How to Become a Travel Photographer

Here's how I ended up doing this. Not a plan, not a path, just what actually happened.

First Camera

I bought a Canon 350D in 2005, entry level, with no training or idea what aperture did. I wasn't shooting in manual because I didn't know how. I liked taking photos and I was about to travel, so I figured I should have a decent camera. That was the whole plan.

I learned by shooting constantly and studying photographers I admired. No courses or YouTube tutorials - they barely existed then. I'd look at work I loved and try to figure out why it worked.

Travel Came First

I'm not a "professional travel photographer" in the sense that someone pays me a salary to fly around the world. I worked in the tech world - at HP as a Unix engineer in Australia, quit my job, spent my savings on travel. Left Australia for three and a half years, some of it working in London, then came back.

Travel came before the photography career. I was already travelling when I picked up the camera, and the work followed the trips.

Forty-five countries so far: three and a half months overland through Africa, multiple trips to Japan, ten days in Iceland, four months living in Brazil, New Zealand's South Island, and Jordan, Turkey, Egypt. Southeast Asia was the first place I ever travelled with a camera.

The National Geographic Cover

In 2010, an elephant photograph I shot at the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania ended up on the cover of National Geographic Traveller. The camera was a Nikon D90, 12 megapixels, about ten years old at the time. The lens was an 18-200mm zoom, nothing special.

NatGeo found my portfolio through a Google image search while researching Melbourne for an article. There was no agent or submission involved. They emailed asking if they could use some images, and my answer was an immediate yes.

The career impact was mainly credibility. Licensing enquiries picked up after the cover. A luxury safari company contacted me randomly and paid $1,500 to license two images.

They found me because my work was on a website indexed by Google. If it hadn't been findable, nothing would have happened.

My Kit

My NatGeo cover was shot on a Nikon D90 with a kit zoom, 12 megapixels. The shot came out of being there when the light was right at the Ngorongoro Crater. I pay more attention to light than any kit detail.

These days my kit is minimal. I use a Nikon 24mm f/2.8 prime for landscape work. I've generally preferred second-hand full-frame bodies to new crop-sensor ones - that way the professional lenses work at their engineered focal length.

Post-Production

Post-production is where a lot of my learning has happened. Sitting with a photograph in Lightroom, adjusting exposure, colour, crop, shadows, is how I've figured out what works in a shot and what doesn't.

I stay on the photography side of the line between photography and digital art. My edits are colour correction and cropping, nothing beyond what was actually there. I want to show the world as it was.

Editing

I'm strict about what I show. Editing my own work matters as much as shooting it. Most of my best photographs come from wandering without pressure or a plan. Three hours walking, one photo I love, that's a good day.

Working Quietly

The work I'm proudest of captures moments that would have happened whether I was there or not. I try to stay out of the way and not register as the photographer.

With people, I start by trying to put them at ease. Past the initial nervousness, the image has a chance to show something real.

On Being Found Online

If I had my time again, I'd spend more on SEO. It takes years to start paying off and I undervalued it at the time. These days AI search - ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar tools - is where a lot of the discovery happens. Either way, findability online has a long payoff curve.

On Making a Living

Depends what you mean by career. The full-time-salary-to-fly-around version is extremely rare. What I've built is a life where photography is central, funded by licensing, print sales, commercial work, and teaching alongside the travel.

I also run DJB Photography School. Teaching forces me to articulate what I know, which has made me better at the doing. It's also how I've made photography sustainable as a career.

Photography funds travel which feeds the photography, and teaching keeps it all running.