Sean Tucker interview where he discusses photography, his journey from pastor to photographer, running a YouTube channel, street photography, filmmaking, cameras, lenses, and gear, spirituality, and much more. A very special thanks to Sean for appearing on the Done Over Perfect show.
Sean Tucker interview where he discusses photography, his journey from pastor to photographer, running a YouTube channel, street photography, filmmaking, cameras, lenses, and gear, spirituality, and much more. A very special thanks to Sean for appearing on the Done Over Perfect show.
- [Chris] Today's video podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.- A lot of YouTube is people going, I need a 10-minute video, so I'm gonna drop a minute of good advice and have to pad around it. And I'd try as far as possible.(laughs)- No, I don't know what you're talking about there, Sean.(upbeat lively music) Hi, everyone and welcome to the Done. Over Perfect podcast. My next guest that we're about to meet is, in my opinion, the single greatest photography educator that I've ever come across, and I don't say that lightly. His teaching style, his philosophical approach to the why of photography and his ability to craft together a story is on a whole other level. I'm talking about, of course, photographer, YouTuber, and author, Sean Tucker. Sean, are you there?- I'm here.- [Chris] Are you there with us? How are you doing?- I'm good.- So you have had quite a journey, right, as a pastor living in South Africa, all the way up to living in the UK as a professional photographer, a YouTuber with almost half a million subscribers, and now an author with a book coming out, I believe, on August 16th. How did you get there? How did that journey happened for you?- I was born in the UK, but my family moved over to Africa when I was very young, about six months old actually. And then my parents divorced when I was about four years old. And my dad, I didn't have a lot of contact with him, and I think anyone who's growing up without a father figure in your life you kinda go looking for those people. When I was a kid, it all started with fascination around ghost stories and then sort of what might be going on that we can't see. I remember that always being something I was drawn to. That then the church sort of fit in that, that space in my head as a kind of 10, 11, 12-year-old. But then moving on, I sorta got involved in the church on my own terms. I did a gap year after high school where I joined kind of a music and drama group that traveled around South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana and Namibia. And did just, you basically set up in a town. You'd visit all the schools for the week and you'd sorta do shows in the schools, invite them to the church on the Friday where we do like a big show and then try and sort of feed them into the youth groups in the church and then we bounced to the next town. And I remember like really enjoying the positive impact we were able to have on kids. So many of the kids that would come to shows like that were kids like me, who come from a divorced home or didn't have a very good family life and felt lonely or didn't have a lot of friends and felt disconnected. So the fact that we were able to hang out with these kids and just inject some positivity back into their lives was a big deal, so yeah. Then I went into the church for a good decade.- Wow--- I did a degree first in psychology, which I finished up. Because my family again was sort of saying, we're fine that you wanna do this, but we don't think working for the church is a real thing. So you have to go get a real degree so you can get a real job.- Right.- So that's why I went and did a psychology degree. And then after that, I took myself to seminary after that and did four years in seminary and was ordained. And it was all just to kind of speak to young people. That's my job, was always 35-year-olds and under, and I got a real kick out of standing up and teaching and trying to encourage and inspire young people to take a look at their lives and tweak it and better it or to give them a bit of encouragement and tell them that they're on the right track. And if they're not, to help them get on the right track. So when I kind of left the church, I just turned 30. I got fired from the last church I worked for for being a heretic basically.- Wait a minute. You got fired for being a heretic?- Yeah, I was saying things that they weren't a fan of.- Wow, wow.- In South Africa, particularly obviously, there are huge issues with poverty. We ran a soup kitchen down the road and I would try and bring these guys to church on a Sunday night, and was told can't do that'cause they'll mess up the furniture. And they were installing metal spikes outside the front door, under the awning so that homeless people couldn't shelter there in the rain. It kinda came to a head. I stole the church bus to go and bus people out of--- Wait a minute, hold on a second. You stole the bus?(laughs)- Well, yeah, I mean, in 2008, I think it was. South Africa has, every now and again you'll have these sort of violent xenophobic attacks that will kick off. So if people coming in from Zimbabwe, or from Angola, or from Somalia who is setting up local shops in the area, at some point local people will just feel like, it sucks that we don't have jobs and why are these people here and they can make a living? So they will attack people who come in from other countries. And it's literally burning down businesses and killing people in the streets. So this was kicking off. And when it kicks off, it kicks off really fast. It spreads like wildfire. So I just said to the church, we need to bus people out now 'cause people are dying. And they told me no, 'cause the bus will get damaged and God gave us the bus, we need to look after it. I'm like, I think this is what God wants us to use the bus for us, so I stole the bus and we bus people out. But what broke my heart was, is we had to take these people to schools because school halls were the places that were putting up beds to take care of people. I couldn't take them back to the church. And for me, that was a break point where I just started standing up on a Sunday and saying, guys, we're full of crap. Like, what we say we believe is nothing to do with the way that we live. And either we change or I don't what we're about anymore. And I was told to stop saying that or I'm out basically. So I said, you'll have to fire me, and they took me up on that. So that's how I left.