Crafting Impactful Narratives Through Long-Term Projects with Dan Milnor

#553 Dan Milnor is a seasoned photographer with over 25 years of experience. His career began with an unexpected twist when a lost transcript led him to a community college with a renowned journalism program. Milnor narrates his early experiences as a photojournalist, detailing the adrenaline-filled assignments and his eventual transition to documentary photography. The discussion delves into the challenges of keeping photography authentic amidst the current digital age, where social media often overshadows genuine skill and creativity. 

KEY TOPICS COVERED

1. Dan Milnor's Journey into Photography - Milnor details his unexpected path into photography starting from his interest in storytelling, influenced by his mother’s use of a Pentax K1000, culminating in a scholarship offer at San Antonio College that commenced his education in photojournalism.
2. Challenges of Modern Photography - The episode emphasizes the pitfalls of relying on social media for validation. Milnor critiques the modern "online photo community" and stresses the importance of creating unique and meaningful work outside of social media platforms.
3. The Importance of Print and Bookmaking - Milnor shares insights into the power of print, emphasizing the tangible nature of photo books as lasting records of work, contrasting with the ephemeral nature of social media images.

IMPORTANT DEFINITIONS & CONCEPTS

• Sunny 16 Rule: A photographic rule of thumb for estimating daylight exposures without a meter.
• Long-term Projects: An approach in photography focusing on extended storytelling beyond single images to provide depth and context.

DISCUSSION & REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. How can photographers ensure their work stands out in a saturated digital space?
2. What are the benefits of producing physical photo books versus digital albums?
3. How does Milnor’s view on social media challenge or change your perspective on its use in photography?

RESOURCES:
Visit Dan Milnor's Website - https://shifter.media/

Download your free copy of
46 Creative Photo Ideas to Get You Out of a Rut
at https://creativeimageideas.com/

Sign up for your free CloudSpot Account today at www.DeliverPhotos.com

Connect with Raymond!

• Join the free Beginner Photography Podcast Community at https://beginnerphotopod.com/group
• Get your Photo Questions Answered on the show - https://beginnerphotopod.com/qa
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Thanks for listening & keep shooting!

Transcript

Dan Milnor: 0:00

Digital online and technology are all fine, but there is a different level of consideration when it comes to print, especially high levels of the industry, because print signifies a couple of things. And number one is it signifies concerted thought specific thought about your work because there's a big difference between putting your portfolio on an iPad and putting it into a book form because the book forces you to apply critical thinking to your work. What's the best image? What's the cover? What's the sequence? What's my edit? And the book is confrontational because you have to put your phone down to look at it.

Raymond Hatfield: 0:37

Hey, hey. Welcome to the Beginner Photography Podcast. I'm your host, Raymond Hatfield, and each week I interview one of the world's most interesting photographers to learn what it really takes to capture beautiful images so that you can start to do the same. In today's Rewind episode, we are chatting with photojournalist and documentary photographer Dan Milner, about mastering the skills that really matter in photography today. But first, the beginner of Photography podcast is brought to you by Cloud Spot, so your photos through print products, and of course digitals. With cloud clouds mind, you can set up a storefront in minutes and start earning more with every gallery you deliver. So grab your free forever account today over@deliverphotos.com and only upgrade when you're ready. Over the past 25 or 30 years with a total adoption of digital photography, the time that journalists have to capture a story becomes less and less. And sometimes it can feel like the world demands our images right now. Even if you're not like working for a newspaper, I got home from a wedding before and after explicitly telling the bride that I would have sneak peeks for her the following day. I. She texted me the night of the wedding and asked me if I was close to finishing those sneak peeks that night. I wasn't even home yet. If you love telling stories with your camera, you're going to love today's interview with Dan Milner because he's taken the opposite approach and started documenting long-term projects. These are stories that take time to produce not in hours or days, but in years. And the additional time allows him to go deeper into a story and create a much richer set of images. They'll truly make an impact. So in today's episode with Dan Milner, you're gonna learn how to embrace the idea of projects, why you should prioritize print over digital when putting together a story. And how to develop your own unique photographic voice by focusing on original work. There's a lot here. And real quick, I just wanted to say thank you for tuning in to the Beginner Photography podcast. I know that there's a ton of photography podcasts out there, You chose this one specifically So that you can learn something that's gonna help you become a better photographer. So don't waste that opportunity. Pay attention. Don't zone out, and don't doom scroll while listening. Alright, with that, let's go ahead and get on into today's interview. Today's guest is Dan Milner, a self proclaimed creative evangelist, with over 25 years of professional photography experience, disinclined to social media. He's a film shooter and his work can be found in the Los Angeles museum of art, as well as the George Eastman house. Today. I am so incredibly excited to talk to Dan. Dan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Dan Milnor: 3:16

Of course, thanks for having me. I love talking about this stuff.

Raymond Hatfield: 3:19

this is a fun one for me. I learned about you through a mutual, friend of ours, Mark Silber. Uh oh. Who is, uh, Oh yeah. Quite a guy. I mean, this guy obviously has been in it for a long time, and the way that he kind of sees photography is very different compared to how a lot of other photographers today talk about photography. And when you two sat down and had your conversation, I knew that you As well would be a perfect fit for the podcast to kind of share your story of photography. You have a very different take than a lot of other photographers, but before we really get on into all of that. Can you take me back to when you first picked up a camera? What was that like for you?

