get a wider lens, shorter focal length or shorter, yeah, shorter focal length. So then we were for the longest time shooting the Z seven and Z seven two and those were great cameras.
We beat them up.
We had a blast. I just recently actually have been dying to get this Nikon Z nine, which is like they're it's so it's so annoying with electronics because new electronics become obsolete in two years, you know. They're everything advances so fast and moves so quickly. They kept updating the software on the kind of like the first rollout of their mirrorless cameras, but it got to this point where the hardware wasn't strong enough to support the software
that they were coming out with. And so with the release of the Z nine and Kalen who just recently got a zf, it just it kind of changed a lot of things in like the terms of auto focus and video recording, and the Z nine I got I want to say I got that in like November, just before our trip to Tanzania. We went on this trip to Tanzania with that geo, and it's something I've always wanted.
The Z nine.
It was so expensive. It was like six thousand dollars just for the body, going from a four hundred dollars camera six years ago in the D thirty five hundred to a six thousand dollars camera.
Now it was tough. It was a tough pill to swallow.
I was able to sell my Z seven two and a couple of other lenses and things like that that I had bought throughout the years to eat into a fair amount of that price tag. But I'm really glad I did, because when we went to Tanzania, I felt like I had the best equipment available to me to get the shots that I wanted to get, and especially being there with that GEO, like, I wanted to make sure I was able and capable to do the things that they wanted me to do.
But that's where we're at. Now.
I've got a Z nine, Kalen's got a ZF. I also have a ZFC, which is like the crop sensor version of the ZF. It's not quite as nice, but it's significantly cheap. It was not significant, like half the price. But it's so interesting because now I know so much more about the components of a camera, how to how to like light a picture when it comes to shutter speed,
iso aperture and all that stuff. But there's still so much I don't know, and so now I feel like I've kind of reached a point where I've plateaued where I don't necessarily feel like I have to learn more because I know the basics well enough. But I'm always gonna be this like middling photographer because of that, because I don't have like this unsatiable urge to learn the
next thing, whatever it might be. But I still do travel with my friends who are a photographers, sometimes not as much as I used to, and not as much, not as like deliberately as I used to. I guess where I used to go on these trips just so I could learn from them. Now it's like, let's go on the trip as equals, I guess, rather than like me asking you a million questions. I still do ask a
lot of questions. I think asking questions is the number one best thing anyone can do for themselves whenever they're trying to learn a new skill. But it's gotten to the point now where I just like to travel and fail and learn from my own failures and see what works and what doesn't work. That's kind of my quick thirty thousand foot view of my camera journey. I do want to whenever anyone reaches out to me. I love nicon so much. I suggest getting like an entry level
mirrorless camera. The nice thing about mirrorless two is the viewfinder. The electronic viewfinder on the mirrorless camera shows you an image of what the picture is going to look like before before you even take it, whereas the old DSLRs you're just looking through a.
Piece of glass.
Send it a mirror that projects out through the lens, and so it's not electronic, which is a lot of people do like it. It's it's good because it more natural, more organic, I guess. But you don't see the picture
before you take it. You you have the frame of the picture, but you don't know how it's going to be lit, because you know, you change the shutter speed and aperture on your mirror list and it changes it to you on the display, so you know exactly what it's going to look like, whereas you probably have to take a couple of test shots with the DSLR see what it's going to look like and then kind of go from there. Well, I'm talking so fast and running myself out of breath here, So I do recommend always
two people to get a mirrorless camera to start. I think I think like the most inexpensive Nikon mirrorless cameras are, you know, somewhere in the five hundred to eight hundred dollars range, which is kind of close to where I started. Like I said, don't get the kit lens. I always advise people just buy a body, get a thirty five millimeter or fifty millimeter f one point eight lens. Learn how to frame photos with your feet rather than with the zoom ring. I think that's a big thing too.
I look back an old picture sometime, like when I went to China, and I'm like, these pictures are so much better than the pictures I take now.
I wonder why, and.