- I am speechless.- The church. Yeah, it was a long road. I mean, I worked for seven churches all in all. I made myself pretty unpopular in a lot of them. And I think after being fired from that last one, I just made the choice not to go back because the only reason to stay for me at the time was to make a difference and push things forward and try and change the institution. And I've realized by that point that actually, for as much blood, sweat, and tears I poured out and how much it had cost me doing this, I've made no difference at all. And that was when a friend said to me, hey, you've gotta start from scratch. So you might as well pick something you like doing. You gotta rebuild a career. So that was when I, I had already been doing video work on the side of church for--- Oh, you were doing videos, okay.- Video came first for me, just because working for sort of corporates, I was doing sort of training videos on the side. I even did a training video for an abattoir once, which was quite an eye-opening experience. And that was all kind of to subsidize my income because the church obviously didn't pay very much. And I also knew, I knew in the back of my head I wasn't gonna last in this either because I would leave,'cause I get too frustrated or I get kicked out for saying stuff I was saying and refusing to kinda toe the line.- So you ended up in the UK and then you came from a video background, you see you enjoyed video, when was that moment when you picked up a still camera and started going through that journey?- Well, it was still back in South Africa. So when I left the church in South Africa, I had the video stuff but I was already getting into photography for myself, so I decided to try and do like, started a little freelance thing that was a mix of photography and video, and also I would build websites and I would sort of set up social media platforms. So I was kinda aiming for sort of small to medium businesses that needed an online presence, where I could be like a one solution package that could, I think at the time I was using WordPress, I would set up a WordPress website and I would shoot a bunch of photos of their businesses and portraits of the people who ran it, do a little promotional video, like a three-minute thing, set them up at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, whatever it was. So I would get them off the ground, then train them how to use it. That was my idea. And it really didn't work.- Right.- Because no one wants to hire me. I wasn't very good at the time. I was just starting out. I had a lot to learn. So for three years, after the church, my main source of income was waiting tables. I had to go back to waiting tables. I mean, I've always had a creative bent with whatever I did. I mean, when I was in the church, the stuff that really got me excited was being able to speak from a stage, I think is a very creative medium, writing those talks and delivering them. And I was also a musician at the time. So I was always looking for creative outlets. So the photography and the video side was definitely the thing I wanted to lean into. I knew that there weren't a lot of opportunities in South Africa for that kinda work and that's when I chose to come back to the UK because I knew my opportunities would be more. And then I went to work for an American consultancy as well based with their London office, where I was kinda heading up their photography and video for their Europe, Middle East, and Africa offices. Kinda after that job was where I jumped to working for myself, yeah.- You can't ignore the fact that you have this incredible spiritual background, working and the experience that you had in South Africa. What effect has that had on your photography and on your composition and on the choices that you make when you are shooting?- I mean, it affects how I see photography, definitely. And that's the place I like to teach from as well. I'm trying to get people to think about this is more than f-stop and ISO, this is that you're trying to communicate, you're trying to talk, you're trying to see better as well so that you can capture things better. So awareness about ourselves, what we're interested in, about life and how life works, about human beings and how complicated we are helps us do things like take a better portrait. It helps me be a more empathetic photographer when I'm taking someone's portrait hopefully. It helps me look for other levels when I'm taking photographs, rather than just good lighting, pretty dress, whatever those sort of surface things. I'm looking for how can I convey something a little bit more than that? It definitely colors how I see, even in filmmaking as well, I suppose it's exactly the same it. Like, why am I talking about the things I'm talking about? Yes, I'll do practical tutorials on my YouTube channel, but I also wanna talk about how to, like good philosophers used to do. How do we hack life so we can make this thing work a little better for us? How can we ask ourselves tougher questions and get more honest with ourselves all the time, strap on some more self-awareness that helps me to get rid of those blind spots and to, that those are the things I care more about. And I almost feel like photography and filmmaking, even though I do care about them and I enjoy them, are a little bit of a Trojan horse for me to talk about more important stuff. And I'd love my work, the images that I take to move in that direction as well, although I'm not a good enough photographer yet to do that. I've got a lot to learn, and especially about what I wanna say. I've got a lot of the techniques down, but I think that's really, it's quite easy to get the techniques down, but that is the starting point. So many photographers get to that point where they go, gosh, I've got a lovely camera now and I know a lot of tricks and I still have no idea what to point this thing at. Like, that's where the work comes in, I think, and that's the work I feel like I'm pushing into in these years now.