Dan Milnor: 3:56

I think you have to go, slightly further back. It wasn't, what made me pick up a camera was my mom picking up a camera. So, when I was a kid, we lived from Indiana to Wyoming to Texas and my mom had a Pentax K1000 and Kodachrome. And she had this Halliburton case. Yeah, her camera's probably still out there. Someone's probably still using it. Those things are bulletproof. And, uh, everywhere I went, we had that Halliburton case. So in Wyoming, if we were in one truck, you always had to move the Halliburton case over and mom was shooting all the time. So the idea of recording with a camera was always kind of in the back of my head. And, I started actually writing before I did photography, which I still do, I write every day. But I, I would, I just started writing like fictional short stories when I was in elementary school and I would write down conversations that I heard and my parents talking to their friends. And I don't know why I did that exactly, but I just started recording and the camera became sort of an extension of the writing, whereas I just, and I still feel the same today. I just have this need to record things. Even if no one sees what I'm recording or reads or any of that, I just do it constantly and it's an addiction. It's a curse, whatever you want to call it. And then I got out of high school. And, I actually had a scholarship as a shooter, a shotgun shooter, believe it or not. which was a really good scholarship and it was to a very good academic school. And the coach that taught the shooting team, they traveled internationally. It was a really amazing thing. He had seen me shooting when I was a little kid. And he came to my dad and said, you know, pay it when he's older. If he can qualify, get into the school, I'll give him a scholarship as a shooter. And so my life was headed towards that and also studying geology. I really wanted to be a geologist and the admissions building. And the admissions program at that college was moving. And in the process of moving, they lost a huge number of incoming transcripts, including mine. And so the Dean of admissions called my mom and said, look, it's our fault. We have no record of him. So he's going to have to go somewhere for a semester and then transfer in the following semester. And the only school left open was San Antonio college, which was a two year community school I knew nothing about all I knew was that all I thought The only people that go to SAC are the ones who can't get in anywhere else. And so I was sort of heavy hearted. I went down there, I signed up for basic classes, English, history, whatever, that would transfer to this other school. And lo and behold, I find out that they have one of the best journalism programs, in the country, run by a guy named Jerry Townsend. And Jerry was like a no nonsense guy who basically saw some images that I'd made and said, Hey, if you want to be a photographer, I'll give you a scholarship to be a photographer. And that was it, man. And I had, I walked in Rudy Gonzalez. Who's the photographer. I think at the Rocky mountain, no, the Rocky mountain is gone. I don't know where Rudy is now, but Rudy, it was amazing. Photographer was the first person I met in the program. And he walked up to me with a. And an old Nikon with a screw mount, 35 millimeter, and he gave me this little printout that was the Sunny 16 rule for exposure, and he gave me an assignment. So literally, I had never used a camera for real, and I was, going out on assignment. It was that quick, and you learned very, very quickly working on a daily paper with blinds. It was a weekly paper, I think, at the school. Anyway, it freaked me out. I was terrified for about five minutes and then I just said, I have to own this I'm not gonna go halfway, I'm gonna make this my life. And that was it.

Raymond Hatfield: 7:13

Wow. So let me go back there. when you first showed up to San Antonio College and you decided to take this journalism class, was it through the stories that you were writing? Is that what you were, getting the scholarship in or was it through the photographs that you had shown? Um,

Dan Milnor: 7:28

so. My mom and I were driving home one day in San Antonio, and there was a massive flood happening. And so, when I got outta high school, I was in the, merchant marine program out of Texas a and m at Galveston. That was like a four month program. And one of my roommates on the ship had a camera and he was kind of serious about photography and the ship had a photographer. And I remember being in that ship and watching the ship's photographer work. And I had never seen a human move the way that this guy moved. And I couldn't figure out why he was moving the way he was. And then after about a month and a half on the ship, I realized. He was following light, he was looking at light, and he was moving himself into positions for light, and I had never thought about light before. So, when I got off the Merchant Marine ship, I picked up a camera, I found an old camera in a closet in our house, and I started wandering around with this thing, no idea what I'm doing. My mom and I are driving home one day, and there's a flood happening, and we come to a low water crossing, and there's a school bus full of kids that's about to get swept over this bridge. Oh my gosh. And the Army's brought in, or the Air National Guard, or somebody's brought in this big chin up, double screw helicopter, and they're trying to lift this bus out. And so we're just standing there watching, and I'm like, you know, Hey, I have a camera, maybe I should take pictures of this. So, I shoot a couple of pictures, and then I shoot a couple of other pictures during the flood, and I'm at lunch, at school, with a bunch of friends, sitting around a table, and I have these little 4x6s on the table, and I'm showing my friends, like, Hey, look how great I am, I did these pictures. And this instructor walks by and he leans over and he goes, who took those? And I thought I was in trouble. So I'm like, they're not mine. I didn't take them. And so we're all sitting there and everyone's like, nope, don't know where they came from. They're not ours. And he goes, I'm not leaving. I know one of you took these. And that was Jerry Townsend, actually. He was the head of the journalism department. And I said, okay, I didn't want my friends to get in trouble. I said, okay, these are mine. And he said, I'll give you a scholarship if you want to be a photographer. and, this was a community college. The scholarship was probably less than a hundred dollars. It probably paid for my books. But what I didn't realize was that. Jerry was, had a really remarkable career and Jerry was driven. And again, he was no nonsense. This was prior to the internet. This was prior to digital technology. This was prior to political correctness. This was prior to having to basically baby people who were getting into photography. This was high pressure, high demand. You know, do not mess up. If you come back without an image, don't bother coming back kind of thing. And so you're on assignment and people who were there are taking it very seriously, whether you're a writer or a photographer. So the first assignment I had was as a writer and I got sent to a bomb threat in one of the buildings on campus. And on the way there, I thought, I wonder why they're sending me. It's I'm probably I'm expendable. And then I got over there and they said, Hey, we don't have a photographer free. Can you make pictures? And I said, I don't really know. And that's when Rudy gave me the camera and the lens and the sun 16 rule for exposure. And I, I did a couple of assignments and I never went back to writing. Even though I write every day, I never did it for a career.

