Gary Crabbe is an award-winning photographer and author living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Gary began his photographic career spending nearly a decade managing the image library for famed National Geographic photographer Galen Rowell. Since then, his own client and publication credits include the National Geographic Society, New York Times, Forbes Magazine, TIME Magazine, Victoria's Secret, The North Face, Sunset, L.L. Bean, Subaru, The Nature Conservancy, and The Carnegie Museum of Natural History to name but a few.
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In This Episode You'll Learn:
How Gary got started in photography
The hardest part about photography for Gary to learn early on
What elements go into every great landscape photo
The tale-tell signs of an amateur landscape photo
How to start focusing on composition
What to do when the weather does not cooperate
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How to start selling your landscape photos
Shooting on assignment vs Shooting personal work
All about licensing. How it has changed and how to charge for your work
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Full Episode Transcription:
Disclaimer: The transcript was transcribed electronically by Temi.com and may contain errors that do not reflect accurately what the speaker said. Because of this, please do not quote this automated transcript.
Raymond Hatfield: 00:00 In 2018, seven of your landscape images were chosen by the us postal service to represent just how beautiful America is in a series of stamps. Now, I want to take a step back from that, just monumental achievement right there. And I want to know what, how you got into photography in the first place.
Gary Crabbe: 00:24 Oh, that's a really easy answer. And it's a question I do get asked a lot. I was a breakfast cook.
Raymond Hatfield: 00:35 Okay. Let's go on. Let's elaborate from that. How does,
Gary Crabbe: 00:38 Okay. No, actually, I, I was so absolutely sick to death of waking up every morning at ungodly hours that I actually now waking up again that early, but I, I literally woke up with a stream of profanities coming out of my mouth saying I didn't want to go to work. And my wife basically said, well, find a different job. And so I basically started applying for anything I could find out of the newspaper and that included answering telephones at an adoption agency, a telemarketer you know, I didn't care what the job was as long as it was a normal Monday through Friday nine to five job. Wait, that's what you wanted was the norm. That's what I wanted because as opposed to waking up really early and cooking, and I had to spend my weekends cooking and stuff like that, I want, at that point I wanted some sense of normalcy and I think it was maybe about 24.
Gary Crabbe: 01:54 It was right after I had graduated from college. And one of the ads that I saw in the paper was for to outdoor photo agency must love dogs. Okay. And so I applied for it and got asked to come in for an interview. And it, soon as I showed up at the doorway I recognized it, it was the studio of even then a world famous national geographic photographer named Gale and Raul. And the only reason I recognized who it was immediately was because I had seen his mountain light exhibit in person at the California Academy of sciences. A number of years before that and his famous shot of the rainbow over the potassium palace is like a, you know world-class signature photo. And I was just kind of like, Oh my God. And surprisingly, I did get offered the job of basically just being a little file, boy. My job was going to be taking all the slides back from clients. Cause in this time there was no digital photography not even digital scans, so everything was done on slides and they need someone to put all the slides back into those same sort of file drawers that you see behind me. And so I did get hired, I got paid less than I was as a cook. And surprisingly I did ask for and got a raise on my very first day of work
Raymond Hatfield: 03:42 Day one, starting out.
Gary Crabbe: 03:46 So they, they agreed. They gave me, you know, we, we split the difference on what I was losing. But literally nine days after I started working there, I went off on my three week honeymoon. So actually I guess my wife was my fiance at the time. This first started happening. But within that nine days, I was exposed to all of this world-class photography. And I figured, Oh, here I am. I'm going off to Hawaii on my honeymoon. I've got my little old money manual Minolta [inaudible] and I was going to be like the next Galen route. I took, you know, like 10 rolls of those print film, negatives that you develop in the drug store. And, you know, there were shots of rainbows and Palm trees and sunsets, and they were all
Gary Crabbe: 04:46 Like, I knew nothing about it. I came back from my honeymoon three weeks later and literally the moment I walk in the door, the manager of the office goes Galen and Barbara need to see you in their office right now. I mean, we're talking eight 30 in the morning after my first day on the honeymoon and I'm being summoned in the office and I get into the office and they say the people that are running your department are no longer here. We've let them go. Do you think you can run the department? And I went sure,
Raymond Hatfield: 05:32 Does it come with a rake?