- One of the most important things I've read about photography was on the About Page on your YouTube channel actually, where you said, I wanna focus more on the why of photography and not the how. Can you expand on that?'Cause that just is so important, I think, for a lot of my viewers who, some of them are just starting out and on this journey and they're looking at your work. What would you, how would you address that?- It's important to say there's nothing wrong with the how and it's good to know and I think that's where we all have to start. We have to start with that stuff. So any beginner in photography will want to begin with gear reviews and pixel peeping and understanding what megapixels do if you add a bunch more or every portrait we'd take is shot wide open so you get tons of bokeh'cause that's an exciting thing to be able to do. And then we get to strobes and we're using 20 strobes and jelling everything with an inch of its life so there's multiple colors. Like, that's the good stuff. It's a great, exciting time where we learn that stuff, but it also, certainly in my case, learning all that stuff helped me to make a bigger mess because--- Really?- While you're experimenting with all that stuff, it's very difficult to be consistent in your work. It's very difficult--- Oh, right.- To put a message into your images overall, because every image becomes an individual experiment and another technique. So my message, if you look at my overall work, becomes quite confusing and mismatched. And I think any artist as they grow up, this happens if you're open to it, it happens organically. And you'll feel this stage where you've learned so many techniques, but you've realized it's not giving you really what you want in your work and there's something else to be looked at. You can't watch another YouTube tutorial that's gonna give you another trick, that's gonna show you how to do a 20-shotBrenizer stitched with crazy depth of field. And then you're gonna, I found it, now my work has meaning. That's not where meaning comes from. It's a nice trick and maybe you'll use that in those images with meaning, but the meaning comes from the why. Why am I taking this photograph? Not how, why. What am I pointing my camera at? What do I wanna say with this? Who am I? What's my worldview that makes me wanna point this camera at this person? Who is that person I'm pointing at? What's their story? Because that's the human connection stuff that makes us stare at an image a little bit longer, I think.- And clearly you are at a part of your journey where you are deeply embedded in the why and you've kind of passed through those things where you did corporate headshots, you did the standard going into an office building and setting up the lighting and doing all that. Where you're at right now, and you made a video about this once, where you talked about knowledge gaps, what is your biggest knowledge gap right now?- I mean, in terms of genres, I'd say I'm a pretty terrible landscape photographer.(laughs)- Okay, right.- I mean, I've tried it for fun myself. I don't really know what I'm doing in that space. The biggest knowledge gap I have that I wanna attack next because it's where I wanna go is documentary photography and storytelling more specifically. Bu that I don't feel that's a technical knowledge gap; I feel like that's an experience knowledge gap. That's stuff you can't learn by reading a book. You have to learn by asking for permission, getting access, going, spending time, taking a ton of bad images, coming back and looking at them and over a few years. So that's kinda the next bit of the journey for me, is going down that road and learning by doing, rather than kind of learning more technically or picking up the right book.- Your YouTube channel, I mean, and this I can speak directly to you 'cause it's hard work. The type of videos that you put out are not the normal type of YouTube algorithm-friendly videos at all. Do you ever, have you ever had times where you've poured your soul and heart into a video and it's maybe not getting the views or it's not getting the reaction, has that ever happened to you?'Cause a lot of YouTubers are gonna be watching this right now with that same problem.- Long ago, I stopped thinking that's anything to do with the quality of the video. I mean, think about it this way. So if someone goes and watches a video that you make and they decide, well, this is rubbish, and they don't bother watching anymore and they go off and watch something else, you still get that view because they clicked play. So a play is not necessary, it could be a like or a dislike at that point, so if you don't get a lot of views, it means a lot of people just didn't bother to click to watch in the first place because maybe they were doing something else or watching something else or they've moved on in their tastes. It wasn't that you made a bad video directly. I've made the same videos the whole way along. I've let them evolve as they should evolve and I'm happier with what I'm doing more than I ever have been. And my channel went through slow growth and then it went through quite a lot and now it's tailed off again. But that's with the quality only getting better for me. So that graph doesn't match what I think I'm doing in the videos. And it would be a huge mistake, and I think this is where people lose track on their channels, is it'd be a huge mistake now for me to try and change what I'm doing because I think my audience is leaving. Even if they are leaving because they might be leaving for completely different reasons and I'd be about to sell out what I believe I'm doing, instead of saying, no, I believe in this, I believe in doing it this way, I've thought about it, I back myself, and if it doesn't meet