Raymond Hatfield: 10:23

Oh my gosh. Wow. What a way to get into photography. Like, Hey, here's the camera. Uh, let's go photograph a possible, life, ending situation here. That's insane. And

Dan Milnor: 10:34

the funny thing is the first assignment I had after that was to photograph a speaker who I don't remember who it is now. He's a well known guy. I show up and it's in an auditorium and there are at least 300 people in this auditorium. And I'm like, I have a 50. I'm like, I have to be right next to this guy. I have to be up on the stage or in front and everybody in the room is going to see me. And I stood in the back of the auditorium for a couple of minutes and I was really nervous. I thought, man, I don't want to do this. And then I thought, you know, I made a decision that I've stuck with for the rest of my life. And it was a great decision, how I came to it. I don't know, but I, I just said, look, I'm never going to see anyone in this room ever again. And if I go up there and trip and fall over and everyone gets a laugh out of it, that's probably the worst thing that can happen. So I'm going to own this and I'm going to go and move where I need to move to get the pictures. And I did. And I still remember what the picture looked like. I still remember where it ran the paper at the school was called the Ranger. And, uh, yeah, it was pretty great. It was a great way to learn photography.

Raymond Hatfield: 11:32

Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. Especially to get one of your first images printed. pretty rare. that's awesome. So, I kind of want to know a little bit more about, because at that moment you had decided that you were going to stay at San Antonio College, is that correct? to fulfill this, uh, no, that's not what happened.

Dan Milnor: 12:33

No, I, I was there knowing it was a short term gain. I still had the shooting scholarship and the geology school in play, had I wanted to go that direction. But, once I started shooting photographs. was like, Oh, this is kind of what I've been waiting to do my whole life. And so I looked around for a four year school that was in state that had a good photojournalism department. And at the time this, that was cool. That stood out was, Texas, UT Austin. and at the time, this is pretty funny now because, UT Austin, like all other colleges in America have changed dramatically and they're so, they're so expensive. what people are paying to go to school there now is as beyond my comprehension. So literally this was like two weeks before classes started and I was like, I think I want to go to Texas. So I applied and they were like, yeah, sure. Come on up. I got in. I paid more for books than I did for tuition. I think my tuition was less than 300 bucks for the semester. And yeah, and I studied photojournalism and I had minors in Spanish and anthropology. And it was good. The program during the eighties had been one of the premier Programs in the country. And when I got there, I would say that the program was in somewhat of a trough. It hadn't sort of kept up with some other programs like the university of Missouri, Western Kentucky. These were photojournalism schools. and then you had the big art schools, like, center in Pasadena, you had Parsons and, ICP in New York. And, they were very different kinds of things. We were very specific to photojournalism. And so I realized very shortly after getting to school that whatever I was going to come out with was going to be on my shoulders, not from the faculty saying, you're going to do this because the faculty was training us to go in one direction. And I realized immediately that I needed to go in another direction. And, consequently, I sort of fell out of favor, I think, with some of the faculty who just looked at me as either arrogant or, something. Because I said, look, I want to know black and white, I want to photograph black and white, but I need to know color. Because if I get out and I want to be a magazine photographer, everybody's shooting transparency. I can't shoot tri X all the time.

Raymond Hatfield: 14:34

Yeah.

Dan Milnor: 14:35

And they were like, no, no, no, you're going to shoot Tri X and a 28 millimeter and everyone's going to love it. And I knew that was not going to be the case. And so I got very fortunate. I started shooting color right away and I bought a police scanner, an old police scanner. And every night I would drive from my horrible apartment to the I 35, which splits Austin, north to south. And I would park, underneath the I 35 and I would turn on the police scanner and I would just wait because. East Austin at that time was very unsettled. There were huge gang problems. there was a lot of crime. There was a lot of stuff happening. And at the time I thought, Oh, as a photojournalist, this is kind of what I'm supposed to photograph. So I would go and I just would, you know, the police scanner would crackle and it would say, box alarm, whatever, or they had codes for domestic violence, they had codes for shooting. And I learned what all the codes were and I would show up. Oftentimes, I was the first person on the scene. I'd be there before any law enforcement. And this was another education that I never saw coming was how to navigate in the field. And when you, when your police scanner goes off and you roll up on a crime scene and there's no one there, it's not just about photography. It's about, you know, All these logistics and scenarios that you have to understand before you can actually get in, make successful pictures, and get out. You know, where do you park your vehicle? If you park and you block an emergency responder, you're in trouble. If something goes sideways and your truck is blocked and you can't get out, then you're in trouble. All these different things, does somebody need help for more than, you know, does that trump making pictures kind of things? And so, while I was out one night photographing a house fire, a guy approached me, older guy, suit and tie, oddly enough, even out of fire, and he was the Austin Fire Department photographer, a guy named Erwin Haddon. And Erwin said, you know, I've seen you around at these fires. Who are you? What are you doing? I told him it's photo journalism student. And he said to me, do you want to know how to print color? And I said, yeah, because we don't, they're not going to let us print color for like another two years. He said, come to the fire department. I have a dark room. I'll teach you how to print color. And

Raymond Hatfield: 16:39

he did.

