The Difficult, Expensive, and Sometimes Soggy Reality of Nature Photography
Armand Sarlangue is one of the world’s best aerial landscape photographers, and the latest guest of the Amazing Aerial podcast and masterclass series. However, his life as a travel and landscape photographer is not as glamorous as it seems. He shares some of the more difficult realities of this field with Amazing Aerial Magazine.
Jul 05, 2024
An image of a sandstone butte in Utah, USA. One of Armand’s many beautiful landscapes, which combine his talent for capturing beautiful nature and sharing his artistic vision. © Amazing Aerial Agency / Armand Sarlangue
By Rebecca Duras
On the surface, being a travel photographer seems like a dream job that only a lucky few get to do. Few people would say no to getting paid to travel to the world’s most beautiful locations. However, travel photography comes with its own challenges, including financial, logistical, and emotional. In this article, as well as in his podcast and his masterclass, master landscape photographer Armand Sarlangue shares the reality of his line of work, the beautiful and ugly sides of it.
Armand did not get his start as a nature photographer, even though he’s been interested in photography from a young age. Although long a passionate fan of nature, he started off in the studio with his father, also a photographer, doing commercial work. After his father passed away from cancer, he decided to pursue his passion for nature photography. “At some point you just have to think about what you really want to do now, even if it’s difficult,” Armand says.
Money Matters
Finances were one of the main problems Armand thought about before switching to full-time nature photography, and they are a common struggle for artistic and travel photographers. Travel photos are not as reliable a source of income as commercial photo shoots, which may be less interesting to the photographer, but have a guaranteed payout from the commissioning company.
There is a lot of competition, and it can take a while to establish yourself as a travel photographer worth following and commissioning, placing your first photo or publication. Armand found his inroad into professional travel photography through awards and contests, and speaks more about how he did this in the masterclass.
Financing a travel photography career is made even more difficult by the fact that this field of photography requires considerable financial investment from a photographer just to take those photos. In the podcast, Armand shared that he spent about $20,000 dollars on a recent 15-day trip to Alaska, covering the cost of a group trip, flights, gear, and more. “It’s an investment really, but a dream doesn’t have a price,” he said.
While some photographers plan their budget carefully, calculating whether or not a trip is worth going on, Armand focuses more on achieving his dreams. “I do not consider the return in terms of money from a trip, like selling a picture, et cetera,” he says, “I go because I want, because I need, and because that’s how I live.” That does not mean he does not plan his trips, as he needs to make sure that the trips align with his financial and scheduling capabilities, and he does calculate financial viability when scouting a location for the tours that he runs.
Planning Out Logistics
Planning a photography trip also requires considerable logistical planning, sometimes months and even years in advance. Concerns such as visas, local fixers or guides, and routes must be carefully planned out, especially when visiting most areas of the globe.
In conversation with Amazing Aerial Magazine, Armand shares that getting around is the biggest challenge he faces when planning his trips. “The most difficult thing for me is finding transportation in some very remote places,” he explains, especially in countries where there are additional restrictions on where and how foreigners are allowed to go. He spends a lot of his pre-trip prep work finding information about locations in remote areas and tracking down local pilots and other professionals.
Sometimes, going solo can be more work than it is worth. Although normally a fan of solo trips, Armand chose to go with a group tour to Alaska to minimize his logistical planning “The Alaska trip was a big trip with a lot of helicopter flights and staying a long time in some areas that I don’t know well,” he explained. “For the logistics, I preferred to do that with a group.”
Being a photographer going on a long trip adds additional logistical hurdles that a regular traveler does not have to worry about. Even though technology for both aerial and ground photography has advanced, you still have to carry cameras, lenses, drones, batteries, and other equipment—and on long treks, every extra gram that you have to carry matters. For aerial photographers, figuring out how to keep drones powered up, especially on long trips into the wilderness, presents an additional challenge. Armand struggled with this during his trip to Alaska. “The worst of all limitations as a pro photographer is drone battery,” he says, reflecting on the trip to Alaska, for which he took 10 batteries, but could have used more. “There is also the limitation of weight and size, when we go with a helicopter we have strict limitations on what we can take.”
Mental Health Matters for Photographers As Well
The realities of life on the road are also far less glamorous than it appears to be in photos. Photographers out in nature deal with wild weather, storms, sweltering heat or extreme cold, as well as bugs, wild animals, sleep deprivation, and more.
Armand’s award-winning Big Bang photo, which won the 2022 Grand Prize at the Siena Drone Awards, contains one such story of hardship behind its beautiful imagery. Armand drove over all of Iceland and stayed awake for over 24 hours before capturing the shot, in the middle of a storm. “It was very tiring, but it’s part of the game,” he says. Armand previously spoke in more detail about the story behind this photo with Amazing Aerial Magazine.
All of these challenges take a toll on one’s mental health, but surprisingly, for many photographers, it is readjusting to the regular world after being in nature that is more difficult than spending time in the field. “That’s often a strange transition, actually, especially when I go for solo trips,” Armand says. “But then when you come back, you have to reconnect with reality and sometimes it’s a bit strange. But the images are here and travel continues even when I’m back home.”
For many photographers, part of the difficulty in readjusting to life after being out in the field is the contrast between the beauty of the natural world they got to see, and the reality of the human civilization intent on crushing it. Armand has previously shared with Amazing Aerial Magazine that one of the most distressing aspects of being a nature photographer is seeing the effects of climate change on spots that he loves up close. “It’s obviously very hard as a nature photographer who is concerned about conservation to see those places changing because of climate change,” he says. “Rivers that are gone, lakes that are almost vanished…we can see the changes pretty often as we are in nature often.”
However, Armand has tried to turn these feelings into something more galvanizing. “That’s also a source of energy to do more pictures, to tell more stories, and to try bringing the beauty of nature to the most people possible, to try and connect people emotionally with the landscape.”
All of these challenges do not mean that travel photography is a uniquely difficult field. After all, every job comes with challenges, but not every job takes place on the glaciers of Iceland or the coast of Nigeria. Most photographers such as Armand are conscious of this, and are very grateful for what they get to do.
However, it is also important to acknowledge the hardships that photographers face, even if they face it while doing a job that most people envy. Minimizing these hardships also minimizes the value of the photographs that we see. Often, landscape and nature photos were only created after months of planning, days of hard work and trekking, and thousands of dollars of investment, and should be valued (and priced) as such. Understanding the challenges that nature and travel photographers face also allows agencies such as Amazing Aerial to support their team members, at the very least, by showing them that they are not alone.
For more insight into Armand’s experiences as a landscape photographer, check out his podcast interview and the masterclass that he hosted.
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