the right audience but I just have a smaller core audience who cares, I'm happy with that. It's not about, I mean, the other thing is that that big number, that big subscriber number is a fiction, it's not real. So if you go and look on any of your favorite YouTube channels, go look at their subscriber number and then go look at the regular amounts of views they get on their videos. The bigger channels it's always around about 10% or under. It's certainly true for me. If I've got almost half a million subscribers on my channel, I'm getting regular views from maybe 40,000 of those regularly, in which case that means those subscriber numbers as someone who said, one day I'll subscribe, I'm interested in what this guy has to say, and then they forgot about you. You gave them a tutorial that was useful on a day and they hit subscribe and they don't remember you since. If you try and serve that big number that's fictional, you're going to lose what you believe that you're supposed to be doing and--- Amen!- And you're serving people who don't know.- You are a pastor. Amen! That's right. You're absolutely correct. For those of you that have not seen Sean's videos, just, we'll pause this video, go watch any one of his videos. It doesn't matter which one. There's not a lot of jump cuts. And as a, I didn't want to call myself a fellow YouTuber, but as another person that makes YouTube videos, I can tell you that when you get into the editing room and it's yourself and you're talking and having to keep the dialogue going and cut and to make those decisions, but you have an incredible ability to talk to a point, remain on point, say it almost perfectly that first time around. And so I'm asking for all of my viewers who are struggling with this, how do you do it so well? Is it incredible preparation, script writing? What do you do with these videos that makes them so just flow so well?- I should say, when I was in high school, I was terrified of public speaking.- [Chris] Really?- It would really freak me out, yeah. So when I started to work for the church, I realized I'm gonna have to learn how to do this'cause it's a big part of the job. And in seminary, you have what are called homiletics classes. Just means preaching classes. So for the first 45 minutes, if it was my turn that week, I'd have to stand up and I would have to give a message to the class for 45 minutes then we take a five-minute break. Then we come back in, and for the second 45 minutes, the class would then shred everything you just did. But you're not allowed to speak. You can only listen and take it in. You can't justify anything. You can't explain yourself. You just have to hear how they take it. So you talk strange, you repeat yourself a lot, you hold your hands funny, you make a weird face, that point that you said I didn't believe, that story you told I don't buy it. And listening to that stuff is like the best crash course in learning how to communicate or tell a story that I could ever have had. So that helped me communicate better for sure. I basically used the idea of, tell them what you're gonna say, say it and tell them what you just told them. And I do that kind of an introduction. Here's what I'm gonna talk to you about. Then I'm gonna use the three points to drive that home, roughly speaking. And at the end, I'm gonna give you almost a benediction. If I'm talking to you about how to take portraits with more meaning, I'm not gonna couch it in very obviously religious language'cause it's not the format, but I'm gonna say something like, and not maybe in these words, but I'm gonna make you feel, may you be able to get out there with your camera and take portraits that make you feel you've done something worthwhile, may you be able to draw people out who sit in front of you and help them be more vulnerable in your presence so you can catch something special together, I'm wishing you well on the topic that we've just spoken about. So using that formula, I will script everything word-for-word, but I don't use those words. So it's not to make sure that I say things exactly the way I've scripted, but I'd write it out in full to make sure that I've processed the ideas and that it's worth someone's time.'Cause I think a lot, being a little bit critical, a lot of YouTube is filler. A lot of YouTube is people going, I need a 10-minute video, so I'm gonna drop a minute of good advice and have to pad around it. And I'd try as far as possible.(laughs)- No, I don't know what you're talking about there, Sean.- No, no, no, not yet. But I try as far as possible to sort of craft an actual message so that, no point in this, I want you to stay for the whole. And sometimes, especially through lockdown where I couldn't go out and make films, I sometimes sat on the couch and talk for 20 minutes. To hold someone just talking for 20 minutes is hard to do, so you better make sure you've got good stuff to say. When I'm filming it, I basically, when I scripted out, I have it in kind of rough paragraphs of like eight to 10 lines. I'll have the script, but I will pick it up and I'll read a paragraph and then I'll put the piece of paper down and I will say that paragraph to the camera maybe two or three times. And it's not to remember all the exact wording, but I just kinda know where I'm starting and where I'm finishing. And maybe a couple of words or phrases will jump out that I will remember and that's it And then I'll say it.'Cause I trust myself that I know it, I've written it, it came out of my head in the first place. And the exact wording isn't the important thing now; it's looking like it comes from me genuinely. And when I'm thinking about the wording, you can watch me genuinely thinking about it so it feels real. So even though I've done the work, I'm still picking the wording as I go through'cause I'm not trying to remember the exact wording. And then I'll pick the best of those two or three takes and that will be how I'll paste it together, if that makes sense.- So when you're finished and you've got the footage, you obviously, are you doing your own editing? Do you do that work yourself or--- Yeah.