Dan Milnor: 16:39

And. Everyone was, really great. He was a guy that like bent over backwards to help me. And, at school you had these Jobo processors to do a color print, which take about 10, 000 years to make a print and, you know, they're good and they're fun. But after a while you're like, okay, I'd love not have to spend 45 minutes on this print. So Erwin had an automated color processor and an enlarger with a color head. And he taught me not only how to print color, but then also told me how to use color settings to print black and white. And that like blew my mind open. So I got lucky and, I had a good run at the paper. I started to freelance while I was still in school. I was doing assignments for the daily Texan, which was the paper at UT. Really good paper. And the people I was working with, I mean, John McConnico, who went on to AP, John Moore, who's at AP, Jean Franc, uh, Jean Marc Bijoux, who won two Pulitzers at AP. We didn't hang out a whole lot, but these were my, fellow students. Scott Dalton, who's covered the drug war in Colombia for 10 years. I went to school with some really amazing photographers.

Raymond Hatfield: 17:41

Oh my goodness. So, just before we move on, how long were you a night crawler going in and photographing these, possibly horrific scenes? How long were you doing that for?

Dan Milnor: 17:51

I did that in Austin for a couple of years, and then my first internship, as of, so I got out of school and I looked forever to try to find an internship. And this is kind of a long story, but I'll spare you the details, but at the time, it was incredibly difficult to find internships. Yeah. And I kept getting rejected for all kinds of reasons. very rarely was it about imagery. It was always about extraneous things that would keep me from getting these internships. But I finally got one. I think, I don't know for certain, I think someone called on my behalf. I think I know who it was that called on my behalf. But, he has never admitted doing so. But anyway, I got this internship in the Arizona Republic in Phoenix. And it was amazing because the Republic had a huge budget. it's a big paper. It's a state paper. They did international, national, local news. They covered the whole state. They had a big staff. but I worked the 3 to 11, 3 p. m. to 11 p. m. shift as an intern. And after 7 o'clock, because it was a morning paper, unless a UFO landed in the middle of downtown, nothing you shot after 7 p. m. was going to make the paper, basically. So I had my police scanner and I would leave the paper and I would drive straight south on Central Avenue and I would pull over and South Phoenix at the scene at the time was a war zone. It was not a happy place to be after sunset. And so for me as a photographer again, I was like, Oh, I'm a journalist. I'm supposed to be doing this stuff. So I started shooting the same thing and it was worse than Austin. You know, every night there's a lot of bad stuff happening. And so I got to know some of the police department. I got to know some of the fire department. And I also began to editorial policy and marketing and advertising and how what you saw in the paper was not necessarily representative of the news. Because I started coming back with images that were not popular in the newsroom because management saw them and said, No one's going to buy the paper if we're showing this stuff and we're trying to sell ads for golf courses and they don't want to see domestic violence shootouts in South Phoenix. and so what I started to do is I compiled this huge folder of all the work that I've made in Phoenix in the middle of the night. And when I quit at the paper and moved on, I went to the photo editor and just dropped it on his desk and said, you can kind of deny that this is happening in the city, but this This is happening in the city. You're supposed to be a news organization. You have to cover everything. Yes. The golf course is important. Yes. The Phoenix suns are important and the Cardinals and I get it. It's, you know, and that's the thing about community paper is you have to cover the community. And thankfully by the time I left South Phoenix was making some progress and I don't know what it's like now, but you know, most of these places have been gentrified to some degree. The violence levels are down. I mean, there exceptions country where there's some pretty dicey places out there. But, I learned a lot, and the fact that I could speak Spanish, the police loved it because I would show up sometimes at like domestic disputes and translate. No way. Yeah. They would say, hey, do you speak Spanish? Yeah, I speak Spanish. Well, hey, what is he saying to her and vice versa? And I'm like and at the time I forget what I was probably like 22

Raymond Hatfield: 20:50

Yeah,

Dan Milnor: 20:50

I'm walking around like is this really happening?

Raymond Hatfield: 20:52

Yeah,

Dan Milnor: 20:53

and

Raymond Hatfield: 20:53

I'd be getting paid for this

Dan Milnor: 20:55

And just crazy scenes, you know, I mean, I got shot at once in Austin at a little league baseball game. There were people all over the place. There had to be 2000 people around. And I was photographing a kid who was part of a gang in Austin, and I'd known him for a long time. We'd spent like four months together and we were hanging out. I was with his gang and we were all sort of hanging around, drinking beer, hanging out in this little section of the barrio that was theirs. And someone came in and said, Hey, so and so from this rival gang called EGV, East Grande Barrio there, he's at this other location and, you know, we've got to go get him. And so they all run to go. And I was like, well, I want to go to take pictures. And I didn't know what get him meant. You know, I was like, oh, they're probably going to fight. And so, we roll up and I get out of the car and like an idiot, first of all, at a 24 millimeter lens on, which is, you Mistake number one. Number two, I've strove on, major mistake. Number three, I put myself in the worst possible position, which was between the guys that I was with and between the guy that they were going after. But there were people all over. There was a little league baseball game happening to my right. There was another one behind me. And I was like, nothing's gonna, yeah, nothing's gonna happen here. And then I heard a window break, car window. And it just, I saw literally. It was like, it was as if a gunshot had gone off. All the people at the little league games collectively went like this. Everybody froze duck and started taking cover. And again, I'm like looking around, not quite putting it together. And then full auto rounds guide, the guy whose car window was broken, gets is trapped in the parking lot. He stands up, turns around with fully automatic and just on loads on the parking lot. So like I'm hearing these rounds hitting. And I'm like, maybe I should take cover. I didn't take any photographs, which is not, not good. But I remember looking down at my feet and there was a mom and a little boy behind the front wheel of a car. and you could tell that this was not, the first time they'd had to do this, that this was, this kind of violence was relatively common. And so the whole thing, you know, 10 seconds goes by. I have no idea what I did. I wake up and I'm next to her on the ground behind the car. And the guy that's shooting is driven away. And I waited and I waited for the police to show up and nobody showed up. Nobody came. And then at about 10 minutes later, the games were gone again. Everyone's back playing. And I was like, wow, this is a, you can get used to anything.

