Hello, photography lovers, I’m so happy that we get the chance to say goodbye to July all together.
Don’t get me wrong, I love summer. But it’s another day and we have to celebrate it just like we’re going to celebrate our guests today.

Because you know our schedule every Wednesday, we’re here with another creative and every other Friday, I’m answering your questions. And I’m also giving you some little tips and tricks.

Before the start of the show, I have to tell you who made it possible for us to be together at the moment. And this is, of course, our gorgeous producer George.

This is one of the interviews we try to keep a very chronological because Karl has so much experiences so much knowledge to share.

We’re starting as usual with his history and the way he found photography.
But then we take a look at the present and he sharing with us what would be the steps if he had to start his career.
Today, we go to Iceland, thanks to one of his stories, and we dive deep into the difficulties of business and also the possible decisions that can resolve our problems.

So let’s go straight to the podcast.

Karl Taylor
Hi, my name is Karl Taylor, and I’m a commercial and advertising photographer, and photography instructor.

Virginia Y
Your name is quite well known. Tell us about the beginning of your career. Have you ever thought of doing anything else?

Karl Taylor
Well actually started in art, flooring and design. When I was younger, I was really into that when I was at school. And when I left school, I moved into design work and interior design, then I was made redundant from the job that I had when I was young. And I accidentally fell into photography. And then from there, I just became hooked on photography. And then that was all I ever wanted to do. And I kind of switched my allegiance, if you like from design and from art to this new medium that I discovered called photography. From that moment on, I just did everything I could working in various photographic jobs, dark rooms, assisting at that time, I wanted to be a photo journalist. So in my early 20s, I did a lot of traveling around the world world photograph and culture and people. And then after that trip, I showed my work to various publications in the attempt to try and get commissioned to do some photo journalistic articles. So that worked. And from there in my mid 20s. I spent a few years working as a photo journalist and traveling around Southeast Asia. And yes, so my initial career if you like, as a freelance or self employed photographer was actually doing cultural and travel photography as a photo journalist. Although I’d had many other jobs assisting or working in professional dark rooms or various connected jobs to the photography industry. My first actual self employment, if you like in photography was was working as a photojournalist how many years ago was that? A long time ago? It would have been when T five years ago with least Yeah.

Virginia Y
Do you think you would do the same if you had to start your career today?

Karl Taylor
I mean, it’s very difficult. I mean, as you probably know, many people want to be photographers. And you know, a lot of people’s dream is to travel. So breaking into photo journalism is much, much more difficult now than it was then, really the only places that managed to maintain a successful career in photojournalism travel photography would be staff photographers, and National Geographic, or photographers at Magnum, there’s very, very few sort of jobs for that. I enjoyed my work as a photo journalism, but it wasn’t very well paid. It was a sort of hand to mouth existence, I work on one project, and then I’d use the money from that one to work on the next one. And, you know, eventually, I actually got fed up with doing that after a few years. And that’s when I decided to diversify and try another area of photography, I suppose if I was going to start again, I think I’d probably look a little bit more about filmmaking, as well, and explore those mediums if I was starting out today, as well as also exploring 3d modeling and 3d animation. Because I think now, in the industry, there’s this crossover for many photographers, and certainly other ones that I know that you know, a top level where they are having to apply themselves as directors, lighting, consultants, Stills, photographers, videographers, and in some cases, also get involved with computer modeling, as well. So technology changes all industries.

Virginia Y
Although you’re not starting today, you are a little bit into the 3d modeling and all the stuff that you mentioned. So here is the real example of how people can learn every day.

