I’m sharing a wrap-up like this at the end of each month to help with accountability and discipline. The basic format: an inventory of how I spent the last month with regard to nature photography and our photo business, a casual discussion about the things that are on my mind, and a few non-photography recommendations at the end.
NEW PHOTOS AND OTHER THINGS:
Composition webinar: On December 14, I will be teaching Composition and Visual Design for Nature Photographers for the Lehigh Valley Photography Club. I am fully revising this presentation so even if you have seen me talk about composition before, I hope you will get something new out of this talk. It is $10 and you can register here.
Webinar with Ian Plant: I will be joining Ian Plant to talk about the benefits and challenges of trying new types of photography (specifically wildlife photography for me). We will both be sharing some of our recent photographs and talking shop. It should be fun! There is no cost to watch this webinar but you need to register in advance.
Wild Women in Photography: Over the last year, I have become friends with Brie Stockwell and was happy when she invited me on her new podcast, Wild Women in Photography. You can listen to my episode, and all of the others, here. When I got started in nature photography, it took me a year or two to meet even one other woman photographer. Years later, it is exciting that Brie has so many talented women to choose from for these conversations. Especially for women just starting out, being able to listen to these conversations might help the field feel more welcoming than it did for me. It is also a reality that women have different experiences as nature photographers and I am glad that Brie has created a space for women to talk about these things.
Autumn in Colorado: I have processed most of my photos from autumn in Colorado but I am not ready to share the full set quite yet. A few of my favorites are sprinkled into this blog post.
The first snow of the year coats a small sub-range of Colorado’s San Juan Mountains (2023).
November 2023 Review
FALL COLORS IN ZION NATIONAL PARK: November feels like it was two months crammed into one month, which is actually okay with me because I feel happier when I am busy. The month started with us camping in Zion National Park. We enjoyed a lot of campfire time and photo time with a nice mix of photography friends. Anna Morgan joined me for about a week and we had a wonderful time together. Our photographic interests are in alignment and we have similar levels of photo stamina. I generally have a hard time photographing with other people around since I naturally tend toward socializing but Anna and I were able to find a good rhythm that balanced both.
After Anna headed home, Ron and I left for a three-day backpacking trip through the west side of Zion NP. Our friend Taylor dropped us off at Lava Point and a few days later we entered the main canyon near Angel’s Landing. While at camp one afternoon, we realized that we hiked this same route exactly ten years ago and this realization offered the opportunity for some reflection on why we keep returning to this park. Since 2011, we have photographed fall colors in Zion every year (except for 2015) and I feel like it is still a fresh, creatively exciting experience, although I did feel like I was repeating myself at times this year (see below). This blog post from Michael Frye does a good job of summarizing the same reasons I enjoy revisiting familiar places. Each year is different, both in terms of the landscape and how I experience it.
When our campground reservation ended, I tried to convince Ron that we should stay for another week or go to Death Valley. He was ready to get home and once we pulled into the driveway, I realized that I was ready to be home as well. When we sketched out our autumn plans for 2023, our goal was to fit in as much fall colors photography as possible. We would start in Alaska and possibly end in Death Valley (Death Valley has quite a few deciduous trees if you know where to look), with stops in Colorado and Utah in between. In Zion, we both reached a point of creative exhaustion and realized that if we want to extend our autumn season in this way in the future, we need to build in some real breaks to catch up and rest. Since Ron has a mentally taxing full-time job, it is especially hard for him to maintain this photography pace for an extended period of time without a chance to pause.
Corn lilies are beautiful in both life and death. Here, a light coat of frost covers the brown leaves of the corn lilies, plus a few scattered aspen leaves and grasses. Colorado, 2023.
BETTER ALIGNING MY FIELD PRACTICES AND EDITING PROCESS: My photo backlog issues continue to bother me and our time in Zion NP highlights one of the main reasons why: because I have worked through so few of my photographs, I often do not know whether or not I am repeating myself when I am out in the field in a familiar place. It also feels both ridiculous and embarrassing to say that I have photographed in Zion for so many years in a row yet I only have a mediocre collection of finished photos to show for all that time. Over the last few months, I have come to the realization that my field work (very prolific) does not match my culling and processing approach (deliberate and slow). While in Zion, I deliberately avoided subjects I had photographed before in favor of trying fresh ideas and I also reigned in my photo-taking a bit. A bit of progress.
Going into 2024: I need to better align my field process with my processing and sharing. Meeting in the middle seems like a reasonable way forward: be slightly more selective when photographing in the field, commit to more quickly culling and rating photos after a trip so I have a better sense of which files have the potential to be processed, and then more quickly process and share a tight selection of my favorite photos. Even if I cannot be as thorough as I would want to be in an ideal world, I might actually have a chance at working through this morass I have created for myself. (Foreshadowing: And for those massive folders from my favorite places… Why not turn those into zines or book projects?)
If you have any recommendations for how I could get these two parts of the photographic process into better alignment, please share.
This forest was full of so many singing birds. They provided a lovely backdrop for photographing this mix of grass tufts and ponderosa pine needles. Colorado, 2023.
BUSINESS MINDSET: On the positive side, I am really enjoying the business aspect of our photography business for the first time. We started selling our first ebook in 2013 (Forever Light: The Landscape Photographer’s Guide To Iceland… nature photography has changed so much since then, but that is a topic for another day). I have always enjoyed the creation process: coming up with an idea, framing it out, and then pulling together the writing and photography. Then the business part comes into the picture—the selling, consistently communicating—and my attention wanes, or at least it has in the past.