Raymond Hatfield: 24:02

Wow. So tell me that you made the conscious decision. Not to take any photos in that moment.

Dan Milnor: 24:08

No, hell no. I didn't know what I was doing. I froze. I mean, I there's a 10 to 15 second period where I have no idea what I did. I got from standing down to the ground. So I did something smart, but the other thing was the distance involved with a 24 and a strobe. If I had to pop the strobe, it would have highlighted my position, which is probably not a good idea. And with a 24, he would have been, you know, microscopic in the frame. And I just, it was just a bad move. It was bad all the way around, but I didn't get shot. So,

Raymond Hatfield: 24:35

yeah, well, yeah, you're here today and I'm, thankful for that. I'm sure that you're thankful for that as well. Wow. but I also realized that,

Dan Milnor: 24:42

you know, the sort of getting shot at thing was not something that I was keen on.

Raymond Hatfield: 24:46

Oh yeah.

Dan Milnor: 24:47

and the other thing was, the idea of having a picture of the guy doing the shooting was not what was intriguing to me. What was intriguing to me was the game starting again five minutes later. And the fact that this was conditioned, this was a conditioned response to perpetual, Simmering sort of crime and violence and you get used to it. And all of a sudden, it's normal. It's like, Oh, they're not shooting at me. This is totally fine. I'll, I'll be fine. That's what was intriguing to me. And that is really the moment that I went from being a photo journalist to a documentary photographer that I was not, the frontline stuff was not, I don't think I had the fortitude to do the frontline stuff, but what I did have was the fortitude to do long term stories.

Raymond Hatfield: 25:31

Yeah. I definitely want to get into. To you as a documentarian and doing these long form stories. as I think that sets you apart from a lot of other photographers, but as you mentioned as well, a lot of people are, you know, we're still kind of, under the impression that you should go to college to make it in a profession that, that you want to be in. But with the rising cost of college, a lot of people are wondering, you know, is photography something that you really need to go to school for? So I'm sure that When you made the decision to go to, Texas and Austin to go specifically pretty much for, photography, I want to know, what did you hope to have or what did you hope to know by the time you left school? And do you think that it's still as important to go to college today, as it was when you went?

Dan Milnor: 26:19

What did I hope to get out of it? Well, you know, fame, fortune, of course. Fame and fortune.

Raymond Hatfield: 26:22

Right out of college?

Dan Milnor: 26:24

No, And I had an apartment right in the middle of all the sororities, which was a good move. That was, that was a good move, in hindsight. No, let me think about that. What was my goal getting out? I wanted to be a professional photographer, and at the time there was a clear footpath that you followed to go from A to B, to C to D, and how you became a photographer. the short answer to the second part of the question is, it's not necessary, it's not critical essential to go to college. However, in my opinion, it is critical to actually learn photography. So whether you do that in college or you do that. With a mentorship program, or you do that through a series of workshops or a combination of all the above. If you're going to be a legitimate photographer, and this is where people are going to take offense at some of this, I know, but there's a big difference between being an online photographer and being an actual photographer. There are two industries working simultaneously. You have the online photo community and you have the on earth, real time human being editors, agents, agencies, assignments, and professional photographers. These are two entirely separate groups of people that oftentimes don't even recognize one another. They don't know any, they don't know each other. So, for example, you can have a guy that has a million Instagram followers who does YouTube that has a ton of followers and blah, blah, blah. And if you said to any agent or editor or photo art buyer in the photo industry and said, Have you ever heard of this person? There's a good chance they're going to say no idea who that is, because that's the online photo world. The online photo world to me is very deceptive, because you have a lot of people selling things. And so, you know, hey look at me, and basically it's based on numbers, based on following and traffic. And that's a very dangerous thing, very different thing from saying here's a really good photographer. I know tons of good photographers, elite level people, who have no social following whatsoever. because they're busy working all the time.

Raymond Hatfield: 28:12

Yeah.

Dan Milnor: 28:12

They're actually doing real assignments. They're doing editorial work, they're doing commercial advertising, fashion, fine art, automotive, etc. So these two very different things. There was no internet when I got out of school. So my goal was to get into the photography world for real. I wanted to make my living from photography and that meant I wanted to have health insurance. I wanted to have money in the bank. I've never been a believer in this concept of the starving artist. I think that there are plenty of starving artists, but I think that that in some ways is something that you have to mentally get over. There's no reason if you're a, if you're capable of making unique work. And that's easier said than done. But if you're capable of making unique work, there's no reason to starve. you have to be intelligent about it, but there's a way of doing it. At least there was at the time. So I got out of school knowing that I needed to get a job at a newspaper. That was step one. And then while I was at the newspaper, after I had been there for a while, I would start freelancing for editorial clients on the side, magazine clients. And then eventually, when you had enough magazine clients, you would leave the newspaper and you would jump into the magazine world. And from the magazine world, that led to commercial photography, and from commercial photography to advertising. Where the serious money is. And that's still true to this day, is advertising photography is really where the massive budgets are. Not nearly as massive as they once were. Mm hmm. But the ultimate end game was to be able to shoot advertising very sporadically, just enough for me to be able to pay for my own documentary projects. That's really the rub is most documentary photographers. It seems like a significant percentage are doing other kinds of work to try to make money to do their own projects. that's the key. It's hard. It's not easy. It's getting harder every day.

