You're listening to the Nick Amp podcast, a podcast that dives into the lives and stories of creatives, entrepreneurs, and outdoor enthusiasts. My name is Nick Amp and I'm a filmmaker and photographer best known for documenting stories in the mountains. We sit down with guests to uncover where they get inspiration from, dig into their experiences in the outdoor industry, and find a ton of actionable inspiration from their adventures in life. Welcome to episode 15 on the Nick Amp podcast.
Lorelei is in the house today. What's up? I'm bringing her out of retirement again. She's the best co-host I have. And today we're going to get into something a little bit different. It still follows along what we are doing here and we're going to dive into more about how to be authentic, what it is, why it's important, who does it, and why you shouldn't be conforming to popular things and to explain why it's important. Okay? Simplest forms.
When you're authentic to who you are, you attract the people that you want to be around. And when you're not authentic to who you are, you're going to be around people who are with you as a friend, spouse, whatever, that like you for the fake you. What are your thoughts on this Lorelai? Well, honestly, like, it's just more energy to be the non-authentic self. I mean, the point of authenticity is like being natural, being the person that you are.
And that's not to say you don't work on things that you do and stuff like that, but it's more natural for you to just be who you are and learning to also love yourself for who you are.
And that way you get people who are more like-minded as you and you can just have better connections with those people as in, like versus when you are fake or putting up a facade or someone who you wish you could be or something like that, that it's- you attract people who aren't necessarily your number one supporters, then they're not necessarily the people you're going to be getting along with either because they don't necessarily know who you are.
So to get right down into it, what does authenticity mean in photography and filmmaking? Lorelai, you're not a photographer or filmmaker, but you do read books, so you do appreciate what art is. So you can give us an explanation from that aspect and I'm going to bring in the aspect- I'm going to bring in the perspective from being a photographer and filmmaker. I'm an outdoor photographer and filmmaker.
If any of you don't know that, I go in the outdoors, go to the mountains, and that's where I like to be the most to capture the beauty of the nature. So just to get right into it, I think being authentic in photography and filmmaking is creating the work that you want to create. And a lot of people say art is just a medium of how you express yourself. I express myself through photography and video. For example, I love the mountains.
I might create a pretty video telling a story about why the mountains are beautiful. Lorelai reads books. Can you share your perspective of people you read? Yeah, I mean, the books that I find that I enjoy the most are the ones that have characters that you can connect to when they make the characters real. And I think a lot of authors are able to do that when they have some sort of experience too with that kind of stuff. And it's like they make characters that are not superheroes.
They have flaws. They're human, and that's what makes you connect with them. And I think that's making human characters that's an authentic way. And I mean, even with stuff like music too, as an art, when an artist makes a song and you know that they're singing it with their heart, that's really authentic because it's something that they experienced in life or something that they feel and they're pouring that into a song. And that is super authentic to that artist.
And those are the most enjoyable pieces. So another example, editing. There's a whole filming side. There's the planning side to be your authentic self, tell that story. But editing could be anything. It's editing a video, editing photos, editing a book. Editing helps you show a different creative style of what you're doing, whether it's making the colors look different. So maybe an authentic thing to me is I like the colors green and orange. And those are the colors I put in my video.
Those are the tones I use in my photos. And another thing would be editing would be editing the pace of my video. Maybe I make fast cuts. So in a book, I suggest I'm just going to pull at this. I don't read a lot, but maybe they edit their book to be a way it moves fast. One thing you can tell by how the scenes switch so fast is that it sounds accurate to how what you read, like the way they edit the book. I guess the editing the book kind of just more goes into grammar and stuff.
But when they're creating the book, it could be like, is it more action-filled or is it a slow burn or things like that that are attractive to different readers? And also genre too, the different genres also. Some authors stick to just romance and other authors stick to just fantasy and stuff like that. Some of them can go into different genres, but most of the time they stick to one because that's what they love to write and it's what they're good at. Right.
So being authentic, it can help you build a stronger personal brand and actually be more successful in whatever career you do. Whether you're in marketing, you're a photographer, you're a book writer, music, musician, because you just mentioned sometimes you just stay in romance, sometimes they just stay in comedy. For me, I'm in the outdoor industry and I can even get more narrow as a niche.
I'm an outdoor filmmaker who likes to make an impact by telling people why we should protect the giant sequoias, why we should protect the trails in the back country to make sure we protect all those. It's a very specific niche. Having a specific niche helps create a personal brand so people always know you for that thing. And you might say, well, I don't want to be put in a box. That's absolutely not true. Being able to narrow down that much helps you stand out from the crowd.
