In 2014, I was at Photokina in Cologne, Germany, which at the time was still one of those wonderfully overwhelming events where it seemed like the entire photography industry had temporarily relocated into a handful of enormous convention halls. I was there speaking on stages for DJI, Adobe, Fujifilm, and doing the usual Photokina routine: presentations, meetings, running into old friends, talking about photography for twelve hours straight, and consuming the quantity of coffee necessary to make all of that seem like a reasonable thing to do.<\/p>\n
Somewhere in the middle of it, my friend Rafael Pons\u2014Rafa\u2014found me and said he really wanted to talk. He had a crazy idea.<\/p>\n
Now, I\u2019ve learned over the years that when someone begins a conversation with \u201cI have this crazy idea,\u201d you\u2019re probably about to hear one of two things. Either it is, in fact, completely crazy, or you\u2019re hearing the beginning of something genuinely interesting. In Rafa\u2019s case, it turned out to be a little bit of both.<\/p>\n
Rafa and his team in Menorca had created PhotoPills<\/a>, an app that helps photographers plan images around the sun, moon, Milky Way, and night sky. I\u2019ve always loved the fundamental idea behind PhotoPills because it begins in exactly the right place. It doesn\u2019t tell you what photograph to make. It helps you answer a question that has already formed in your imagination. What if the moon appeared behind that building? What if the Milky Way lined up over that mountain? What if the sun dropped into exactly that opening in the skyline? PhotoPills can help you figure out the when and the where, but the what if still has to come from you.<\/p>\n But Rafa hadn\u2019t pulled me aside at Photokina to talk about the app. He wanted to create something else. He wanted to create a photography camp.<\/p>\n Not a conference, and not exactly a workshop. He kept coming back to the word camp because he wanted it to feel comfortable and uncomplicated. He wanted people to come together almost like a family\u2014to learn, share meals, tell stories, stay up too late talking about photography, and make friends around the photographic equivalent of a campfire. And he wanted to bring them all home to Menorca, this small Balearic island off the coast of Spain that he had started calling The Island of Light.<\/p>\n By then, my wife and I had already spent years running photography workshops and tours around the world, so Rafa wanted my advice. We escaped the chaos of the show floor, found one of the little cafeteria areas, grabbed some coffee, and sat down. I did what I thought I was there to do and started asking questions.<\/p>\n What about transportation?<\/p>\n \u201cOh, I\u2019ve got that figured out.\u201d<\/p>\n Okay. What about the hotel?<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, that\u2019s all here.\u201d<\/p>\n Meals?<\/p>\n \u201cGot it.\u201d<\/p>\n Locations? Group sizes? Timing? Logistics? Backup plans?<\/p>\n Every question I asked seemed to have an answer.<\/p>\n Then Rafa handed me what I can only describe as a small book.<\/p>\n He had introduced this thing to me as his crazy idea, so I was expecting something resembling an idea\u2014maybe some notes, a rough itinerary, a few pages of thoughts. Instead, I\u2019m sitting there with what must have been forty, fifty, maybe sixty pages of detailed planning.<\/p>\n And I started reading.<\/p>\n There were pages about accommodations. Pages about transportation. Pages about locations and schedules and meals. I\u2019m pretty sure there were fifteen pages about the hotel alone. Every time I thought I\u2019d finally found the section where Rafa actually needed my help, I\u2019d turn the page and discover that, no, he\u2019d already figured that out too.<\/p>\n Eventually I realized I had absolutely no idea why I was there.<\/p>\n I remember looking across the table at him and thinking, What exactly do you want me to tell you?<\/p>\n He kept asking, \u201cWhat do you think?\u201d<\/p>\n And I kept reading, desperately searching for something intelligent to contribute.<\/p>\n Finally, I slid the whole thing back across the table.<\/p>\n \u201cRafa, you don\u2019t need my help. You\u2019ve already done this.\u201d<\/p>\n I meant it. In fact, he\u2019d planned it better than I probably would have.<\/p>\n What I could do was help him connect some people. I knew photographers who I thought would love what he was building, and I was happy to send some messages and make introductions. More importantly, I told him that when he made this crazy thing real, I wanted to be part of it.<\/p>\n And he did. Here’s all of us at the first PhotoPills Camp in 2017.\u00a0<\/p>\n Twelve Years Later<\/p>\n The first PhotoPills Camp happened. Then another. The idea grew beyond a single event in Menorca and became a community of photographers coming together around the world to learn, explore, collaborate, and help one another create photographs that might otherwise have remained ideas.<\/p>\n Dream shots, basically.<\/p>\n Sometimes literally moonshots.<\/p>\n Sorry. The pun was right there.<\/p>\n And twelve years after that conversation while having coffee at Photokina, I found myself thinking about Rafa and his crazy idea again.<\/p>\n Last week, an extraordinary group of photographers came together in Spain to photograph the total solar eclipse. People like Albert Dros<\/a>, Francesco Gola<\/a>, Antoni Cladera<\/a>, and others had spent months working with the PhotoPills team to prepare for a moment that would last only minutes. There were astronomical calculations, location scouting, weather analysis, equipment decisions, travel logistics, boats, massive lenses, and contingency plans for the contingency plans.