In 2020, when I decided to shut down my (successful and enjoyable) consulting business and try full-time photography, I felt unsettled about it. Life circumstances brought me to that decision instead of me making that decision with full vigor and excitement. We made the deliberate choice to leave city life in Denver in favor of living in closer proximity to nature but I still loved my consulting work and a huge part of my identity was tied up in being part of Colorado’s nonprofit sector. Living in a rural area meant that I could no longer work on those big, exciting, and complex consulting projects without a lot of travel. The whole point of moving was to live in a new place, not constantly be traveling away from it (although we do constantly travel away from it for photography, but that is different!). It was either doing repetitive board retreats and strategic plans for small rural nonprofits…. or doing photography full time. I decided to slide into full time photography because it was sorta the best option.
And then the pandemic happened and it felt like a really horrible decision to give up my consulting business and a career that I excelled in for whatever this photography business thing was, and this photography business thing was failing because all the in-person teaching I planned to do could no longer happen (and my dad passed away, adding a whole lot of other sadness into the mix). After struggling through 2020, 2021, and 2022, I finally made the decision in late 2022 to make some big changes with how I was approaching this whole photography business thing and after a year of rebuilding, it feels like things are finally clicking.
I have the background, knowledge, and skill set to run a photography business but until now, I couldn’t find the motivation to direct those things in the right way, and I was constantly allowing myself to be distracted by “opportunities” that were easier but ultimately not a good fit. I still don’t know if I will ever be able to replace my former income with income from photography but I do finally feel like I might be able to make this a fulfilling endeavor and make it financially viable—and that feels good. With this surge of motivation, I have focused a lot of effort on the business side of things this month.
Autumnal shrubby cinquefoil. Colorado, 2023.
I know this will be very boring to some (most?) readers but if you are thinking about wanting to earn an income through your photography, these are the kinds of tasks that you will spend your time doing (notice how little photography work is involved):
Working, working, and working some more on the expanded and fully revised second edition of our Beyond the Grand Landscape ebook (the second edition will be a course with videos and a workbook, too). Stay tuned if you are interested in learning more. It has taken me a bit longer to finish this than I expected but I am excited about how it is coming together.
Refreshing some details on our website (making all the fonts consistent, reorganizing the menu, eliminating duplicative pages, updating the photos on our about page since the old ones were probably ten years old).
Moving our ebooks and tutorials from a Shopify store to using Shopify buy buttons on this Squarespace website (you can see the new store page here; that single page plus the linked pages represent a few days—days!—of work). Shopify buy buttons used to require an awkward pop-up cart but now they will redirect to a full webpage hosted by Shopify. I’ll see over time if conversions go up.
Switching email providers to FloDesk. As an email list grows, the costs become really hard to justify with a provider like MailChimp. Between emailing out blog posts and a newsletter, we send four to six emails a month and I am not willing to pay more than $2,000 a year to do so. I have sent out three emails through FloDesk and have changed out all of our sign-up forms and am so far really happy with the service. And now we can grow our list without having to pay more each month.
I also presented to two camera clubs, recorded a podcast episode, wrote two blog posts, hosted my mom and aunt for a week for Thanksgiving, applied for a long-shot grant, and worked on two projects that will be released in 2024. I hope this level of motivation persists into next year.
Two months in one. That is what November was!
Gambel oaks and aspens meet on a hillside in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. 2023.
THIS MONTH’S RECOMMENDATIONS
Podcast 🎧 This is Your Brain on Deep Reading. In this episode of the Ezra Klein Show, he talks to Maryanne Wolf about her research on deep reading. While some of her advice seems totally impractical for modern life, listening to this episode felt like a wake-up call to put more effort into protecting my brain’s ability to focus deeply on reading and creative activities. Some of these same ideas seem applicable to photography. If we want to do deep, personal work, we need the habits to support that work—including the ability to pay attention and stay focused for long periods of time. I do not spend much time on social media but it isn’t great that I sometimes feel compelled to look at Instagram when I am out of service and hiking or photographing. My brain deserves better than I am giving it, I think.
Podcast 🎧 Craig Mod on the Longform Podcast. This podcast is about talking to authors about their writing process. I have never closely followed Craig Mod or his photography but this podcast introduced me to the interesting things he is doing in terms of book publishing and audience development. If you are interested in either topic, this is a worthwhile listen.
Recipe 🧆 Mushroom and Cabbage Pan-Fried Buns. These Chinese-inspired buns are delicious and easy to make, although they take some time (and I add a bit more soy sauce to the mix than specified in the recipe). I would enjoy eating a bowl of the filling all by itself, too.
Golden Chai ☕️ I have a hard time with caffeine so I have been so happy to find this chai concentrate. It is so delicious and is not full of sugar like most brands. I think it is a pretty perfect drink when combined with some unsweetened soy milk.
Photo-Related Recommendations 📸 Subscribe to our newsletter! I share a list just like this but entirely focused on nature photography in each issue of our newsletter.
Sarah Marino is a full-time photographer, nature enthusiast, and writer based in southwestern Colorado. In addition to photographing grand landscapes, Sarah is best known for her photographs of smaller subjects including intimate landscapes, abstract renditions of natural subjects, and creative portraits of plants and trees. Sarah is the author or co-author of a diverse range of educational resources for nature photographers on subjects including composition and visual design, photographing nature’s small scenes, black and white photography, Death Valley National Park, and Yellowstone National Park. Sarah, a co-founder of the Nature First Alliance for Responsible Nature Photography, also seeks to promote the responsible stewardship of natural and wild places through her photography and teaching.