Michael Has an Exciting New Photography Project!
And he'd like you to check it out.
I’m launching a new Substack devoted to my travel photography and would love to have you come along! Subscribe here or keep reading for more details.
I recently cleaned up my Adobe Lightroom account — which is where I store and edit the pictures I take as we travel the world — and in doing so, realized that in Brent’s and my seven years of nomading, I have taken and edited over 70,000 photos.
No, that isn’t a typo.
That’s not even the total number of photos I’ve taken — just the ones I liked enough to save and edit. My Google account probably has three times that many.
When it comes to taking photos, I might be a little crazy.
Here’s the very first photo I posted to Instagram:
Not much to brag about.
To be fair, I’d never done much photography before we became nomads because I was too busy writing books. But as we traveled the world visiting so many fantastic places, my interest in the subject grew.
For 2019, my Adobe account contained 1,453 pictures.
By 2023, I had 19,619 just for that year.
Okay, maybe I’m a lot crazy.
But hopefully, my photography skills have improved the more photos I’ve taken.
Here’s one I took a few months ago on the Lycian Way, a trail running along Turkey’s southern coast.
That’s better, isn’t it? It’s fun, has some good composition, and I think it captures the spirit of the place.
Which brings me to the point of this article:
I’m launching a new newsletter devoted to my travel photography. It’s called Michael Takes Too Many Pictures.
I mean, I have to do something with those seventy thousand pictures.
Don’t worry. I promise not to do a newsletter equivalent to Uncle Maury’s boring travel slideshow extravaganza about his trip to Fort Lauderdale, where he saw a real live alligator!
Instead, I want to show you some of the incredible places that never made it into Brent and Michael Are Going Places.
Places like a particularly stunning mosque in Tetovo, Macedonia; the charming town square in Gouda, a town in the Netherlands; and some of the more remote ruins in Cambodia’s Angkor Wat that are harder to get to but still spectacular.
Through my photos, I’ll also introduce you to some of the interesting folks I’ve met on my travels, like the elderly Syrian man who happened to be coming to visit the exact gravesite I was photographing at a cemetery in Oslo — his son’s.
And I’ll take you on some of my most scenic morning walks, like my stroll along a canyon ridge in Katoomba, Australia.
And I’ll explore various topics and ruminations, like why October is my favorite month.
These days, the world is filled with a lot of ugliness. I want Michael Takes Too Many Pictures to bring you a little beauty.
But I know how busy folks are, and I promise not to bombard your inbox.
Even better? It’s free.
Here’s the link to subscribe.
Ciao for now!
Michael
P.S. Brent has a solo newsletter too, devoted to his book and movie projects.
I love this, Michael! Your photos are always stunning. My husband was a professional photographer for 15 years - he did event and wedding and also food photography. He still does some professional side gigs here and there. Throughout the last 6 years of our travels through the US, Mexico and Canada, he too has taken somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of photos range. I always ask him what he's going to do with all of them and he just shrugs. They're for us and our memories and for sharing with family and friends. But I told him someday I'm going to arrange a gallery showing of all the best of them and make him famous, lol.