- Wow.- Yeah. I mean, I know a lot of people hand it over, and I have thought about it a lot. I just feel like it's, for me, as long as I can do it, I will do it because it's as much a part of the storytelling as what I'm saying for me, especially when I'm doing documentaries with other photographers. The way that I cut that together, my choice of music and timing and B-roll and where I put those interview sections and my style of editing is part of that story. And to hand it over, I think it would take me a lot of time to explain that to somebody and to get them to, not that I'm a brilliant editor, but to get the stylistic choice in their head because everyone has their own style of editing. And I don't think my style of editing is a very popular one in the YouTube world. So it would be a case of getting somebody to do what I think is right even though they might be a better editor than me because I wanna protect the tone of what I'm doing.- Sure.- And I might be me being a control freak, absolutely.- I was just gonna say, giving up control.- Yeah, it might be, it might be. It might work out really well. But at the moment, while I can't do it myself, I think I'm gonna hang on to it.- Okay, all right. Well, let's take a look at your Instagram page here. This is your second one that was put up just recently. Abolish human contact on the sign and you've got two people, one of them wearing a face mask and the other one on a phone. You are out there as a street photographer, observing people out and about more than just about, I think, any other kind of photography. Are you noticing a fundamental shift with smartphones or with the disconnect with human contact being abolished, as you've put in this picture so to speak?- It's hard to tell on Instagram,'cause obviously the details get lost in such a format. But the thing about that particular image, which you'll notice if you take a look, is the guy in the window. Can you see him?- [Chris] Yes, right--- So I just liked the kinda juxtaposition with, I like the colors as well'cause it's Chinatown in London in Soho. So you've got the nice reds and the wood, you've got that guy who sort of stuck behind glass with gloves on and a mask on, you've got the sign in the foreground saying Abolish human contact, and this couple walking across, like it sort of felt quite separated and interesting for that reason. I mean, I know the argument with the phones thing. I don't really have the same point of view. I know a lot of street photographers rail about, oh, everyone's on their phone.- Sure.- I mean, in the '50s, street photographers were moaning about the fact that everyone's got their head in a newspaper.- That's a good point, yeah.- But now, how cool does it look when you get a shot of a guy in a hat with his head in a newspaper? We all want that shot and can't get it. I think everything ages with time. I think in sort of 50 years, where phones aren't the same thing, it's gonna be quite interesting. Especially at night, looking at people who were lighting up our big dumb faces with this screen in our hands are gonna be fascinating shots to people down the road. And it is the world we live in. And I think it's important often to have like a longer view of things than just moaning about the current state of affairs. Get those shots now 'cause they will look different to future generations. And this is the problem, is we all think about the quick gratification of Instagram likes. Will it get the response I want online today? We're not thinking about the long-term and what will this look like way down the road. Maybe when I'm a much better and better known photographer than I am now. So maybe just have more cloud. It's taking the history view of things, I think, changes things.- There's kind of a growing movement of, you have no right to take my picture in public.- Yeah, definitely. I mean, I'm not really a very confrontational street photographer. I don't really get in people's faces, so I very rarely have that interaction with people. But yeah, it's definitely true. Things have changed. I think in Europe, particularly with the GDPR that's come in, I think people have misunderstood what GDPR is, especially in countries like Germany and France particularly where they think that having their photograph taken violates GDPR, which it doesn't. To violate GDPR, you'd have to publish their photograph with their full name and date of birth and a bunch of information around it. It's an information packet of data. But a bit of a photograph on its own with no data to it, with no name to it, that's anonymous is not a violation of GDPR. And street photography, in all countries in Europe, as far as I'm aware, with the exception of maybe Hungary, is still legal. It's just that the general population will kick off faster because there's a greater suspicion around photography and what it's being used for and their protection of data. I think photographers who were much more confrontational through the '70s or '80s can't do that. You can't shoot like that now. It's not possible because the world has changed.- [Chris] Sure.- And photography is a lot more ubiquitous and everyone has a camera on them. And people are suspicious about what are you doing with my image. Which I think has necessitated an interesting shift in the style of street photography'cause a lot more street photographers are embracing the scene now and photographing space and interactions within space rather than going off to single subject. Maybe in the long run it's a shame that we've lost that more confrontational style of street photography. Maybe it's a good thing. I don't really have an opinion. But maybe something interesting and new will take its place. So we don't necessarily lose everything. It's just the shift that's taking place.- What's the first thing you look for? You've got your gear, you're out, and you're starting to look at people, what's going through your head? What are you looking for?