Raymond Hatfield: 29:53

Yeah. So as a documentarian, In your own words, what would you say is your job as the photographer? What do you have to do or capture to consider your job a success? I

Dan Milnor: 30:04

think you have to make original work. That's the key. It's very easy for me to go online and see what somebody else has done and go out and copy it. There's people are doing that every day. Every generation of photographer, every generation, there's a handful of people worldwide. That come along that adds something new to the conversation. I am not one of those people. I wish I was, but I'm not, but every, you know, you have Sebastian, you had, let's go way back. You have Gene Smith, W. Gene Smith, documentary photographer, probably the best documentary photographer that's ever lived after Gene Smith. The next person that jumps out to me would be somebody like Ster Solgado. And so Gado was not only a good photographer, but he was able to secure funding. He was able to secure long-term assignments. He was able to envision where his projects would be in 10 years time. Wow.

Raymond Hatfield: 30:51

And

Dan Milnor: 30:52

so Gado would, also work on a project for 10 years before it was released. So he did, his first project, big one that got recognition was the famine in Ethiopia. And then he did a project in the Americas, then he did workers, and these were 10 year increments. And so Gato would come to someone like Kodak, where I worked at one point, and he would say, I want X amount of money, and they would give it to him. Because he'd come in and say, if you give me this money, this is what's gonna transpire. And it was all worked out over like a 5, 6, 7 year period, and you're like, nobody else is doing this, wow, that's remarkable. Really the key being a photographer is to try to tell unique stories in a way that people can immediately recognize who did the work. And that's hard today when there's so many people working and so much of the work you see looks exactly the same. and it's hard. It took me ten years of shooting every day to figure out what I was doing, literally ten years.

Raymond Hatfield: 31:41

I believe it. I believe it. So, was it your work for the paper, which seems very run and gun do it now. Let's tell the story right away, which is Maybe I'm wrong, but I would consider kind of short form. did that kind of, Open you up to the idea of long form stuff or get you excited for that?

Dan Milnor: 32:00

Yeah, so the the daily paper, especially a big daily where you're getting multiple assignments every day, you get up in the morning, you get There's a little basket that has your name on it. And it is a stack of paper and each one of those is an assignment. And the beauty of that is that, and we're shooting at the time, I'm shooting 35 millimeter transparency film. So I'm shooting slide film. This is not easy. It's not easy. You got to get it right. Your exposure has to be right. And the assignment range on a typical day would go something like this. city council meeting in a windowless room. With three people and overhead fluorescent lighting, which meant you had to put a green magenta filter on your camera and a green gel on your strobe, balance it out for the, you know, with, with a hundred speed Fuji Chrome push to three 20, you could shoot at F four at a, 30th of a second with a strobe bounced off the ceiling and you do this and these pictures are horrible and they suck. And no one should have ever assigned this, but you got it

Raymond Hatfield: 32:54

and

Dan Milnor: 32:55

you're like cursing the paper and you're cursing the person that assigned it. And the people in the city council don't want you there and you don't want to be there. And you, so you bang that thing out and you're like, okay, get me out of here. And then you get in the truck and your beeper goes off. At the time we had beepers, no cell phones

Raymond Hatfield: 33:09

and it's,

Dan Milnor: 33:10

and it's always nine one one. It's always a panic emergency. Hey, this fell through the gaps. you have to go photograph the mayor. Yeah. And so you go, okay. And you go and you shoot a portrait of the mayor. And then on the way back to the paper, there's a brush fire that fires up in downtown Phoenix and there's houses on fire. And they're like, go shoot the brush fire. So you're going from all one thing to another all day long. And it is the ultimate training ground. But it's frustrating because you don't get time. So on the side, on the days of the week that I was not working or from, if I worked through 11, I was still up at whatever, six in the morning. I would be out shooting projects. And so what you were hoping for was that the paper would occasionally would throw you a bone and say, look, we're going to give you a picture package on, you know, the community section. And they end up running three, four or five pictures. And that wets your appetite for. Hmm. This is great. And also I'm at the half price bookstore in Austin, looking at books of my idols. I'm looking at Salgado. I'm looking at an act away. I'm looking at Jill Perez and I'm looking at an Alex Webb and Maggie Stieber, and I'm looking at the books and the work that they're putting out. And I'm like, that's who I want to be. these are multi year, 50 to a hundred images over a five to 10 year period on the same story. That is intriguing to me. It still is.

Raymond Hatfield: 34:30

Yeah, what was, I guess, your first assignment of this caliber? Was it something that you had given yourself that you decided to tackle? Did you get an idea from somewhere else? Was it commissioned?

Dan Milnor: 34:40

all of the best work I have ever done, This is really sad, but I think it's true for about 95 percent of all the photographers out there. The best work I've ever done was all self assigned because what I learned very quickly, and I'm, I just, I turned 50 in January. So I got the tail end of what I would consider the last sort of real photo industry that existed. As are, as the generations before us knew. So there was a real editorial world. people were paying rates. You could get contracts, all these things that are really out the window these days. but I learned very quickly that to get a multi day assignment was rare. So, you know, I'd get a three or four day assignment, editorial assignment. Those were few and far between most of them were these quick hit things that I thought this isn't helping me at all I'm shooting all these pictures and these pictures are other people's pictures. These are not mine.