Gary Crabbe: 05:34 What I was doing? But I said, absolutely, I can do it. And so they put me on like a 90 day probation period to see if I could keep up with what I said. Yeah, that turned out to be a decade that I wound up staying there. And I was running this image library of 400,000 slides. I'm dealing with all of, some of the top publishing companies, agencies, magazines, ad agencies in the world, which was great because that was training ground for me as a photo editor. So that's literally what I consider part of my business is not just photography, but I also do photo editing as well. And the benefit though is the photographer was that Galen taught workshops out of his office there in Berkeley and I had to work them. So I got the training of being in, sitting through over the course of years.
Gary Crabbe: 06:43 Like I'm probably about 30 or more of his workshops that he led. And at some point we got even to a point where I was helping teach them and working with the students out in the field and stuff like that as part of the job. But the greatest point of the education was always like the slide critiques, where they, you would listen to Galen critique the slides. And that started to be like, Oh, I just had all that information sinking into me. It turns out ironically though, they would refuse to hire photographers. They had been burned by photographers a number of times. So when I was hired, it was like, do you want to be a photographer? And I'm like no interest in being a photographer. And oddly enough, nine years later when I laughed, I wound up having enough information and skills that I was able to start my own photography business. So it's
Raymond Hatfield: 07:53 Okay. Hold on, hold on. There's a lot of questions I just wrote down on this little piece of paper here about that story. First of all, what did that I have to do with dogs? I didn't hear anything about dogs and that, and that whole story.
Gary Crabbe: 08:04 Oh, there was there Galen had a golden retriever named kumu and that dog basically lived with us in the office at all times. And they were gone. We had to care for the dog. So yeah, that was, that was one of the requirements walking into the dog. And that was actually on my cover letter was like, you know, I may not know what a photo agency is, but I liked dogs,
Raymond Hatfield: 08:33 But I had never knew a shooting dogs, nothing like that. No photograph. Okay. At least a they're focusing on everything that's important there. Right. You gotta be welcome to the family before you can, you can take a photo. So before starting did you have any prior photography knowledge up until that point? I know that you said that you had a Minolta camera. But how, how did, how, how did you know about photography before you had stopped?
Gary Crabbe: 08:59 Not a lot. I knew how to point and push the button and keep it on the automatic mode. I had taken a black and white elective photography course through my art department in college. And that was the sum total one semester in the dark room. However I did wind up getting a job working for the university that I was at. I was getting my master's degree in the theater. And so I became the official photographer for the theater. So from that black and white class I was able to adapt to shooting in the theater where I used a 3,200 speed. And since I had experience with both acting and directing, they would let me run around on stage with the actors during one of their final dress rehearsals. And so I would basically get the film that I shot from the dress rehearsal, run back to my apartment, process it all in my bathroom with a little dark room unit that I had bought during the course of that class. And I processed all of these eight by 10 RC glossy prints of the theater production. And in the morning I dropped them off with the art department and in the afternoon they were lining the walls of the theater. And that was it. That was photography job number one. And the sum total of experience I had before I walked into that other job. But that was probably just enough to help me get that job because they definitively didn't want photographers, but, you know, I had just little bit of experience and that was it.
Raymond Hatfield: 10:51 Yeah. It definitely helps knowing a certain aspects about a camera before you go in. You don't want to go in completely blind. So that, that makes sense. I love that. My next question is, is, is when it came to, this is, this is just how much I love this story. So you had you said that your master's in theater directing, right? Yup. Okay. So clearly like you, you enjoy being in the company of people. What I want to know now is that like, when did you decide that landscapes, which arguably, maybe one of the loneliest forms of photography would be something that you were going to pursue full time? What was it about landscapes that really drew you in?
