My interview and published photos with Digital Photographer Magazine

Back in November, while I was in Australia, I was contacted by a lady called Poz Watson. She was writing an article on cruise ship photography for Digital Photographer Magazine and had been shown my blog.

She wanted to interview me, and for many reasons we did this over email. And over the following weeks I sent pictures as and when I got model releases for them.

The magazine is finally out now and the 2 full spreads of the article look like this:

You cannot imagine how flattering and exciting it is to see my photos and words like this! I wrote a lot in my answers to questions and submitted lots of images and then all this time past, so it's been really interesting to see what was selected.

That massive panorama on the first spread you may recognise from my images of Santorini:

Incredible to have my work selected for a spread like that however Digital Photographer asked for so many images that this particular one had not been emailed in full resolution! So it is pixelated on the page, much to my disappointment seeing as I have a 35MB version of this image!

Although other people contributed to article most of the pictures, certainly in terms of space, are mine and the same with words particularly towards the end where I get the feeling my stories were chosen because I was positive about it all (not like me normally!) and the other contributors had been very honest about hours and pay, subjects, those who know me, will know why I avoided them!

I love how this is a story about being professional in the 'go-pro' area! There are other areas in the magazine where people put their work forward to be published but I was asked to and had more images published as a result!

That's my name! In big letters!

And that's the address where you'll find this blog, amazing!

It's really interesting with the pictures what was chosen. Poz really wanted regular examples like formal studios and gangways but permissions were hard and the whole feel of the article is completely different because it is now mostly photos taken for pleasure, one photographer has even submitted pictures from a stingray tour!

Of all my panoramas they chose the ones that show ships, even though they quote me saying I collected views taken from the ship. This one was taken in Rhodes:

So the only photographs in the whole article that show examples of work done for the job are two from Deep Blue Studios.

I submitted a few samples from Deep Blue and have one friend that I am disappointed didn't get her picture in the magazine however I am delighted that Ivonne did get in. We took these pictures during a Deep Blue training session and as Ivonne is no longer on ship, and we are in touch, I knew that she could turn around a model release fast for me. It was worth her doing so!

Interesting how photographs from the same location are the ones chosen again and again, see this article where my photograph was used in the Mail Online.

Not sure why this one? But ok!

And then the end of the article is basically huge chunks of my words about the things that you learn and generally about it all turning out OK in the end! (Image, I should be on commission!)

It's really great to have this. It shows that this blog has been important too which is wonderful. It doesn't even slightly make me want to go back because I just look at it and go "yeah but it's all dying out now, no one is buying", I don't want to return to a struggling industry. Is it really bad that I have this talent and I feel that it is totally useless now?

Tough times for photographers that's all I can say, particularly if there are photographers reading this and truly thinking about trying ships. However if you're fresh out of college, go for it, the graduate unemployment world is worse!

Clearly I love talking about my time on ships so please contact me if you have any further questions.