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Meet Charly

Welcome to The Wildlife Photography Workshop. So before we get into things, I thought it would be cool to give you guys a little bit of background of my life. So I was born and raised in Bristol, England. And from there, I've kind of moved all over my whole life. I moved from England to Singapore and I lived there for a few years and then my family and I stayed in Australia for a little bit. And I remember as a child, my dad asked me, "Do you want to stay and live permanently in Australia or do you want to move to America?" And I don't know why I chose America really at the time because I loved Australia, I loved all the wildlife and the kangaroos, but for some reason I was like, "Dad, I wanna meet Mickey Mouse, so let's move to America." So we did, we moved to California. And from there, I remember I started school and unfortunately, I was bullied for my accent. It was the first day of class and I turned to a boy and I was like, "Excuse me, can I borrow a rubber?" And they were like, ...

"Oh, she said rubber!" And I was like, "Eraser? Oh no!" And everyone made fun of me and laughed. And people called me the alien for months. So I lost my accent on purpose. I started just copying American words and pretty soon it was gone and everyone in my family still had their accent besides me, which is sad, but I get it back a tiny bit when I visit. But from there I moved to Seattle and I moved every year for eight years in a row. So currently, that has exhausted me. I don't really ever want to move again. It's taught me the importance of grounding yourself. I started to find that I was jealous of photographers that I admired that had a deep connection to the place they lived. Maybe they lived there their whole lives or they just felt really connected to their landscape and the landscape was inspiring their work. And I just felt like, "Man, I really wanna have that." So through an unfortunate series of events in Seattle, Josh and I ended up losing jobs and we could no longer afford to pay our rent in Seattle. So it was kind of very strange timing where as we lost our income, we also simultaneously sold our cars. And as we sold our cars, this little van came into our life. His name is Sushi. He is a Mitsubishi Delica and we decided, okay, we were kind of forced into it, but it was also perfect timing, dream come true of okay, now is our chance, we are going to live in this van full-time and find home. So I think it's a little bit different because I feel most people, they choose to move into a van because they want to travel and they want to find freedom and be off grid and be free. We were doing it to actually find stability in the long run. So we drove all up and down trying to find home. And then in March, before the pandemic hit, I got hired to do some photography work up here in Alaska. And we got here and we fell in love with Alaska immediately. I have immediately never felt so at home, like this is my people, this is my landscape. Alaska just has this roughness and this bluntness that I think I appreciate maybe from my English background, but the people here are so genuine. But at the same time, Alaska is not for the faint of heart. It's extremely wild. I think it's something like Alaska is as big as California, Texas, and Montana combined. Only 20% of Alaska is roaded. So if you want to get anywhere here, you really have to want to explore it and put in the time and effort, you most likely have to take a bush plane or a boat to go find these crazy remote places that no one's ever seen before. So I'm super happy to be here and find stability and start incorporating that into my work. So I wanna take a second to go a little bit into my background and explain how I got to right now. Since birth, I have always been a creative person. As a child, I always was drawing or I had those little cheap disposable cameras taking photos of everything. I have memories of my dad and his film camera. He would put it on the tripod and make us stand in front of it for hours until he got that perfect family photo, and we would all be so annoyed and complain. But now I have this giant suitcase full of film photos from our entire lives, which is pretty cool. I think as artists, we have a tendency to become hoarders. My dad is lugging around this giant suitcase full of film photos. And now currently in the digital world, I'm lugging around this giant plastic box of all my hard drives with all my photos I've taken. And I think that can be a blessing and a curse. I think as photographers, we tend to hoard memories. I mean, that's what we're doing with the camera is capturing a memory and then hoarding it on our hard drives. And I think carrying around all these hard drives and all this camera gear, for me, sometimes it gives me anxiety and it feels like I just have this giant hot mess collection that helps me to do my job. But I think that since I struggle to find minimalism and calmness in my actual life, I strive to find that in my photo world. And that's where I try to remove clutter and find peace and calm and minimalism. Even though I was a creative and a weirdo since birth, it's honestly been a huge struggle with my parents the entire time. They've kind of fought me on following my dreams up until pretty much like a year ago. Anytime I mentioned to them that I wanted to get my degree in art or I wanted to be a photographer artist, it was always met with, "Well, you're never gonna have enough money to survive" or "You're just gonna be a starving artist and we don't want that for you." But I've always had this kind of rebel nature. And so, I ended up rebelling against them and I got my degree in scientific illustration and photography at the University of California, Santa Cruz. From there, I landed a job where I ended up being the graphic designer and illustrator for Whole Foods for 10 years. And that was a great job, but I did get very burnt out on drawing, illustrating, sitting at the computer designing day in and day out. And I just felt like I needed a change. From there, Microsoft actually ended up scooping me up and stealing me away. And finally, my parents' dream had been realized. They both worked at Microsoft at the time. So they were finally proud of me that I worked for their dream company. However, I found myself sitting at my desk all day every day, not doing what I was supposed to be working on. And instead I was secretly looking up photography and how to freelance, how to start your own business while no one was looking. And during that time I was also getting more and more back into hiking and being outdoors in Seattle. And so that was also kind of fueling my fire to get back into photography and while secretly researching it at work. So needless to say, they ended up firing me, which was pretty devastating, pretty devastating for my parents as well. And I definitely had a big freak out of like, "Holy crap, how am I gonna survive? Seattle's