Karl Taylor
Absolutely. I’ve always had that ethos that you shouldn’t stop learning, no matter how old you all you should be. And I think that comes from passion. Absolutely know, if you’re passionate about something, you infuse the artistic about it, then you’re eager to pick up any tips or learn any information you can. And I’ve always had that sort of curious mind, inquisitive mind where I wanted to know how that’s achieved, and how that’s achieved. And a lot of people say to me, all your lighting seems so precise, and you seem to do so well catching it in camera, and not so much post work. And the reasons for that is because I’ve spent a huge amount of my life studying basic physics of light, and really understanding how light works and how light interacts with different objects and different textures, and different frequencies of light, and how we can modify and shape light. So I basically dedicated at least the last 10 years of my career to really going in depth on using and manipulate light. And that for me has has made the biggest impact on my work, because I would say that my work personally, although I’ve been a photographer for 25 years or more, I would say it’s the last 10 years that I’ve seen the biggest growth because of my willingness to keep wanting to learn.

Virginia Y
And this is so cool. Because you’re not just learning, you’re also teaching

Karl Taylor
Yes, came about kind of by accident, really. If we go back, I mean, were 2000 going team. Now, if we go back 10 years, it’s just when people were getting really interested in digital photography, maybe back 11 years, actually a little bit 11 or 12. But I started getting people saying, Oh, you know, I’m getting into photography, I’ve got this digital camera, you’re successful photographer, can you help me? And there was so many people asking me whether I could run a workshop or do something, tell them that I decided to try running some workshops. And they were really successful school. And I really enjoyed teaching people and imparting the knowledge. And I thought this is interesting. There’s there’s actually so much enthusiasm for photography, I thought, how could we reach a bigger audience? So I approached a media company that I’d worked with that did filming and websites and various other stuff. And I said, Look, how could we multiply this? How could we expand this and reach a bigger audience. So obviously, the internet and the web would be involved. But at that time, we decided to create a series of DVDs on photography and training on photography. And then they just became very successful, especially in the US, they really took off, and our name became known. And then obviously, over the last 11 years, things have changed. So we’ve gone from DVDs to downloads, and now we run a membership model where you pay a monthly fee. And then you can access all of the training that we’ve ever created, and all the new training and live shows that we create each month as well. So the education side of the business was really a bit of an accident, off of the back of discovering that I enjoyed teaching. And then I kept my commercial photography, business running. And the education business grew really well from that. And then I just became also recognized as being a good educator. And then that led me to work as a consultant and training consultant for some of the big photography brands.

Virginia Y
Oh, I got so many questions to that center. Okay, let’s start with this. What was the biggest difficulty when you started this side of your business? Because this is a completely new source of revenue. I bet there were many challenges, because you’re a photographer.

Karl Taylor
Yeah, I suppose the most basic challenge would be getting familiar with presenting to a camera, because running a workshop and talking to a group of people in a studio or room is one thing. But then it’s a different scenario, when you become like a presenter towards a camera, you have to approach it differently. And you have to try and connect with the audience, even though you’re talking to a piece of glass. And I think the reason that I managed to do that, okay was because I always sort of show a level of passion and enthusiasm for what I’m doing. And and in many ways, I kind of just enjoyed talking to the camera. In some ways, I found it better than actually talking to people in a real workshop, although I enjoy that as well. So that was a challenge learning how to do that for the team as well. But I was working with, they also have to become familiar with how I present and how I move around, because I don’t really stay still very long. So for the camera guys, they’ll kind of having it was more like a documentary program for them. And I think that’s kind of where we found our niche, because there had been some education programs out there. But they were quite static, where it was almost like someone just stood there, or someone sat at a desk, saying how they did this and how they did that. And we wanted to do something more lively, more energetic, so we decided, let’s actually just do photo shoots, and film them. And I’ll talk to the camera as if I was talking to someone who was shadowing me as an assistant or something. And that format worked really well. The other challenges, obviously, with a business like this is that previously, as a commercial photographer, I’m dealing with art directors and advertising agencies and that sort of thing. And then with this type of business, we’re dealing with the general public, because they are the customers and the audience. So you have to figure out how you’re going to reach that audience and how they’re going to know about you. And YouTube became very popular for us in the early days, basically getting our name out there by putting some examples of our training YouTube. And that kind of grew an awareness about what we did.

