My big break
Dan Ballard shares the story behind the shot that led to his career as a travel photographer
Travel photographer Dan Ballard has visited more than 50 countries across five continents. His work has been published in numerous magazines, including National Geographic, Digital Camera and N-Photo. To see more of his work visit www.danballardphotography.com
Dan Ballard grew up in a village of 75 people in Colorado where most people never ventured beyond the state border, let alone overseas. Yet he grew up with a passion for travel and photography, thanks largely to his mother, who was also a professional photographer (“She shot Nikon, which is why I do”), and a grandfather who regaled him with stories of his journeys. “He had hitchhiked up to Alaska and fixed tyres on the side of the road to get there. When I was growing up, he was always talking to me about travelling.”
So, aged 20, Dan decided he wanted to be a travel photographer, and followed his grandfather’s advice to see the world. However, his early images proved disappointing: “I would travel to all these countries and I’d love the experience,” he says, “but then I’d come back and show people the images, and I just didn’t feel they expressed that emotion at all. It was always such a let down.” He continued to feel this way for the first few years of shooting professionally. “The one thing I could never do was really express how I felt about a place through my photography.”
All that changed in 2009 when he made a threemonth trip to Southeast Asia, and found himself wandering through a rice field in Laos late one afternoon. “I had been in the area for about a week at that point,” he recalls, “just walking through the rice fields for hours and hours, trying to look for moments, for things happening. I was trying to find something to put in front of those incredible hills with the low-lying mist and the sun breaking through. I could tell it was going to be something cool if I could just find a subject.”
The breakthrough
Dan fitted a 20mm f/2.8 Nikon lens to his D700 when he found his subject: a woman walking down the path ahead of him. “I got one or two quick shots and she was gone.” Looking back, he believes this image marked a breakthrough in his attempt to convey the essence of a location. He explains: “Even though I had been shooting professionally for a few years before I took this, nothing before it really captured a place in the way that I wanted it to. This image made me realise it was possible, and really affected my later work.”
It also inspired Dan to change the direction he was taking with his work. “At the time I didn’t want to be a travel photographer, I wanted to be a landscape photographer that included the culture, so this image represents a little of that transition.”
Seven years on, this transition has proved to be instrumental in Dan’s success, and his stunning travel images have since appeared in National Geographic, Trail Runner, Men’s Journal and numerous other international publications.