Like for Enveraille McClary, I had him on the podcast, we had a podcast about the Tahoe Bears, the late Tahoe Black Bears, why it's a problem over there. There's not more niche than you can get in that. That town doesn't have that many people there. You have the yellow tourists, but now he's known for that video. J.K. Rowling, the book writer, known for creating fantasy Harry Potter books. In all her stories, we'll be able to create that imagination for you.
So don't be afraid to narrow down your niche and really dig deep into what kind of story you want to tell. Yeah. It's important to make sure that that niche that you're creating is something that you love. Otherwise, like you're going to be doing it and then it's going to start becoming difficult for you to stick with. And you're going to want to change your mind, but then you change your mind and it can be difficult sometimes to do that.
Sometimes you can't do it, but it's hard sometimes when you change. If you're building a brand or something, all of a sudden you change, your audience is like, whoa, what the heck? Where'd this guy go? What's happening to him? You know? So you want to make sure when it goes back to authenticity, it's something who you are and something that you love. And you're able to put your heart and soul into it so that you can continuously doing it and not get tired of it. 100% agree.
When I compare us to watching a TV show, you know when the TV show gets to like season eight or something like that, then I start changing it up and you're like, I don't really like this anymore because it's not really what I started watching this for. And part of the reason they ran out of ideas, maybe that's not when they wanted to go with the show anymore, they wanted to change directions.
All perfectly okay to change directions, but just know when you change directions, you're going to lose some followers, some people who appreciate your art because they followed you for your past art. And I want to talk about social media and maybe you're creating a TV show, you're writing a book, you're starting a business and most businesses have to use social media these days so when you change directions, it makes them less engaged with what you're doing.
Yeah, I mean, you definitely have the chance to lose followers, but you also have the chance to gain them as well when you change like that. You'll start getting different people who are into those things as well. It's just a matter of how's word going to spread. If you're losing people, how's word going to spread to the new people to get them that would like it? It'll just take a little bit longer to get there. So before you start, make sure you have a clear idea of what you want to do.
A little bit of a backtrack, start first, don't wait to start, start, but also outline what you want to do, most always you want to tell. And I'm not saying it's easy. I'm like the Kingo, changing and not being authentic to myself, but I've always tried really hard to be authentic to myself. That's not something that I've been scared to do. Sometimes it has been because I knew I was afraid that I would lose followers.
Like I'll tell you, I started out as an outdoor landscape photographer, then I started, I moved over to landscape photography tips. Then I moved to travel photographer slash giving tips about traveling. Then I started giving tips about road tripping. Then all of a sudden I noticed that like raw videos are doing really good. Like iPhone videos that are like very poorly edited.
And me, the supposed professional photographer and videographer is over here trying to make poor videos because I thought that that's what was going to perform on social media. How dumb does that sound, right? But you know what? It's hard. If you're going through that right now, I completely understand. Sometimes it can be hard to break away from what you really want to do. Then it took me over two years to finally get close to my voice.
June of 2022, I finally realized, wait a second, I love coming out here to the outdoors because I love being able to capture these memories, remember and look back on them and tell stories. Before that, I was just trying to inform on social media and create content for social media. It's hard finding your voice, but it'll probably never stop finding your voice. But you got to be honest with yourself. Yeah. I mean, it's not to say like you can't grow or you can't change either.
Like as a person, you're constantly, especially like in like your twenties and like changing from a teenager to an adult and then like starting your life and stuff, like everything's changing around you. So you have to change too. You're growing as a person and you're learning. A lot of times your interests and who you are changes and that's perfectly fine. It just comes down to learning yourself and knowing who you are.
So you got to get to know yourself first before you can do anything, I guess. So yeah, we're at that stage in our life where twenties, your life changes a lot. A few years ago, I felt like I was just a kid and I was 20 years old and 23 now and I felt like I have a whole life's experience now just in these three years. And I understand it can be challenging when we're a world where social media, it rewards conformity, posting trending videos, trending audios, just posting the same ideas.
I mean, that's not authentic to who you are. Yeah, I get it. If you're building up brand and you're trying to build a following and things like that. But still, if you're creative, just anyone who's trying to build a business, find your voice. Highly recommend, strongly urge you to not partake in what's trending. I understand it's fine if it's a fun trending video, but if you want to find your voice for real, create original work. And original work doesn't mean a whole new different thing.
Maybe it's just a little bit different than something else you find inspiration from. Maybe you saw someone create a documentary on black bears. Okay. I might make a documentary on how black bears are endangered in Oregon. Okay. That's a little bit different, different location. Maybe I might make a video about taking a photo at Yosemite, most photographed place in the world. Probably one of the top ones. I'm at Tunnel View. I documented myself going. I've been there 10 times.