Gary Crabbe: 11:35 Probably the fact that when I was a young, as a teenager and a kid and young adult, that I had grown up fishing and camping with my parents. And as I started to get into my teen years, I started doing backpacking and getting out into some of the wilderness, especially by like, like Tahoe and parts of Yosemite and stuff like that. And you know, I also had this one specific memory of when I was a kid we had driven across country from, at the time I was living in New Jersey and we drove and came back into California. And I remember jumping out of the camper and just seeing the majesty of Mount Shasta over highway five, which is just in fact, I was just there a little while ago. And you know, every time I see this big, huge volcanic peak towering, you know, 10,000 feet over the surrounding landscape, it's just, you know, the jaw dropping awe of nature, the natural processes, and the fact that it's the part of the planet that will go on and has been here long before and long after humans, you know? So it is that point where you can escape everything else that is around us and retreat, just back to, you know, what is the real kind of mother earth aspect.
Raymond Hatfield: 13:18 So it's funny that you mentioned that I remember as you said, like Shasta, I told you that I grew up in Northern California, my grandma lives in in Redding and every year we would go up there to to see her and we'd go camping at, I think it was whiskey town. Was he late? Yeah, exactly great place. Yeah. And I believe that one of my first photographs now that I think about it is of Shasta as we were driving up a five and I'm going to have to ask my mom if she can go back through my old scrapbooks and and find that photo that's. That's awesome.
Gary Crabbe: 13:50 Yeah. It is just something it's like walking up to the rim of the grand Canyon the first time, or seeing half dome for the first time or looking at the Swiss Alps. You just, you know, it is something that is transcendent and literally goes right. I think to the core, you know kind of our own being. So when those moments hit and that's, that's what attracted me,
Raymond Hatfield: 14:18 Well, it makes an impact that's for sure. So when you went to Hawaii, right on your honeymoon, you had your 10 rolls of film. You had your Minnesota, you go out, you're super excited to take all these photos when you get back and you develop them. They're all. What would you say was the hardest part about photography at that point for you from the technical side for you to, for you to learn?
Gary Crabbe: 14:41 I think so obviously there was the basics, like exposure and composition but one of them, the things that gallons talked a lot about. Yeah. And, you know, people I don't understand right now in the digital world, if they've grown up totally in the digital world we did not have little LCD panels on the back of our screen where we can immediately see what we were getting. And so probably he's this phrase, learning to see like external, in other words, you could look out there and through this lens of basically what was a foreign language, understanding how the film was going to see the world differently than how our eyes were seeing it. You could start making compositional and artistic choices based on what you knew the palette of the film was going to do versus what your eyes were saying. And that was probably a huge quantum jump because compared to that learning things like, you know, your rule of thirds and you know, diagonals being good, don't put something directly in the center.
Gary Crabbe: 16:05 Those were kind of the more easy technical aspects, but suddenly learning to, to think in the light language of photography was much a much better step up the ladder than any of those small instructions, because it allowed me to start making more critical choices. What I was in the field. And there's a famous photographer named art Wolf, who I think I think it was him who said, you know, the hallmark of a good photographer is knowing what photo not to take. And so as we've learned this kind of language of film and the language of composition and the language of light itself as the beginning and photographers, you just run around and you point your camera and you push the button, you literally have no clue. It's like, Oh, that kind of looks nice. I'll take the picture up. That looks good.
Gary Crabbe: 17:04 I'll take the picture. But then once you start learning all these things, you can go now, that's, that's not good. Maybe if I move over here or maybe if I change this or change that you can start reacting to the world around you, I'm making informed choices. So that, that aspect of like learning to see like film and to understand what else is going to get in the camera without having to look on the back of my camera to see if it's okay, first that's something the modern world, you know, doesn't teach you. But I thought it was a great resource, but there, the way, you know, light and subject matter comes together in that little, two dimensional frame that is it's like learning a second language. And once you become fluent in the language, you're able to basically speak it much clearer
Raymond Hatfield: 18:07 When you become fluent in the language, you're able to speak it much clearer. How do you become fluent in that language?
Gary Crabbe: 18:13 That's, that's a lot of practice. You know, and it's a lot of mistakes and it's a lot of really looking to see what doesn't work. A really easy example. And I think even Gustavo had mentioned it in his little interview the other day was that, you know, have someone try bracket their exposures and just put them all up on the screen and look at what it does. Try and feel how your eye moves through a frame. I'm sorry. I thought I'd put all these ringers to silent. No worries. Believable. So I literally had a chair and I had basically set them all to silent and had them sitting here on silent figures.
Raymond Hatfield: 19:17 The whole world's against you. I swear.
