Shooting for Lonely Planet

Heading to Asia with a backpack and no real plan in the mid-90’s pretty much meant you had a Lonely Planet guide with you. Sure, there were a few other options but by and large, Lonely Planet was the first choice. I landed in Bangkok off a flight from Sydney in early 1997 with little more than the knowledge that my return ticket had a one year validity, and that my Lonely Planet “Southeast Asia On A Shoestring” guide said the Khao Sanh Rd area had plenty of cheap guesthouses. Nothing booked, nothing planned, and no real idea of how to get from the airport to KSR. And so off I went to figure it out. That guidebook, which was joined later in the year by additional guides for Nepal and India, saw me through a year on the road. They gave a great overview of areas, with word of mouth and traveller recommendations providing finer detail in certain places.

As I travelled, my travel journal entries progressed from simple records of people and places to actual in depth writing, and photography continued to be important. As I returned to Australia and considered my next moves, the idea of being a travel writer / photographer began to take shape. In 1999, living in Melbourne, a notice for a talk by Tony Wheeler, founder and then head honcho of Lonely Planet, appeared. I think it was in my local library and some such venue nearby. So along I went. Later I continued travelling and continued to use Lonely Planet, and continued travel photography although writing largely fell by the wayside. At some stage, becoming a Lonely Planet photographer became a goal.

How to go about it remained a mystery but over time, I learned different methods of marketing my work, and made contact with other photographers and a few travel writers as I started getting assignments from small travel magazines. Tony Wheeler sold a 75% stake in Lonely Planet to the BBC, although Melbourne remained the LP headquarters and they still largely ran independently. I was living in Taiwan, and one of my photographer friends passed my details along to Lonely Planet Images, and they reached out to me. Initially it was a one off assignment, to photograph the Taiwanese tourist village of Jiufen for an upcoming guidebook.

Jiufen is one of the more popular day trips from Taipei, being only an hour or so from the city. Tea houses and eateries, small winding lanes on the side of a hill, and plenty of history. It’s also, to my mind, incredibly overrated and usually overcrowded.

Still off I went to photograph it, spending a lot longer there than a visit would normally call for in order to get the shots I needed. They’d given me some guidelines for what they wanted, and also quite a bit of freedom to shoot what I wanted. I wandered up and down lanes, in and out of shops and cafes, and over to the neighbouring, more interesting village of Jinguashih.

Afterwards, I boarded the bus to head home and started reviewing some of the photographs. They had image requirements for submitted photos that were fairly similar to the kind of journalistic guidelines I was used to, so editing was quick and easy. I sent my selection in and waited.

I didn’t have to wait long. They came back to me with a contract to officially come onto their books as a contracted Lonely Planet photographer, and requested an initial image submission of 500 photographs to go into their stock library on an exclusive basis. I ended up shooting a lot more work for them over the next few years, mostly in Taiwan but also with some stock from elsewhere in Asia. In fact, I stayed with them right up until Lonely Planet Images got split off from the larger company and sold to a large stock agency who subsequently offered me a contract to shoot for them, on slightly less favourable terms.

Today, almost 20 years after that first request from the photo editors at Lonely Planet, some of those very first images I placed with them as stock still get licenced. The fees for stock are a lot less than they were back then, but it’s kind of cool to have that long tail residual income even if it barely pays anything these days.

These days, Lonely Planet has been sold a couple of times and massively changed its scope from its heyday. It’s still around but guidebooks aren’t it’s main focus anymore, and a whole generation of modern travellers and backpackers have never heard of it. For me, it was great to collaborate with them over the years, first as a traveller, later as a photographer.