- I'm not looking for people, first, is the truth. I'm usually looking for, which is why I'm not a street photographer really. I'm looking for interesting light and shadow. That's what draws me. So I'm often walking around looking for where interesting shapes are being made by the shadow. And this is a big thing that photographers, it's always a big turning point for a photographer where they suddenly click, that we don't see like cameras see. The minute they can see what the camera sees, rather than their own eye. Because when I'm walking around, my eye can see into the deepest shadows and the brightest highlights. There is no real contrast. But I know my camera can't do that. So I'm using a limitation that the camera has where I have to choose, am I gonna expose my highlights or my shadows? If I expose my highlights, which I do, I'm gonna have very dark, black shadows which will create interesting shapes. So it's seeing with the reduced dynamic range of my camera while I'm walking around. What shapes will be created if I expose it correctly? And then when I've got that space in that interesting light and shadow, I'm camping it to watch what moves through, who's walking around. And it almost doesn't matter who it is. I'm often just catching people for a sense of scale in that space or a bit of foreground interest perhaps, but they're often in shadow themselves so there are anonymous, which works quite well for the way we necessarily have to shoot in a lot of parts of the world at the moment.- Let's switch a little bit. I know that it's about the why, but the gear. When you talk about gear, you get views. So I got gear iguana, right? And so I gotta ask, what are you using? What's your basic setup when you're out and about shooting street photography?- Street photography these days is just the little Ricoh GR III.- GR III.- I've got it here.- Let's see it.- Which has a fixed 18 mil lens in it because it's an APS-C, that means it's a 28 mil equivalent.- [Chris] That's it? That's all you're bringing with you?- That's it. And it could fit in the pocket. No one cares if they see me out and about with this. I just looked like a confused tourist.- Right, yeah.- I can snap away all day with this and no one cares. But the reason I like it is because it's got a little dial on the front here for shutter speeds, a little dial on the back here for aperture. So once I got my ISO set, and you have to shoot with the screen because there is no viewfinder on it. So I've got my expose a preview set and they can literally just be dialing in shutter speed, aperture all day and firing, all with one hand. Couldn't be simpler to use, yeah. So usually what I'll do is run around, shoot for a couple of hours, find a coffee shop, Wi-Fi stuff across, edit everything on the phone, and then share. I mean, I've done big prints for exhibitions with images I've just edited on my phone. Just Lightroom Mobile, yeah.- So you use Lightroom Mobile and your phone. See, I have not stepped into that world yet. I find it hard, but you're able to make that work and--- It's not a new phone. You see, it's the Galaxy Note Nine, but it's got a little stylus which is pressure sensitive.- Oh, there you go.- So it actually gives you quite a lot of fine control while you're kinda editing in Lightroom Mobile. But it's Lightroom CC. So it also means that if I'm not sure about something, I mean, my edits are usually 30 seconds. I try to get it in camera anyway, so it's just tweaks. But if I wanna check something, when I get home, I just fire up Lightroom CC and it's all synced there anyway so I can go and have a closer look and tweak if I need to. But it's very rare that I have to do that.- I get the feeling you don't do a lot of raw file manipulation in post-production, right, or do you?- I mean, I shoot raw but I don't do a lot to it. It will be basic exposure and curves, a little bit of color work if I'm pushing something out in color in terms of the color channels, little bit of tweaking in there, and it's out really. I mean, sometimes I might deepen some shadows with a little bit of dodge and dodge and burn or something, but that's everything. I mean, that's for street, though. I mean, when it goes to portraitures, that's a separate thing. Like, that's obviously, I can spend an hour in an image--- Sure.- In portraiture, but that's a different beast.- What do you use for portraiture? What would be the basic setup gear-wise for that?- I've got a Sony a7R IV. And I shoot all my portraits on 50 mil. Until recently, I was using the Zeiss 55 1.8 for everything. But I've just picked up the new Sony 15 mil 12.- Do you like that one?- Yeah, it's great. It's really good. I mean, the reason I got it was because with this portrait project I mentioned that I'm just starting now, there's gonna be a lot of low light stuff. I needed to have something that would really monster the low light work. And 1.8 is great, but 1.2 is better. So I thought, let me just back myself and make sure that I've got kind of a no excuse bit of kit. It's the only time I've spent that much money on a lens, though. That's the first time I bought a G Master, anything fancy like that. Everything is normally kind of the mid-level stuff'cause it gets the, the other thing is with portraits, if I'm in my studio, I'm shooting at about 2.8, f2.8 anyway, I'm not shooting at 1.4 or 1.2 because I don't want eye in focus, nose out, I want the whole plane of the face in and the back of the head blurred. That's about 50 mil 2.8 at the distances I shoot. So I don't need that 1.2 for that work, I need it for kind of those specific low light stuff when they come up.- If you were only to have one camera and one lens, what would you have? And that would be as if that's it for the rest of your life kinda thing. You cannot change. That's the rest of your journey, is gonna be this one camera and this one lens. What would you pick?- It would be a full frame, something with a 50 mil. That would be--- With a 50 mil.- That would be forever, yeah. I mean I do shoot 28 on the street. 35 is kinda my sweet spot out and about. Portrait's at 50 mil. And I can shoot straight at 50 mil. So if I had to choose, it would be some, I really don't care about the brand, but it'd be some nice full frame something rather with a solid 50 prime on it would be everything I need, I think.