Gary Crabbe: 19:21 I'm not a fan of technology. Let me tell you that. So going back at, you know, that was the other, probably big step that helped understanding that this kind of fluency of photography was understanding how, as a photographer, my connection to a subject comes across in a photograph and understanding things like, you know, how light and shadow work together in a frame. But most importantly, how does our eye move through the frame? Because if you create a great visual path and your subject matter can, can literally jump off the page at the size of a postage stamp. You know, you're doing something right. But if someone looks at that and your subject is either dead centered and there's nothing there, or there's a whole bunch of jumbled stuff on the side, a viewer is going to look at that and they're going to feel that kind of confusion and that sort of odd tangle of information so that their brain doesn't process it nicely that hearkens back to, I think what the famous line of, they're always, you know, two people on a photograph, the photographer and the viewer.
Gary Crabbe: 20:47 Yes. And so starting to think like a viewer of a photographer and making things easy for the viewer is one of the steps along that path. That's really important.
Raymond Hatfield: 21:01 There was, there was a lot right there I think to, to unpack when it comes to what goes into a, a, a landscape photo and obviously what makes one better than another. So if, if if I were to ask you to, to close your eyes and describe the perfect landscape photo, what elements are you seeing? What elements are most important to you
Gary Crabbe: 21:28 First and foremost is light because that's what photography is. I mean, you can strip everything out of it, but if you don't have light, you don't have a photo. And one of the things I like to teach is that's what we take pictures up. We don't take pictures of things. We take pictures of light on things, and I've always said, and continued to say that a great, let me get this exactly right. A boring subject in great light will always make a better photograph than a great subject in boring light. So you can have a beautiful mountain in the middle of the day, look substantially less impressive than a park bench at sunset in perfect light.
Raymond Hatfield: 22:37 It's true. That's absolutely true.
Gary Crabbe: 22:40 So that's, that's the very, very, very first thing. I think about the light first, and then I think I match it to the subject. So whenever I'm looking around, like outside my office right now, I can see some beautiful morning light hitting my tomatoes and bean plants and cucumbers and stuff like that. And I'm like, Oh, that's pretty, but it's the light that's catching my attention, not the subject. And I go, Oh, there's the pretty light. That's what I'm going to photograph. So obviously for an outdoor landscape, weather is key. Timing is key. If it's cloudy and gray, I'm not thinking about big landscapes. I'm thinking about smaller details or possibly doing something in black and white. There's a reason that landscape photographers and travel photographers are drawn to what they called the magic hour. You know, the hours between sunrise and or around sunrise and around sunset is because that as the sun gets lower in the sky, it's traveling through more atmosphere and it's getting, you know, more and more golden and eventually turning to red.
Gary Crabbe: 23:59 And that light makes such a special quality on anything it falls. So the first thing I would think about is, you know, am I going to get some beautiful light, either on trees, mountains clouds, especially is there a Lake or body of water that I could reflect that in? Would there be a nice foreground subject, like a rock with a nice angle that I can start leading the viewer into? And can I construct a scene that I think is going to evoke an emotional response so that when someone sees it, they know exactly what I was seeing, what I was passionate about, but moreover than that, that it hits them in some manner with their own kind of emotional response so that they can say, Oh, I want to be there. I want to see that I want to live in that scene.
Gary Crabbe: 25:00 And that's kind of one of the things, you know, as a photo editor critique, when people are going through and I'm looking through their portfolios and they've got these, you know, they're out at a Lake at a sunset or a sunrise, and they've got clouds and they've got trees and they've got rocks in the foreground, but it's not a good picture. Yeah. And one of the hallmark questions as like, would you want to live with that photo on your wall for 10 years? And even if they love the photo, you can almost kind of see the hesitation in their eyes at somewhere. They know, you know, it might be really good for them, but they know that there's some of that kind of combination missing. And it's the ability to create those kinds of compositions adding one plus two plus three plus four, and putting them in the right sequential order. That's the part that takes years of being out there of years of clicking the button and then really trying to look objectively with what you've got on the screen. Once you've got it back and you're sitting there and Lightroom or camera or whatever program you're using to really stop and study what you got and to figure out why was this image better than that image? And that's, that's the long process of it.