<\/p>\n Then I started seeing the photographs and they were incredible.<\/p>\n I messaged Albert and Francesco immediately. You guys absolutely crushed this\u2014hats off. Amazing job.<\/p>\n Albert\u2019s response was essentially: You have no idea.<\/p>\n Apparently Francesco had spent a good portion of the experience puking his guts out.<\/p>\n This was information the photographs had somehow failed to communicate.<\/p>\n I grew up in the Florida Keys and spent a lot of my younger years working on and around boats, so I know seasickness. Once it arrives, you don\u2019t negotiate with it. The ocean has made a decision on your behalf.<\/p>\n Francesco explained that perhaps he shouldn\u2019t have eaten such a large lunch beforehand.<\/p>\n Living out his midday paella fantasy aside, he\u2019s Italian, so naturally my diagnosis was different.<\/p>\n I\u2019m pretty sure the mistake was the cappuccino after lunch.<\/p>\n Whatever the culinary decisions leading up to the event, the reality was pretty extraordinary. After six months of preparation and all of the technology that went into planning the exact position of the eclipse, it ultimately came down to human beings standing on boats in rough seas, hand-holding 600mm lenses<\/a>, pushing ISO values, trying to keep one of the most spectacular astronomical events imaginable inside the frame while also trying not to lose lunch over the side.<\/p>\n And they got the shots. Beautiful ones, while also taking a bunch of PhotoPills Campers\u2014quite literally\u2014along for the ride.<\/p>\n Looking at those images, I kept thinking about the distance between that cafeteria table in Cologne and those boats off the coast of Spain. It started with a question: What if? What if we created something that wasn\u2019t quite a workshop? What if we brought people together differently? What if we created a community around photography, planning, adventure, and friendship?<\/p>\n Twelve years later, there was the answer.<\/p>\n Not the final answer, either. That\u2019s the wonderful thing about big ideas. They tend to create more questions.<\/p>\n The Question Comes First<\/p>\n World Photography Day has me thinking about that a lot this year, because photography itself has always been propelled forward by people asking what if?<\/p>\n What if we could preserve an image made by light? What if cameras<\/a> could become smaller? What if we could capture color? What if we didn\u2019t need film? What if the camera could fit inside something we carried in our pockets? And, today, what if technology could help us spend less time struggling with the process and more time thinking about what we\u2019re actually trying to create?<\/p>\n If those questions lead you toward landscapes, cityscapes, or the night sky, I dig much deeper into that process in Photographing the World: Landscape Photography and Post-Processing<\/a>, Photographing the World 2: Cityscape, Astrophotography, and Advanced Post-Processing<\/a>, and Photographing the World 4: Advanced Landscapes<\/a>.<\/p>\n Photography has been evolving for nearly 200 years, and almost everything about the mechanics of making a photograph has changed along the way. Yet somehow, that original impulse hasn\u2019t changed very much at all. Someone sees something\u2014or imagines something\u2014and wonders whether they can turn it into a photograph.<\/p>\n The tools help us answer the question. They shouldn\u2019t be the ones asking it.<\/p>\n \u201cGreat tools answer questions. Great photographers ask them.\u201d \u2014 Elia Locardi.<\/p>\n That\u2019s an important distinction to me right now. We\u2019re living through another enormous technological shift as artificial intelligence, generative imagery, and computational photography change the creative landscape at a remarkable pace. I don\u2019t find that frightening. I find a lot of it fascinating. I run a technology company, after all. It would be slightly awkward if my official position were that technology was a terrible idea.<\/p>\n What interests me much more than asking what technology can do is asking what technology can help people do.<\/p>\n Those aren\u2019t the same question, and we must not lose track of that.<\/p>\n PhotoPills can calculate exactly where the moon will be months from now, but it doesn\u2019t wake up one morning wondering what that moon would look like behind a particular lighthouse. A modern camera can focus faster than I ever could manually, shoot at absurd ISO values, stabilize enormous lenses, and capture astonishing amounts of information. None of that explains why someone would voluntarily get on a boat with a 600mm lens during rough seas to photograph an eclipse.<\/p>\n That part is still wonderfully, irrationally human.<\/p>\n And I hope it stays that way.<\/p>\n \u201cThe best technology doesn\u2019t replace vision. It amplifies it.\u201d \u2014 Elia Locardi.<\/p>\n The photographs from Spain were a wonderful reminder of that for me. They\u2019re proof that all of these things are capable of coexisting: ambitious ideas, great technology, meticulous planning, friendship, community, human skill, and apparently a heroic disregard for seasickness.<\/p>\n They\u2019re also proof that the what if is still alive and well.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s particularly meaningful to me because, in my own little corner of photography, I\u2019ve been asking a few what-ifs too.<\/p>\n