Virginia Y
It’s so cool that you also mentioned YouTube, because this is so one of the channels that you use. But there’s so many I don’t even know how to do that. You’re everywhere. You’ve got your Instagram account, and you’re driving there, you’ve got your YouTube account, and just so many different streams. And I’m amazed how you manage to all of these?

Karl Taylor
Well, I certainly don’t do it on my own.

Virginia Y
Yeah, because otherwise you would have gone crazy.

Karl Taylor
We have a staff in the business. So we have people here that work on video editing people that work on the website, people that work on analytics, and marketing. And we also have people here that work on social media. So whilst I try to comment as much as possible on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc, I can’t do all of it. So other people also comment and do the post some things and maintain a schedule on social media, although I would stay and I think this is important to point out to any photographers that are starting out or looking for inspiration is that don’t get too wrapped up in social media, because it is not the be all, and end all have a successful career in photography. I know many photographers that are very successful, and they don’t even use social media, you have to prioritize what is important to you. Now, social media is very useful if you’re trying to reach that social general public audience. But that is not necessarily very useful to you, if you are trying to be, say, a fashion photographer or an advertising photographer, you may be better spending your time trying to deal directly with art directors or magazine editors, and actually a more businesslike approach in some ways. And I think that sometimes people become overwhelmed with social media because they feel they have to deal with, they feel they have to project a certain image. And it becomes quite strained. I think in many ways, sometimes it would be better to step back from that and actually just concentrate on your portfolio and your work and let your great work that you develop, then do the talking for you if you know what I mean.

Virginia Y
That sounds awesome. It’s actually great advice. That’s the funniest part. When you’re interviewing an educator, you are writing down your questions. And before you are ready with the text, they have already answered your question.

Karl Taylor
I listened to your interview with Daria Belek over who I know. And that was a really nice interview actually was really good very much. And I saw that she was also your guest.

Karl Taylor
Yes. Well, that’s why I listened to her because she was coming on my show on our talk show. Because I really was amazed with her fashion work. I thought it was very inspiring, young lady, then I saw she was on your talk show. So I listened to that episode. And also amber grow who I’m aware of as well.

Virginia Y
Yeah, she’s also very amazing. Yeah, obviously, you’re captured by this type of magical photography. Yes. Yeah. Have you ever tried to do it by yourself?

Karl Taylor
We do some fashion work, but mostly for our education platform, although I’ve done some commissions for actual brands and labels. But most of my work is actually product photography Simon advertising product photography says mostly still like cosmetics, alcohol electronics that you know, generally still life products

Virginia Y
But you can still have gorgeous magical result, even with products.

Karl Taylor
Yeah, you can in some ways, it’s it’s more challenging. Because you know, if you have a beautiful model, wearing a beautiful dress, and you’re in an amazing location, you should be able to make a good photograph.

Virginia Y
Absolutely.

Karl Taylor
If you’ve got like a pair of headphones or a bottle of whiskey to photograph, it’s not so amazing. You have to make it look amazing and make it look desirable. You have to do this with careful control of light. And that’s why I like the technical challenges of that type of photography. But then when I look at the work of amber gray or Daria bellicose, and you see they bring something else to the fashion photography, they either like Darya for example. It’s got very sort of dark edginess to some of our work that I really, like amateurs got a sort of fantasy sort of style. And I did a fashion project in Iceland six years ago. And I think we were the first people to take a model and fashion to Iceland, and then photograph them all these locations. And then lots of other fashion photographers sort of not copied what we did. But they went there and saw what we did. And then they thought, Oh, great, we need to go to Iceland. So lots of people started going shooting fashion in Iceland. But I was really, really pleased with the images that we produce there. A lot of my fashion work generally takes a sort of slightly side cyphy sort of look to the the style of my work, especially the fashion work that I shoot in the studio, I generally have a very minimalistic clean element to it, but with a slightly sort of dark cyphy edge to some of the images. And that’s just the style that I like. And that’s why I kind of born to dairy is a style as well, although hers is more fantasy, but it has got that dark sort of edge to it as well.

Virginia Y
Tell us more about the Iceland project. I think many people are very interested now.