Raymond Hatfield: 26:33 It sounds like a long, a long learning process. Obviously when you have to wait for things like weather and you have to wait for things like light in order to really be able to you know, test skills, I suppose. But as somebody who teaches workshops as somebody who has attended other workshops, as you said there are those elements, the light, the composition subject matter, seeing images from photographers of all skill level, low skill levels, which one do you think is overlooked the most?
Gary Crabbe: 27:05 Probably the light you know, especially from a, well, I will have to amend that to two sides. I'd say from a beginning perspective, someone walking out in the, the camera, I think, you know, while they may not have the understanding of light, they, they certainly have this kind of intuitive sense of pointing the camera at what they like to see learning, I would say the elements of composition and the visual pathway, you know, constructing a photo so that the eye goes through it. Okay. is probably the first step by that. I try and push people up the ladder. So I know that in my own workshops, when I'm doing the critiques, you know, it's simple things like checking the edges. Why, why do you have the branches? You know, what if I'm, you know, subject is over here, how about, you know, making those kinds of choices and experiment it because the first reaction most beginning photographers do is they'll see something and they bring their camera up to it and they go click.
Gary Crabbe: 28:31 And that's the extent of what they do. So really trying to get them to work with this idea of perspecting perspective and connecting with what they're shooting as trying to tell a story, you know, what is the story that you're trying to tell with this photo? What things do you think you could do to make it better? At least getting them to be aware of light and how light plays is a big thing. But from first step one, I would have to say composition and visual pathways is probably the biggest, you know, if you're going to push someone up that ladder, that's the way I'm going to get them started.
Raymond Hatfield: 29:16 So I think talking about visual pathways, that's something that maybe internally, I think that I struggle with most when it comes to taking a photo of, you know, just like a nice landscape, as you said, something that I find visually interesting. I want to take a photo of it, but then I have to ask myself like, well, what is the main subject of this photo? Because when I shoot weddings, it's going to be the couple. When I have somebody in front of my frame, it's, it's them, that's always the subject of the photo, but when it comes to landscapes and there's something like a rock that could be 10 feet in front of you and you know, a volcano that could be several miles in front of you, right? How do we build the visual pathway and where do we find like what the main, what the main subject is, is does, does that question make sense? That kind of,
Gary Crabbe: 30:01 So I think that is, you know, that is at the very core of one of the other aspects is I especially try and get to with a lot of my presentations, you know, and if I could walk up with a baseball bat and hit people over the head with it it's the one thing I would say is photography is a communication. Medium. People are like, wait, I thought it was just an art form. No, it is a communication medium, which means every single photo you take, you're telling a story, you're saying something about something, that's it. And that's the way a, viewer's going to look at it. They're going to know what does he try? What's the story. This photographer is trying to tell me about this subject. So it doesn't matter if the subject is a single rock or a single flower or a bride and groom cutting the cake, or you've got a portrait of a person that you're setting up for some sort of assignment.
Gary Crabbe: 31:15 You're always trying to communicate something with that image. And let's say for the example that you use the rock and Mount Shasta, which is perfect because it's in the midst of this volcanic landscape, that it would be really an ideal setup to say, Oh, here's a piece of volcanic rock that is sitting here two and a half miles from the mountain. And how do I superimpose that? So that they're in the frame together. And I am trying to say this foreground rock came from that background mountain. So the first thing you know is you have to have both of them in the frame, but then aligning the perspective white using the rule of thirds and composition. So that if those are on a diagonal like this, if there are like straight across like that, it's not as much of a story as if they're pull the part or okay.
Gary Crabbe: 32:18 You know, and finding that kind of balance where you're creating the relationship between the background and the foreground, so that when a viewer sees that they see foreground rock, let's see how I do this here, then background volcano. It's those, you know, how you construct it in the frame that helps lead your eye from one to another, but it also establishes that there is a relationship between the two. And if the rock is down on the ground, if you're shooting from five feet, four inches up, which is the average spot, beginner photographers take photos up, you know, it was like, no, get down on the ground, you know, put the foreground rock up like that, you know, and then match it with a little tiny mountain in the background. That's, you know, that's an option. That's going to tell a story in slightly a different way than if they're both kind of equalized in the frame.