This is an example for me, but I've never seen it with low clouds. Okay. That's an original story to me. Therefore, it's original work. See how it's just a little bit different? People talk about Yosemite all the time when they go there, but it's original to me. The fourth original to everyone else. Yeah. That's how photography is an art for you. It's an art in general, but for you and anyone, you're putting in there how you saw it.
That's your personal mind and you're putting a little twist on it because that's how you saw it and that's how you want to convey it to other people. This is how I saw it. I hope you can see the beauty in it as well. Sorry about that. I had to restart the camera because one of the cameras stopped recording at 20 minutes.
To move on, common obstacles being not to take on social media, your fear of being rejected by getting low views, being criticized by your followers by changing the directions, meeting client expectations. That's actually a big one. Maybe you're working with a client, has a business owner, photographer, and they want you to create work in a certain creative way. That's not really your authentic voice. How do you go about that? Well, one, take the paycheck and move on.
If that's a big one and you just want to get paid, but if it hurts to your stomach and you want to convey your authentic voice in the work you're creating, even when you're working for brands, you can communicate that to them. Maybe they tell you no because they want to end their voice. So that's something that you can barter with. There's nothing, there's no rules that you can't negotiate.
What types of videos you do for these brands, you can find a heavy medium, possibly, just depends on who you work with, but you don't get what you don't ask for. Yeah, typically people are, when they're looking for someone to do videos or photography for them, they look over their style. Is that the style you like? Or do you like a different style?
My mom, whenever she wants to do family photos, she's super into candid photos and loves when photographers take photos of our family, just when we're not paying attention. She always looks for photographers who are good in a candid style. That's just something that you will find people who like the style that you do. Your style is unique to you and you will find people who like it. It's like the kind of people you want to attract to you.
Break out of those old habits if those are the ones that you don't want to do. Create work that you want to get hired for. So I'm going to share with some practical tips that I've used myself to be more authentic to myself. Starting out, I make it a point to create work that I am passionate about, regardless of how it's going to do on social media, good or bad. I'm the type of person, if I'm not passionate about it, I don't want to do it.
Lorelai has known that about me since we first started dating back in 2020. I just, something in me, I just can't do it if I'm not passionate about it. It burns me right here inside the chest. For those of you who are not watching on YouTube, I'm tapping my chest right now. But I pick work that I'm passionate about and that I want to do. So you say, Nick, how do you do that? Okay, let's take it a step further.
Experiment with your video styles, your photo styles, the books you write, the music you write, the business that you're doing. For me, I make, I've made fun short stories, okay, and they weren't necessarily related to my niche as much. Yeah, I was in the outdoors, but it was more focused on the story itself. There was one where Lorelai picked up some snow, we're walking out by the lake and it shows I'm her friend of her and she's being mischievous.
I'm going to throw snow on my back when I'm not paying attention, okay? And then I realize, oh, hi girlfriend threw snow on me. So I chased after her, pick her up and ended the story, right? Just so the typical story of a relationship playing around. And that's not necessarily telling stories about mountains and things like that, but it's really helped me experiment to find how to even use my voice.
Because some of you might be listening, like, I don't even, maybe I have a voice, but maybe I don't know how to effectively communicate. That just comes with practice and experimentation. Lorelai, do you have any thoughts on this? Well, it's just, again, like I said earlier, you know, just learning yourself and learning what you like, like finding the enjoyment in things. Because you don't know if you're going to like it until you try it.
I mean, that's what my parents always told me when I had to eat food that looked weird. You don't know until you try it. So and that goes with any experience, you know, like videos that you're creating or just things that you like to do. If you don't, if you don't know, just keep trying and you'll find something that you enjoy. And we had a lot of fun making those short stories. I mean, yeah, they were pretty fun. That tells you how much, if you have fun doing it, that's a good sign.
Yeah. So make work that you also have fun doing, just like she said, make work that you love. Do something that you want to do forever. Other example, I edit photos. I've edited photos 10 different ways. You can ask Lorelai this. I'll send her a photo 10 times in a row and it'll look completely different. I'm like Lorelai, how's this one look? Or they'll look exactly the same. Yeah, yeah, she does look the same.
But another thing I've been doing this last 2023, I've been trying to connect with more creators who are more in tune with their authentic self and they create work that they're passionate about too, because they, one, they inspire me to stand apart from the crowd, which is not something that I've ever been afraid of doing, but they just inspire me to do it more in a creative way. Two, I can pull inspiration from them, okay, they did an idea about taking photos of an astronaut.