Raymond Hatfield: 35:34

Yes,

Dan Milnor: 35:34

so in 19 1997 I'm living in Southern, California. I'm assisting for a photographer named Rick Rickman and Rick who I think is actually from New Mexico Rick was really helpful to me because he sort of took me under his wing, taught me a lot of things about photography, not actual image making, but taught me about invoicing and assignments and working with editors and all this stuff that I had no experience with. I didn't know what I was doing. I assisted for Rick for several years. and he was super helpful to me and he would get multi day assignments. He would do stuff for the geographic and life and time and people and all these things. So he was a, working, editorial guy all the time. And so, but I realized that the odds of me becoming him were very slim. And so I decided my wife works for Canon or worked for Canon for 30 years. And she got a call from someone she knew that worked at Kodak. And they said, Hey, we're looking for a rep in Southern California. And my wife said, Oh, you should get my husband to do it. He'd be great. So I did that job for a few years. And to get the job, I had to sign a conflict of interest letter that said I would no longer do assignments because if I was doing assignments and I'd be competing with the people that I was trying to help at Kodak I said, okay, I'll sign this. If you sign something that says I get all the free film chemicals and paper I can possibly use, which for Kodak was nothing, of course they signed it, they signed it, but it was not a big deal. And so I sold all my equipment except for a Leica and a 35 millimeter. I think I had two 35. And for the next four years, the only pictures I made were long term projects of my own assignment. And I realized at the end of four years what I was on to and that this was the best work I'd ever done and the only work I wanted to do. So I didn't want to do magazines work anymore. I didn't want to do commercial photography. I just wanted to do long term projects. But that is very difficult to do in the U. S. because there's so little market for it and every year the market was getting smaller and smaller and now there's virtually Nothing. There's virtually no outlets for that kind of work outside of the books.

Raymond Hatfield: 37:38

That is a shame. I know growing up And I talked about this in the beginner photography podcast Facebook group before I've always said that kind of when I first got into photography, my dream was always like, to follow the band, you know what I mean? or follow the team from from the underdogs to like winning the, you know, the World Series that year, whatever it was, or coming out with the Grammy winning album. And because you never really saw those photos. You'd see everything in between and you would never see the entire book. And that's when you would go to these bookstores and you would see these photo books of these, singular events. A singular topic that took up the entire book. It really puts you in that place. Cause suddenly you knew the story and it didn't take any words at all. So I want to talk more about the storytelling aspect of photography. As I've said many times on the podcast, that a great photo is so much more than just the sum of its settings. And a lot of what makes a photo great is the story that it tells. Now, Specializing in these long term stories, how much of the story is planned out like, you know what you want to capture versus just showing up and simply reacting?

Dan Milnor: 38:49

Well, it entirely depends on the project, and it depends on two primary ingredients, which are time and access. How much time do you have, and what's your access like? Access back in the mid 90s was very easy. If you had a press credential, you'd get anything you want, and you'd show up in the middle of nowhere in some part of the country and whip out a press pass, and people would be like, Hey! You want to come into our house, we'll make lunch, you can hang out, whatever. Those days are, those days are gone. Everybody's suspicious now. So time and access are really critical. But, for me, I was working at the newspaper in Austin, at the Daily Texan. I was freelancing for like, anyone who would hire me. Doing these, you know, little assignments here and there. And I went to Half Price Books one day, and I'll never forget this. I go into the photo book section, and there's two books. There's one book called Mexico, which is by a magnum photographer named Abbas, who I met 15 years ago. And his primary work at that time was a multi, like, 15 year project on Islam all around the world, which is this remarkable book, if you can get it. But he did this little book called Mexico, and Mexico was basically all black and white, all like, uh, and it was kind of random. It was like a personal notebook from Mexico. And I looked at it, and I'm like, I like this. And then I opened this book. by a photographer named Gilles Perez, who's a French guy who's a magnum photographer as well. I just froze because one, I had never seen pictures like this before. They were so different and so sophisticated compared to what I was looking at. It literally freaked me out. I wasn't entirely sure what to make of it. But the book was about the Iranian revolution in 79. And Gilles had been there for a long time working on this project and this story. And the book, the copy, the writing in the book were telexes between, He and that Magnum office in Paris, if I have to, if I remember this correctly. And what got me was that was the honesty in the telexes, because here's a guy that's already established at Magnum. He's got multiple stories under his belt. He's an incredible photographer. He's a very intelligent guy. That's way more than just a photographer, but there's a vulnerability in these telexes that I did not expect to see of the doubt that he had in his mind and the uncertainty and the challenges. And I was like, wow, I'm in the same boat that he is like, Even though he's way better than I am and he's way more established and he's got these books, there's hope for me because there are cracks in his armor. He's admitting. but I didn't buy that book, which is a big mistake because that was the first edition Telexaron, which is now probably worth like 5, 000. But anyway, I was like, I can't buy this. It's too intimidating for me to look at this. So I bought the Abbas book, which I still have, but it haunted me that I'd never bought this book. And then like, Five years ago, I'm sitting in a cafe in Brooklyn and I had my camera on the table in front of me, which is an M4 Leica. And a guy walks by and he goes, nice camera. And I look up and it's Gilles. And it turns out that the coffee shop I was sitting at is like half a block from his studio. And I said, you know, Holy cow. I go, Joe Perez. And he sat down and then he goes, Hey, let's go to the studio. And then I called the founder of blurb who was in New York at the time. And I said, you're never going to believe this. I'm going to Jill Perez's studio and she was like, Hey, I want to go to Jill Perez's studio. So we went to his studio and we had lunch with him it was amazing. And he and I wrote letters back and forth for quite a while. And I told him, I said, I screwed up. I didn't buy your book. I should have bought your book, you know, in Austin all those years ago. And then something funny happened about six months ago. A friend of mine moved from California to Wisconsin, uh, really good friend, good photographer, and he called me and he said, we're having a going away party. Make sure you come to the going away party. I said, okay, so we get to the party, and he goes, where's your truck? I said, oh, I parked around there. He goes, back your truck up over here. And he opens up the back of his truck, and it's filled with photo books. And he said, look, I can't take these with me. And the first book on the stack, on top, was Telex Iran.

Raymond Hatfield: 42:42

No way. And

Dan Milnor: 42:43

he's like, here's the book I know you're really gonna want.

Raymond Hatfield: 42:45

No way. So I,

Dan Milnor: 42:46

so I got my copy.