Gary Crabbe: 33:24 I like that. I like, I like tying in those stories or the element of a story there as well. And I think that really helps me kind of figure out how to compose photos a little bit better. So thank you very much for sharing that. It really is, you know, they, they say every photo is worth a thousand words or should be, or could be, but it's that the photo is worth X words just reinforces the idea that you're trying to use photography to communicate something and they walk around and say, what am I trying to communicate with this photo? That's a good way to kind of get you into those better positions to create better photos. That's why you're the pro here. That was perfect. I want to switch gears just a little bit now, and I want to know that as one of the very few people in the entire world who make a living from your landscape photographs, I want you to talk to me a little bit about the business of landscape photography. How do you recommend somebody new to landscape photography, even w where do you recommend that they even begin to start earning money with their photos?
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Gary Crabbe: 35:03 I, I believe that, and I'm going to play devil's advocate here for a second and ask you, what is the role that Instagram plays in your landscape photography? Not a lot. In fact, I don't think I posted more than a couple images since the pandemic began. I know that a number of photographers who have done incredibly successful at Instagram and built up quite a following, but I think a large part of that is the photographers that want to learn from them so they can do what they do that said I've also known several photographers and my self included one, I have a very kind of, I don't want to say bitter reaction, but I, I definitely, I feel a bit saddened by the fact that they have made photography so instant and so overwhelming in terms of the flow of content that people scroll by on this little device.
Gary Crabbe: 36:26 And they barely give some of these excellent photos more than a second worth of attention, and barely the effort to absorb more than a double tap and move on. So as far as someone who really likes to dig in and dive and look at the meat of a photographer's body of work or what they're trying to show me as like, Oh, you know, when I get on instant, it's just like, scroll, scroll, scroll, tap, tap, tap, cut, make a quick comment and stuff like that. But I think people also strive for the psychology of affirmation. And before I switched to my theater degree, I was actually a social, my, my bachelor's degree was in social and adolescent psychology. And this idea of the dopamine hit for the, like, you know, I specifically know photographers out there who gets so wrapped up in, you know, I'm going to do this for the numbers, or, Oh, if, if I didn't get the numbers on this image, it must mean that image is not good.
Gary Crabbe: 37:39 And that's kind of a pervasive set. And I, I, you know, I've known someone that literally came up to me and said, I'm out to kill the Instagram thing. I'm going to slay it. And he did. He made that and he's done great for it. And there is, once you get to that point, there will be a market for people that want to learn from, and that is all very well and fine. It's getting to that point. Yeah, I just have, you know, and I, and I guess that I might feel different if I was 20 years younger at the moment and living on my phone, but as someone who likes to go into a museum and stare at, you know, a three foot photograph hanging on a wall and just really kind of soaking it in instead is the exact opposite. And I think what it is really done is it is dead and our senses to the appreciation of photography. We see it, we know it's good. And bam, we have just moved on to the next thing so fast. We don't know why it was good.
Raymond Hatfield: 38:54 Oh, wow. We see it. We know it's good. And then we just move on. That's a, that's a sad thought that it you're right. I mean, that's a real sad thought. And there's been photographers who I've talked to I'm thinking of Dan Milner right now. And he is a if you don't know Dan Milner, he was a he was a photo journalist in Texas. And then this was a, I guess in the late seventies kind of grew up in this publishing world. And then once social media came around, he realized he's like, this is the worst thing I think to happen to photography. And he just completely swears off it. And now he still shoots on his like, like a [inaudible] and just prints every single one of his photos and makes books out of them. And he's like, this is how I enjoy photography.
Raymond Hatfield: 39:37 And I think that there's a lot that episode has really resonated with a lot of listeners, because I think that they can see themselves getting caught up in that same dopamine hit, like you said, and that, that does take a lot of the the joy and the fun out of being there in the moment and being excited about the photo to capture, because if it only gets like seven likes or whatever, then, then that's going to negatively affect how you see the photo. And that's a, that's a shame. That's a shame. Is there anything that you do about that? Do you specifically try to print photos that you specifically do something to ensure that you continue to appreciate true photography?