Karl Taylor
We went to Iceland for a week, I think we took a team of five of us so a couple of cameraman, makeup artist stylist model, we hired to four by four Land Rovers. We had all sorts of equipment with us, we had a trampoline that we had shipped to Iceland, we had big wind blowing machines, and we had them all on the top of the Landrover packed up on the roof rack. And we just tried to get to really remote places where there was these beautiful volcanic landscapes and jagged rocks and various things or different backgrounds, scenery, or waterfalls. And I just wanted to take these incredible landscapes and put a model in the landscape and then use photography to sort of change the landscape a little bit in terms of shoot, the landscapes are slightly darker exposure so that they looked a little bit more ominous. And then flash light with studio lighting with big Paris and wrong color lighting is light the models so that they were at the correct exposure. And they kind of popped out from the landscape. So we ended up with these sort of eerie, sci fi looking landscapes that almost looked like an alien planet. And as a matter of fact, in one of one of the shots that I did, I actually in Photoshop, put a couple of War of the Worlds alien tripods in the background to get it that sort of 19 5060 sort of what was the camera but the name of the actress now but that she was there was a famous actresses, sci fi films were given that type of field to the shot where they were in these beautiful dresses, but in this bizarre, barren landscape, and it was an amazing week, we worked with a fantastic model who worked really hard. I mean, even though the temperature was freezing, sometimes she’s still in between takes, we have this great big woollen jacket for huge big thing. And then she get out of that and then get into the landscape in the blowing Gail freezing cold, we do the few shots, then she get warmed up again. And she was a real real trooper worked really hard on the project, we got some great results,

Virginia Y
Was there something that you didn’t expect it on the shoot that happened and it was a good lesson for you,

Karl Taylor
I think we didn’t plan for the dust, there was quite a lot of dust in the volcanic regions. So we had a we had one of those small drone helicopters to film some of the shoots. And that got damaged with the dust and stopped working we have a lot of dust issues with the wind blowing. So you know, it’d be very careful with the lenses and the equipment and everything. So I think really, the conditions were quite arduous, they weren’t very conducive to making your life easy. So we were working in very cold conditions with wind blowing strongly in some of the locations and trying to film that and present the camera with you know, lots of wind noise. And then the actual shoots themselves with the model becoming so cold and having to stop shooting and the assistance just trying to stop lights from tipping over. And it was certainly difficult on some of the locations it wasn’t always windy. So some other locations were really good was one shot, we went to score FOSS waterfall. And I’d already worked out on the map and the sun position and everything and how is going to light it. And I knew that we needed to be here here at certain time in the morning to nail the shop. And we ended up arriving late. And we had to wait there for I think it was seven hours until the bike and moved around to the other side so that I could work with the light with my studio lighting as well. Because otherwise, the sunlight would have been glaring directly on the model of the shot wouldn’t work. But I knew I wanted to get so I wasn’t willing to leave the location. So I basically made the whole crew sit there for seven hours until someone moved to a new position around where it would work for what I wanted to do.

Virginia Y
Maybe many people would ask right now why would you wait for the sun when you have strokes?

Karl Taylor
It’s a good question. But the fact remains that when you’re shooting outdoors and you’re combining strobes with sunlight, the sunlight is still going to have an effect on the image, there’s going to be an element of sunlight hitting your model your background. And if that sunlight is coming from the front, directly onto model, then she’s going to have trouble facial expression from squinting or the sun glaring in her eyes would be a problem. And from a photography point of view, I want that like the sunlight I want further around the side and around the back. And then I want to like the front on the side, the other side of model with my flashlight. So basically, the problem on that sheet was that the sun was hitting the front of my model. And I needed the sun to hit the side of the model. And when we were meant to arrive in the morning, it would have been hitting right hand side of the model. But we arrived too late. So I had to wait for the sun to move all the way around the sky until it was hitting the left hand side of the model. Yeah, little things like that. Basically,