Okay, okay, maybe I can do something like that included in my stories. I talk with them and collaborate with them and I ask them straight up, what's your thought process behind this video? I just want to see their thought process because maybe their thought process is different from mine. Maybe I had no idea about certain topics in photography, like they use an external grain on top of their photos to make their photos look vintage.
Yeah, you can use the in-camera lightroom ones, but maybe they use a painting overlay grain to give their photo just that personal feel. Maybe they brought props to their photo session and their video that they're making, and I didn't even think about using that thing like a lamp. I didn't think about that. So talk with other creatives, be collaborative. You can DM them if they don't respond. That's okay, move on to the next one.
My main thing is focusing on creating relationships with others because collaborating is going to be the best way to find your own voice because you're sharing perspectives. Yeah, if you like what you see, why not go after it? Why not do something similar? If you like it, then if you like seeing it, then you might like doing it too.
So Lorelei, not being a photographer or video person, I still show a lot of people who inspire me because I know that even though she's not in one of those, she will appreciate the body of art they create because they're just using their own voice and telling their own stories. One for example is Art Truro. He's based out of Texas. He's took photos of astronauts with flowers out in Texas. I don't know, it looked like you were on Mars, but with flowers, it created a certain type of feel.
Like he's been there for a while. Maybe he was dead. I don't even remember, but he was dead and the flowers are growing out of his suit. He's a very good photographer and he creates cinematic photo sets. So imagine if you see a movie. Let's think of a movie. Okay, let's think of the Batman. Christian Bale one, okay. We're in the Joker scene. He's in the room. They're interviewing him, right? The Batman's interviewing the Joker. All the props there, Arturo does that for photos.
So he takes like movie stills. I think it's super cool and he creates that work and he writes captions that are engaging and he's not afraid to show what he really wants to create. Another guy, Jondra. Two brothers. I don't know where they're from. They're not from the United States, but they're two brothers and they show adventure, fun vibes hanging out. Lorelai, I know, I couldn't tell how many times have I showed you them. A ton of times. They're really cool though.
I like watching their videos. They're always fun to watch. They kind of make you feel like you're there with them. It's just such a fun like vibe that they have. Another one is Shy Guy. Shy Guy, he is super cool. He also just creates visually appealing stories. I just showed Lorelai before we started this, the video he made.
He was in the elevator going up and the whole story was just about how he was waiting for it, putting music in, he was just immersed in the moment and his text said, your life, do what you want with it. And the thing about that is though, the reason why it was so special, it sounds simple, right? You guys who were listening might say, that was the basic story. But he was able to use his own voice to make you feel like you were there. That's where the powerful part came in.
Yeah, a 15 second video made you feel something. And those are some of the best creators is when they can make such a short film and something with simple movements, but you feel so much from it. I literally watched the whole thing two times and I was like, Lorelai, this is not even that hard to set up. But the art of his simplicity was, that's amazing. So I encourage you, the listeners, to find your own inspiration, whether it's me or it's other people.
And people that inspire you to make creative work, to be authentic to who you are and keep on doing it and don't stop creating your own work because you're not going to get better and find your own voice until you create your own work.
So outline what you want to talk about, whether you're starting your social media, starting a business, because it'll be easier in the long run to build your own personal brand because you're already authentic to who you are and you're able to find career success quicker, because people know you're not changing up. Remember, it's like watching a TV show. I also encourage you to reflect on who you are as a person. Wow, Nick, deep question, Nick. We're always thinking about who we are.
I don't know who I am. You're always going to be figuring it out. Okay. I know the story. Or like I said, we're always changing. So it's okay to change. It's okay to grow. So maybe in 2020, I like talking about landscape photography and the art of that. 2023, I like telling stories that are more impactful into people's lives. Maybe I might make them think differently and I might get them to understand other people's perspectives just by me telling a story or making them feel a certain way.
Maybe in five years from now, it might even be something different. Who knows? So I just really want to thank you for listening and encourage you to go follow us on social media. My personal account is then the Nick Gamp on all platforms or Eli is Lolo in the mountains. The podcast, we got a YouTube channel. If you guys want to watch us and see my pretty face, we're Nick Gamp podcast on YouTube and we're on all platforms for podcasts, Spotify, Apple music.
We're on all platforms for podcasting, Apple music, Spotify, Google play, all of those and subscribe. Leave a review, tell me what you think about the video. DM me on Instagram, DM Lorelai. Lorelai, any closing thoughts? And just figure out what you like and keep doing it. All right. I'll talk to you guys next week.