Gary Crabbe: 40:16 Yeah. I definitely try and go to individual photographer websites, and I look at their portfolios on their website now to be fair. During the start of the pandemic, I kind of took a break from the Instagram and posting online from my business side. Now I have a business page. This is one other thing I would say. My business Instagram account is a far different beast from my personal business account and or my personal Instagram page. You know, the personal one is me personally. And it's, it's the, the, the stuff that I do. But when I post something on my Instagram business page, I'm curating that like a professional photo editor, you know, I'm trying to not just think of one photo, but I'm also thinking of, you know, how does this match in a stream of colors or subject matter so that I'm bringing up stuff that is, you know, when someone brings up the whole page that they're looking at it as kind of like this gestalt kind of portfolio, and I don't have seven orange sunsets run together.
Gary Crabbe: 41:32 So I'm really kind of picking and choosing, but I did have to think of that as kind of, you know, Instagram felt like a business thing I had to do, but I also did it with the mindset of like, I'm not going to care about the numbers. You know, I will go ahead and post it one just because I like sharing my photos. I have in the past taken breaks from, you know, a photographer sites and sharing. And then I just realized at some point, you know, if people aren't seeing the work, you know, they should, and I want them to see the work, but I just don't go out there because places like Instagram, you know, they reward people who spend more time on the app and I don't want that fish hook in my mouth. And I just like, you know, if someone said I was going to have to spend four hours a day hanging out on Instagram to bump their algorithm up and to build a crowd, I'm like, that's not the way I want to spend four hours of my day. So, you know, sadly I do. It's like, Oh, it's a work thing. It's like, I have to shift and say, you know, that's part of my job. Like I'm opening.
Raymond Hatfield: 42:52 Oh, wow.
Gary Crabbe: 42:53 I also don't like to do, but it has to get done sometime. Right.
Raymond Hatfield: 42:57 I don't know if this will help, but I was definitely in that, in that trap of like, you know, wanting to grow the Instagram and because that's what you're told from everybody. And that was me. I've found that I was spending so much time on Instagram and yet for no reason whatsoever, but I, I pretty much completely cut it off. Now what I do, I literally, I just schedule everything. So once a month I take, you know, an hour schedule out all the photos that are going to be posted with a program called I think it's called [inaudible] or something like that. And it just automatically pushes those images to me,
Gary Crabbe: 43:28 That's that is a great way to do it because yeah, it is especially, you know, I mean, I've seen, and Noah photographers that have gone down the psychological rabbit hole when it's become so obsessive and so compulsive that they find the rest of their existence has gotten wrapped up and tied up into this kind of online push to, especially for landscapes to have these Epic landscapes. And, you know, there is a bit of a psychological trap in there that, you know, if you're not careful, it can catch you in the wrong area.
Raymond Hatfield: 44:14 That's inspiring right there. And I'm glad that that it's not so much just about you know, obviously the, the, the time shooting, the amount that you've been in the field you're going to have all that great information in and going forward, be able to kind of leverage yourself in that. But I love that story of, of this woman and a cat. That is a that's great. I would love to tell you what I'd be in Europe and I'd be in all the croissants and I'd be like, thank you, mr. Fluffy. This is all all. Thanks to you. I know that we are at the end of our time here, do you have time for two more questions? Is that okay? I'm sure that there are times where when it comes to landscape photography, you plan a photo, you know, when the sunset it's going to be, you know, you know, what your subject matter is going to be, and then you get out into the location and maybe, you know, not everything works, maybe the weather doesn't cooperate or something like that. How do you make do in those situations?
Gary Crabbe: 45:11 Oh my gosh. Yeah, that happens a lot. So it's basically a pre visualizing a scene. And in fact, I think one of the images I sent you of this red light on top of half dome was exactly that it was a scene that I had pre visualized in my head, and I had walked out there and with a buddy of mine and, you know, all of a sudden the clouds came in from everywhere and it was just like, Oh crap. And, you know, my pre visualized image went completely out the door. And here I am in this big landscape with crappy weather in this bike. Exactly what I said, you know a great subject in boring light was still going to make a boring set you know, a boring photograph. So I started shifting my minds like, Oh, well, maybe I could do stuff that's like black and white because of all the storm clouds or something like that.