Virginia Y
I think in the show, we don’t go over many of the technical details. But I think you’re the perfect person for that. You already mentioned the thrill of life and your connection to different brands. Tell us how that this started and maybe go into a little bit of detail so that the people that wants to start a relationship with a certain brand can know what they can expect. How when,

Karl Taylor
okay, I work as an ambassador for Hasselblad, so I’m one of their global ambassadors. So they have about 15 photographers around the world that represent the brand on a global level. And I’m one of those. And what that means is that occasionally we have to give presentations or talks at various events or shows about our experiences with the brand. And we also have to feed back to Hasselblad our experiences on the equipment or new equipment. And you know, just basically let them know of any concerns or any thoughts or things like that, that relationship came about because I purchased my first Hasselblad in 2005, when they came out with the h1 camera with the 22 megapixel back, that was my first digital camera. Before that, I’ve been shooting a medium format film on Mira said six, seventh and large format signer five by four inch film in the studio. So I’ve been shooting film for many, many years. And then digital became to a decent quality with the Hasselblad age one. So invested in that system. So I was one of the early adopters of the Hasselblad digital system. And then throughout the years, I think they just seen my work and follow my work. And they approached me about doing an ambassadorial role for them. And then they also asked me to help them consult for them on trainings, so on their videos that they put out on their website, and they asked me if I could help them with being a presenter on some of those videos, or scripting those videos or explaining to them what they should be talking about it so that it was clear to the audience from my perspective as an educator. So I still work with those guys. And then I also work with brown color lighting company, because I’ve used their lighting for a lot of my work because they have very fast flash duration, which is really good for my motion work and liquid work where I need to freeze liquid, or fast moving objects really quickly freeze them perfectly for for advertising images. So again, they asked me to consult and assist them with their training program, and help them deliver educational videos about their brand and their products. And I also do the same for men for auto and Adobe, as well from time to time. So they basically just brands that have recognized my position as an educator in the industry, I recognize that as an educator, I explain things clearly. And precisely. And people seem to quite like the way that I explained things. And they’ve just basically used me to help explain things for them. Basically,

Virginia Y
There are many educators on the market at the moment.

Karl Taylor
There’s quite a few. Yes, there’s a couple of big ones in the USA, they’re mostly coming out of America, I would say we’re obviously UK based. Well, I don’t know if many in the UK, but we’re certainly probably the most prolific ones in Europe. And we also have a large audience in America as well. But I would say that most of the educators, USA based

Virginia Y
Yeah, I completely agree. Because there are many people on the market of education right now. And some of them have real experience and some of them Yes, or not that legit.

Karl Taylor
Yeah, this is always a thing for me, I become quite frustrated with this actually. I mean, you can be a good teacher, if you’re able to impart knowledge well and help people understand things. But my perspective on it is that you can’t really impart knowledge, if you don’t have the experience or you don’t own the knowledge yourself. And I think that’s why people and certain brands have respect for what we do. Because I’ve come from a long term professional career in photography, before I became an educator. And I also still continue operating as a professional commercial photographer, as well. So my experience and what I’m teaching is basically born from knowledge that I’ve acquired, yet there are many, it seems there are many other educators that position themselves as educators, yet their knowledge is more limited, or their experiences more limited. And, and I struggle with that sometimes in understanding what’s the credibility behind what they’re teaching, if they’ve not really done it, if you know what I mean,

Virginia Y
I actually have an idea. Why don’t we right now make a list of the things that we have to look for when we’re choosing education, no platform or a person who’s going to mentor us? Sure. You can give an example. And then it’s going to be my turn, and then it’s going to be you again, I think it’s going to be a call

Karl Taylor
just before that’d be fun.

Virginia Y
Yeah. So nice. We can make it a blog post afterwards. Okay. Yes, we actually did made this list and you can hear it next Wednesday, or you can go to photography podcast.net and see it right now, because it’s published in our blog section and it’s waiting for you. I bet you can already tell that this part of the interview is over. And yes, so we’ll be back next Wednesday with the second part of the interview. I cannot wait to see you in our Facebook group called fashion photography lovers. And our next meeting is the upcoming Wednesday.