I think it really is because I was using solely prime lenses back then, and so I'd have to get
more creative with the shots. I'd have to move myself around instead of zooming in or zooming out, whereas now with all these you know, I've got a fourteen twenty four, twenty four to seventy seventy two hundred and then one eighty six hundred, so I could literally stand in one spot and get a million different angles of the same picture, whereas before you have to like really try to learn and focus and teach yourself how to frame a picture and what to do when you're kind of restricted by
the focal length of your lens. So do that Get an entry level camera body, get a thirty five millimeter one point eight lens. I bet you could probably get both those things for less than a thousand dollars. Sony's great at mirror list. They've been doing it for so long. Nikon is good, is good. I just I love Nikon's aesthetic. I think they're the prettiest looking cameras on the market, just the camera itself, which is such a silly thing to say. It's like, who cares what it looks like
as long as it takes good pictures. But I something about Canon just don't like the way the bodies look. They do take really good pictures, though. Fujifilm's really nice. Sony's are super nice. I do kind of advise people to get into Sony just because, like the you can use markets a lot better for Sony, so if you wanted to buy more affordably, you could go that route, whereas the Nikon marrorless market is like kind of newer, so there's not as much use stuff out there, which
is kind of a bummer sometimes. But yeah, that's that's my quick little podcast on my photography journey. I don't know where it's gonna go. Kalin really wants us to
sell prints. I don't think that we're talented enough of photographers to print and sell pictures that we take, but maybe one day, you know, we go to some interesting places and some of our shots are good, But then you go into a gallery and you see someone that's actually doing it as a career profession and you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm light years behind this person.
So that's kind of the beauty of it.
You're always going to improve, Like the best way you can improve is just getting out there and doing it. And sometimes I don't pick up my camera for a few months and I feel like I have lost touch with myself or I'm not as creatively free as I used to be.
It can be depressive.
Sometimes there are certain trips we go on where it's like a quote unquote work trip where we're getting paid for it, or it's a free exchange trip or whatever it is, and that can just really suck the fun out of it for me too, because it feels like I'm working. You know, like you don't want your hobbies to become your work. It's great when they do, and it's great when you can get paid for your hobbies, but when your hobbies become your work, then what are your hobbies?
You know?
I love woodworking and photography. If I got paid to be a woodworker or a photographer, then that wouldn't be my hobby anymore, be my occupation. And while I do love it, I just think that doing it for the fun of it is really the best part. It's kind of like the whole essence of it, in my opinion. So if there is ever money to be made from it, I love it, But it's it's a lot more it's a lot more fun and more enjoyable when you're just
out there shooting for the fun of it all. Like Brink used to say when he wrote for Team puppin Sutt's, he's a soul skater, and I think soul skating is the best thing to do.
Just do it for the fun of it.
Do it for the love of it, see where it takes you. It's just it's also so interesting to see, you know. Like when my friends compliment me on photography, I'm like, are you sure we're looking at the same picture, because there's so many things that are wrong with this, but I appreciate the compliment. Nonetheless, I just feel like
I've got imposter syndrome with it. So the big thing about photography too, is in today's landscape, at least with social media being how it is, so much of what makes like it's like fifty percent photography fifty percent post processing. Like you could be a great photographer but a horrible photo editor, and your photos are going to just look kind of normal compared to everyone else's. That's like maybe
a worse photographer, but way better at editing photos. That's one thing on my trip to an art we did kind of focus a little bit of our time with like the editing process and finding out your own style, going with like a theme, whatever it is, applying masks, all that important stuff that did make a big difference. It's you can learn as much as you can on the photography side, but until you learn how to process and edit these photos, I feel like I'm.
Always going to be a step behind. So keep that in mind as well.
I use like your classic It's a great, great program, but I still have so much more to learn on that too. I do want to sit down and listen to some YouTube and watch some YouTube videos about like how to improve that. I know how to work everything, but I just don't know how to cohesively bond it all together to make the product that I at least envision my head. I get so many things, so I go so many places where I'm like expecting an image
to look a certain way. Take the picture, edit it, and it doesn't look anything like I thought it was going to luck and it can be a little depleting sometimes, So keep that in mind. If you're gonna focus on photography, get the right lens, get a camera body you're happy with, and you have fun using. And then understand too that it's going to take an equal amount of work on the other side of it too, with editing it to make it look like you want it to look like.
It's an ongoing thing for me. I'm going to keep working at it.
I hope you guys are, if you're interested, could use this as a catalyst to give it, give it a shot, because like I said, it's opened a lot of doors for me.
It's been a lot of fun.
I love when people ask me to take photos for them or of them. It makes me feel like I have a purpose. It just makes me feel like that they like the things that I take pictures of.
So it's a nice you know.
It's just a nice little little hobby to have in your back pocket. But yeah, what else do I have to say? I could talk about drones, but we're already kind of at capacity for this podcast. So thank you guys so much for listening to this week's episode have Been There Dean That next week, I think I'm gonna
have some friends come on. So, like I said, if you're interested in hearing more from the friends or my brother or I guess we haven't heard from them yet, But if you're interested in me having guests on to share their experiences with our traveling that we've done together, please drop a comment on our Instagram page.
That means a lot to me.
So thank you guys for tuning in for this week's episode of Been There Dean That be sure to tune in next week, where maybe we suck just a little bit less