- There is a level of inspiration that can come from looking at your photos or looking at the work you've created, but what I think is an even more valuable level of inspiration is to hear about when it didn't go right for you and how did you press through it.- It's very easy to look at somebody who people know online and think that, like, it's a success story. But honestly, I mean, I still, I know it could all evaporate tomorrow for reasons outside of my control. And I am still not yet a successful freelance photographer. I haven't managed that. So I've worked in-house for a few companies and I was lucky to do that, although the work was often soul destroying stuff. I mean, shooting a production line of sofas every day. We gotta get three 50 sofas with the same seven angles, all lit exactly the same way and cut out onto a white background and that's your daily job, that's not creative. That just becomes a technical production line. But when it comes to my own work, like whether it's work I do out and about or whether it's the portrait work I do, I don't really get paid very much for, very often for the portrait work I do. I don't get asked to do it. I do it 'cause I love it. I think I have the skill set there. But when it comes to marketing that work to clients, I've never managed that. So it's not even a case of when have I failed? I'm still failing. I still don't have that worked out. What I would love to be known for, which is more narrative, storytelling, photography, people-focused stuff that includes a bit of documentary and a bit of portraiture, I have a long way to go and I've only failed so far. And it's just a case of, I mean, the thing I tell myself is just keep moving. I don't have the answers. It hasn't worked yet. I haven't worked out how to make it work yet. And I've been a photographer for 12 years now. I still haven't managed to do that. But it's still on my radar, it's still what I wanna do, I'm keeping my head above water with a mix of other things and I'm going to keep moving. I'm gonna keep teaching myself skills. I'm still gonna keep asking myself questions about what I'm gonna point the camera at. And I'm gonna keep trying until hopefully something comes together. And even if it doesn't come together, even if it doesn't work out, and I never actually reached that goal, I'm happy with the way I spent my life because I took my time going out to try and teach myself something I was interested in, I got fairly good at it, even if it didn't receive like huge success worldwide, and that's how I spent my spare hours, was going after something and enjoying the process of it. And that's the big thing, I think, is if you don't teach yourself to enjoy the process of learning, then failure becomes unbearable. But if you can teach yourself to enjoy the process, failure might be the result, but the process the whole time was something you enjoyed. And it just meant the result didn't come the way you wanted it to, but that was never in your control in the first place. So I would say, you have to ask yourself, are you willing to risk and try for this thing, even if it doesn't turn out exactly the way you want? Can you be happy that you gave it a go and be happy with the way you spent your time and rinse every little bit of joy out of the doing of it while you were going for it?- And you had mentioned you had lost your dad, you had, when you were younger, he went away. And has events like that helped? Has it hurt your creativity? Is it something that you are struggling with as well with your work and what you're trying to accomplish?- I made a video a little while ago called Embrace Your Shadows, which was kind of off the back of how do we expose a camera? So that was ostensibly the topic. If you expose for a good highlight, it means that everything else is gonna fall into dark shadows. But shadows are good, because shadows shape the light. They help us tell a better story. If it was just light, it would be a white frame. It wouldn't have anything to say. You need the shadows. And I think about life like that. I think you need the shadows to tell a good story. So whether it is, and yeah, definitely, the big rejections in my life are definitely the things that have been incredibly painful while going through them, but have definitely forged me. And that's whether it was my dad leaving home when I was four years old or whether it was my wife leaving very suddenly in January and not wanting to say why, like those incredibly painful episodes that I've been through and am going through, I know that if I stay present to them, they've got things to teach me about me and they've got things to teach me about life and about human beings and about how complicated things are. And I know that on the back of all that I will look back at it and say that even though, I wouldn't wish it on anybody and I don't, I'm not happy I went through it, but I am happy with the results if I stay present to it and learn what it has to teach me. I've read quite a lot about different spiritualities and one of the common themes you get in all spiritualities is that the only times we're growing as human beings are in times of great love or great pain, and especially great pain. Because any time that we are, things are okay, we've kinda got control of stuff, things are fairly predictable, we can start to coast, we go into autopilot, we don't ask ourselves tough questions, we don't change. Life is manageable. But the minute we, someone close to us dies, or we lose a career, or someone leaves us and the relationship falls apart, everything is thrown out of whack, all the predictability, all the I know what happens next, or I know how to do this goes out the window and we're thrown to a very dark place of where we have to decide, hang on a minute, what is the important stuff to me? If I'm gonna build this back, how am I gonna build it back better? Who am I? What do I want? How do people work? Now that I've had this happen to me, what does that tell