Gary Crabbe: 46:12 And so it's kind of saying, well, if I can't do this, then, like I said, I'm going to start thinking first and foremost about the light. If the light is completely wrong, where is it? Correct. I had an instance where I was at Mount Rainier and I was at that beautiful reflection Lake with Mount Rainier, you know, in the background. And the light was just blocked up on the mountain, but the sun coming through the trees at the far end of the Lake was making these beams on the mist. And it was like, fabulous. And, you know, I just like, okay, that's where my camera is going to be pointing. Cause it's pointing at what's interesting with the light that's I, I let that kind of guide me to whatever the subject should be. It didn't matter anymore that Mount Rainier was in the question or in the photograph because this image that was just trees and sunlight and mist was so more fabulous than anything looking in that big, huge mountain off to my other shoulder.
Gary Crabbe: 47:21 And so that's the way that, that half dome image, I was like, well, I'm just going to have to adapt. Maybe I'm going to start looking for smaller details. I I've, you know, it's a nine mile hike. I might as well do something while I was here. And interestingly on that one image of half dome there was one second or one brief moment where the light got through the clouds, right, as it was setting way off to the West and hit half dome and bathe in that beautiful red light, just like I was imagining. And, you know, I couldn't believe the luck. I was literally jumping up and down next to my camera because I had completely said, this is never going to happen. And then all of a sudden it happens. The one thing I knew was I was kind of just being able to anticipate, and I'd like left my camera, just sitting right there.
Gary Crabbe: 48:20 And cause, you know, at that point it was like, there's nothing to take pictures here. I might as well sit down and have a cup of tea and enjoy scenery. And then the light snuck through this clouds and bathe half dome in this red light. I'm jumping up down next to my tripod and I'm yelling at my friend. Who's like 20 yards away from me. Is this happening? Is this really, really happening? When I got back in put all the cam frames into light room, I counted from the first moment that light turned on to the last moment, the light was there was 42 seconds. Wow.
Raymond Hatfield: 48:58 Be prepared
Gary Crabbe: 48:59 The entire day. So I figured, you know, my whole day, in fact, I did, I processed some of the images from early in the afternoon, like as black and whites, I even did. Some of them is sepia tone to make them look like they were shot back in the 1840s. When you, somebody was kind of first discovered by or, well, William Henry Jackson was out there taking photographs. So I had done all those, but then I, you know, that's what they say is luck favors the prepared. But if the luck doesn't happen, you know, look around, change your mindset, you know, figure out what would the light work well on. And, you know, in the end sometimes just put the camera down, enjoy where you are and what you're doing. You don't cause taking photos can take away from the moment. You know, it's great that we can see these Epic moments, but certainly if the Epic moment from photography isn't happening, you still sitting by a quiet Lake next to a beautiful mountain in a forest is a pretty Epic moment with, or without a camera in your hand.
Raymond Hatfield: 50:16 Very true. That's like that old bumper sticker a bad day on the Lake is better than a good day at the office.
Gary Crabbe: 50:23 Absolutely.
Raymond Hatfield: 50:25 Oh man. Gary, you have given me so much to think about today. You have opened up my eyes into truly what the world of landscape photography looks like. And I can't, I can't thank you enough for coming on and sharing everything that you did, but before I let you go for those listening, can you let them know where they can find you online and where they can see some of your amazing photos?
Gary Crabbe: 50:47 Sure. I've got my website and it is enlight photo.com. So it's a contraction of my business name, which is enlightened images, photography, and that's E N L I G H T P H O T o.com. Or they could probably just Google my last name or my name and it should pop up. Hopefully Raymond Hatfield: 51:11 It does. It does. I can confirm. I'm glad that you didn't point them to a, to your Instagram that would've kind of negated that whole conversation.
Gary Crabbe: 51:20 If they really want to see it, there's a link on my website. That'll get them there. Raymond Hatfield: 51:23 Yeah. You know what I found interesting when I was doing a little bit of research on you was to look at the photos that you're tagged in and seeing maybe other people's stories that they had either at some of your workshops or photos that that they took that were inspired by some of yours. And that was just really fun. So I would still recommend checking out the Instagram.
Gary Crabbe: 51:43 That's the part of Instagram I do like that. I mean, it's not, it's definitely not all bad. So no, it's not something I'm saying to avoid.