super expensive." And I just kind of had this overwhelming gut feeling piece that was like, "Now's your time, you're not prepared at all." I mean, besides the research that I'd been doing, now is your time to jump into freelance and do this full-time and chase this dream. So I did. And for the first few years, I mean, sometimes it still even is a massive struggle. Freelance can be very up and down and I feel like a lot of it is glamorized. People think, "Oh, I just wanna travel full-time and take photos." It can be an emotional roller coaster. Sometimes you have months where you're crushing it and you have a bunch of jobs and you're surviving and doing good. And then sometimes you don't know when your next paycheck is gonna be or if it's ever gonna come, and you have to kind of have a lot of faith, and that's not for everyone. A lot of people need stability in their life and some people can handle it and some can't, so always consider that if you're thinking about quitting your job and making the jump because it is scary at first. So when I entered the freelance photography world, I was super timid. And because of that, I undervalued myself a bunch and I made a ton of mistakes. I think as women, we have a tendency to do that, where we start off kind of quiet before we find our voice. So I really want to encourage women to be bold as quick as you can and find that voice so you find your success. I think at the time, and I think it still mainly is, photography the most part is a male-dominated industry. I remember I looked up the teams at Nikon and Canon, and I remember seeing it was all white male photographers and maybe there would be one woman and she was always in charge of marketing and emails. So that kind of actually led me to switch to shooting with Sony because they have an amazing program called Sony Alpha Female where they are empowering female photographers to get into photography. So still to this day, I struggle to find female photographers that I can look up to. I constantly felt kind of pressure from my male peers that I should show my face more or become a wander babe, (Charly chuckling) and be in front of the camera more. And it didn't feel right to me. I know that travel blogging and things like that can be such a great and lucrative career, but there was something about having my portfolio just be filled of pictures with me in them that didn't feel right. I wanted to be the one behind the camera creating those shots instead. I also kind of believe that that kind of career path can have a short shelf life. When I'm 70, no one's gonna want to see me standing on a cliff in front of a mountain. Well, maybe they do, maybe they don't. But with that being said, on the flip side, in my workshop's, one of the things I teach is a kind of little segment on how to ditch your Instagram husband and take your own self-portrait with your camera so that you don't need to rely on anyone to take a photo of you. You can do it yourself, you don't need anyone. And I hope that through teaching that it kind of stems into women just wanting to learn their cameras completely and finding out what they like to shoot overall. So with that, I just wanna say that photography can definitely be intimidating. And I just wanna encourage you to not be afraid of the technical side. Do everything you can to learn your camera, learn the settings that work best for you. I think Google and YouTube are honestly your best friends. I use them daily to teach myself things that I don't know. So when I got back into photography after doing graphic design for so long, I was so excited to just shoot everything. And I think that's such an important mindset. I think everyone should shoot everything and anything until you find out what you love the most. I was doing product, landscapes, weddings, engagements, modeling portrait type stuff, and I was doing it all. And through that, I eventually found that what I love the most is wildlife and landscapes. I think I often felt a lot of pressure to pick one realm and be a master rather than a jack-of-all-trades. And I don't know if I necessarily agree with that. I think if you love just shooting one realm, great. It's so glad you found that one specific thing. And I think if that's you, you should absolutely master that to the best of your ability. But I think if you're more like me and a little more scattered and you love to shoot everything, then make sure you're the best at shooting those things. And at the same time, find your style to make it cohesive so that even if it is a different subject, at least people can still tell it's you. And with that being said, I believe that it's more important to master your craft, master your style than it is to master your subject. So the more I got into going on hikes and little road trips, the more and more wildlife would pop up. If I was on the road and something popped up, I would get so excited. And as time went on, I started to notice that I was becoming less interested in photographing humans and more interested in photographing animals. And through that process, I failed a lot, but I've also learned a lot. And to this day, I still continue to make mistakes when I'm out in the field. But you can let that give you anxiety or you can let that encourage you to continue learning and keep growing. And I think that's super important. I think the reason why I enjoy wildlife photography so much is it forces me to give up control. And I think that's kind of a hard thing for me to overcome. When you're dealing with an animal, you literally have no idea what it's gonna do. You can't predict it at all. You literally have to sit there and let it do its thing. And it kind of forces you to be more present because you're in nature, you have to be super aware of everything that's going on. You have to be aware of your safety. You have to be aware of the animal safety and sit back and watch. And that kind of gets me out of my own head and just more focused and present in the moment with that animal. My whole life, I've just been connected to wildlife. I remember when I was a little kid, my brother and I would play games of like, "Pretend to be your favorite animal" and things like that. And I grew up watching those Nat Geo shows and those were always my favorite of just watching lions and stuff in the wild. And I think there's something about animals that moves me way more than humans do. (Charly laughing) I know that probably sounds weird, but something about a creature in the wild just moves my soul more than anything in the world. So why am I doing this? I am doing this because I want to encourage you to go outside and find nature, find wildlife, see if you like photographing it, seeing if it's for you. And then I hope to share the techniques and approaches that I've learned to help you so maybe you don't make some of the same mistakes that I've made. And through that, I hope that you can find your voice, find your style, and stand out from the crowd.