me about people and about our collective pain and the ways that we treat each other well or badly? And I just think used well those shadows can only forge us if we accept them when they come. And that's the hard part. It doesn't mean be happy with them'cause no one should be happy with them. They're painful. But accept them for what they are and let them forge us. I hope that bleeds through into everything I do. And it definitely has bled through into this book that's come out. I think a big part of this is, I mean, there's a whole chapter on shadows. And it was funny actually, because I had literally finished writing this book the week before my wife left. And, which is good timing in a way because I don't think I would've been in a place to write creatively, generating new ideas, if that was happening. But then in about March, it had gone through rounds of copy editing and changes and it was coming back to me so that I had to reread it and make sure that the corrections that they were suggesting that I actually wanted those changes, little things. So I had to read through the whole book again. And I got to that chapter on shadows in the middle of a dark shadow for myself and I read that chapter and I was in floods of tears, obviously because of the pain that I was going through, but because like, everything I've wrote is now is now true and tested again. And it's like, yes, that helps me here and now. So myself six months before, before that had happened, was talking to me six months down the road after this painful thing had happened and everything I'd written made sense and helped in that moment, which was more confirmation for me that, yeah, I do, I'd buy this stuff, time to put it into practice again and learn more from it again.- [Chris] "The Meaning in the Making." And I love that title. What day is it coming out? Is it 10th of August?- August 10th, yeah, is the global release. So US and Canada, you should get physical books shipped pretty soon after that. If you ordered digital copies through Kindle or the rest of it, it'll be released on August 10th. The UK and Europe, there's slight delays on shipping because of COVID and other things. So they will probably get books probably middle of September, physically. But all their digital copies will arrive August 10th as well.- I cannot wait to see it really. That's awesome. And I would ask you one more question before we go. You made a video awhile back called the legacy of your photography and I actually think that's one of your best videos ever.- Thanks, yeah.- And in it, you talk about telling stories to future generations. And my question to you is, Sean, what kind of legacy do you hope to leave?- I think, I mean, if I'm gonna be honest, I think, and I've got a couple of sort of good friends who I journey with and check in with regularly. And two of those friends say to me that you do realize that it's not your photography that's gonna last, it's the things that you say and the things that you write. And I think I know that. Like, I think my legacy is going to be the things that I talk about, whether it's in a book or it's in a YouTube video. That doesn't mean that I don't wanna leave a legacy in photographs as well. And I'd love to be able to do that. And I've got plans to really get deliberate about that too. If my life got lived in a way that I could say something that helps somebody else make something of their life'cause that will all get passed on down the road as well. I'm just trying to work out constantly how I can keep doing that and doing it better, how I can keep talking in a way that helps people get a handle on their lives. And yeah, like I said, I do want the photography to tie into that, but I'm also aware that it's probably not my primary driver and probably not the thing that I would be remembered for above the things that I'm talking about, if that's fair.- It is more than fair. And I happen to agree with you having watched most of your YouTube videos now. I think what you say and your ability to tell a story and your ability to connect in a meaningful way with your audience is going to be your legacy. And I think that will last, outlast anything else. This has been an absolute honor having you on the show, I gotta tell you.- Thanks--- I'm blown away just by what you're saying. I have to actually just watch it back just, I gotta watch it a couple of times. And I know my audience will, too. I am going to have links to all of Sean's resources, his website, his book order page, his Instagram account, YouTube channel of course. If you're not a subscriber, you should check him out, especially some of his earlier work that goes into, if you're trying to learn technique, he's got some wonderful videos on portrait photography, on street photography, on composition, and lighting, and editing. I mean, you pick it, he's got it. But as he's progressed with his channel, his videos have taken a different tone and they've become a hell of a lot more meaningful. And so go learn the photography how from him, but stick around his channel for the why because it's definitely there. And thank you so much, Sean, and I can't wait to see where you go next in your journey for sure.- You're welcome, thanks for having me.- Sure thing. Before we go, I'd like to give a big thanks to today's video sponsor, Squarespace. Squarespace is an online platform that will help you to design, build, and publish your own website and portfolio. I mean, even Sean Tucker uses Squarespace, okay, for his own website. So you know it has to be good. What's great about Squarespace is that your website can be built and published very easily. They have a selection of great designs to choose from and they're optimized for all screen sizes from large desktop monitors to mobile devices. You don't have to do anything to get that setup. It's all included in their wonderful and easy-to-use website design tools that come with your account. Squarespace has agreed to partner with this channel to offer you a free trial and 10% off your first purchase. So start your free trial today at squarespace.com/pal2tech.