Raymond Hatfield: 42:48

Wow, what an amazing story. That must have felt really good in that moment. Yeah.

Dan Milnor: 42:52

Oh, man, that book is, it still freaks me out.

Raymond Hatfield: 42:54

Yeah. I

Dan Milnor: 42:55

mean, he gave me a stack of books that are, to me, books are evidence, right? You can't deny what's in there and they are, the quality bar that has already been set.

Raymond Hatfield: 43:05

Yeah.

Dan Milnor: 43:06

if I'm coming to New Mexico, Northern New Mexico, and I'm going to do a project about the culture here. Then, I have books like Norman Mauskopf's The Descendants, that, and Jimmy Santiago Baca was the one who wrote the copy for the book, Jack Woody at Twin Palms published it, and Norman Mauskopf is the photographer. That book is there. It's my responsibility as a photographer to know about that book, and to know what's in it, and I'm either gonna add to that conversation, or I'm not doing the project, because it's already been done. And it's been done at a very high level. And that's one of the big things that you'll see today with the online photo community is there's very little research done. So what sometimes I'll see, I'll hear about a project and it's being hyped and everyone's like, Oh, it's amazing. And it's great. It's amazing. And I look at it and I go, not only is it not amazing. It was already done five years ago by so and so, and when they did a much better job, it's that the new photographer was able to learn how to market the thing, and spin it through social and marketing numbers and traffic, and be like, well, look, I'm getting all this buzz, but ultimately, when you look at the work, you go, this is just not that good. One of the big misconceptions about photography in the digital age is that it's easy now, because of all the technology, and that is completely inaccurate. It's as difficult to make a good image today as it always has been, and it is. Just as rare because To get a a lifetime sort of signature image you need the right light you need the right timing the right composition And it's really hard and it's rare. I mean I go maybe if i'm lucky a couple of times a year I'll get something that I think would fit if I reduced my life down to It's the top 20 images. It's rare that something new comes along and knock something out of that original 20. It's really hard to get work like that. And so I think the internet and the technology fools us into thinking that what we're making is really good. Most of the time it's not. And that's totally fine. I think as a photographer, you need to be prepared to fail the vast majority of the time. And for some reason, when I was in school, again, I'm 50. So it was a little bit different philosophy back then. Yeah. But failure wasn't viewed in the same way. You kind of expected that you were going to fail most of the time. And when you put your work up in front of your peers, they were going to tear you apart piece by piece. And that's typically what happened. And then suddenly failure wasn't viewed the same way and you weren't supposed to talk about it and you weren't supposed to admit it and whatever. But I think, I mean, look, if you're a photographer and I'm a photographer and you put your work down in front of me and I put my work down, you're going to see things you like, and you're going to see things you don't like. And you have to be able to say, look, Milner. I see where you're going here, but you're not there yet. it's not good enough. And then I have to be able to have thick enough skin to go, Hey, well, thanks for being honest with me. What do you think I should do? Like what's missing? What, how do I fill the gaps? Whatever. And so that's the kind of education that you get when you're learning photography in a school. It's not about technical stuff. You know, UT Austin, literally the entire amount of time that we spent on technical was probably less than a week, you know, And the rest, the three and a half, four years of this stuff was not, had nothing to do with technique. It had everything to do with process, about story, about editing, about sequencing, about design. Those are the important things. The equipment, nobody cared. I mean, you know, people had a Nikon FM body with a 28 and a roll of Tri X. And they were like, here. That was the extent of the gear conversation. We probably spent more time talking about printing. Technique and photographic technique.

Raymond Hatfield: 46:34

Yeah.

Dan Milnor: 46:34

Cause it's, it's complicated.

Raymond Hatfield: 46:36

okay. so we talked about when you first started creating a gallery of say 20 images of your life's work, it's very hard to break that, to move one of those out and replace it with a new photo today. Yeah. So if we wanted to do that, if we want to take better photos, just so that I'm clear, the best way to do that is. Constant critiquing, constant ripping apart our own photos to continue to grow. Is that it?

Dan Milnor: 47:04

Well, I would say the first step is you have to practice, you know, photography is a, physical skill, right? It's, hand eye coordination. It's anticipation. It's knowledge of your subject matter. It's an understanding of light of timing of composition, it's like working out, it's a skill. It's like writing your bicycle. You ride every day for 30 days at the end of 30 days, you're like, wow, I feel pretty fit, but that first day you're riding and you're like, Oh my God, I think I'm going to die. and photography is the same. So for example, I had not worked on a project for quite a while and two and a half weeks ago, I flew to Albania and I shot every day for two weeks in Albania trying to produce a project. And the first couple of days in Albania, I was terrible. I mean, I'm looking at things happening and saying, Oh, there was my phone. Oh, I should have shot that. I just wasn't good because I'm sloppy. I'm slow. I'm not looking, I'm not anticipating, I'm fumbling around. And I've been doing this for 30 years. So practicing and staying sharp. I think that's, being aware of what has already been done and understanding where you fit in as a photographer and what the context of you are, what your context is in the grand scheme of things, really important. Let's say, for example, I want to do a project on the border. The border's been photographed a million times over. I've done multiple projects down there myself, as have many of my friends. So if I go to an art buyer, an agent in New York, and I want to show my work, and I'm showing a project on the border, I better know what's already been done, because if I put something in front of this person, and I say, look at me, look how original I am, and she looks at me and says, you know, so and so, and so and so, and so and so already did the same project, it makes me look really bad. Even if these people have already done the project, and I can sit with her, and I can say, look, I know that Bill and Mary and Tom all did this project before, but this is why I did it. going to take the baton from them and I'm going to move it one step forward because I'm adding this other element or I have a different angle or I got better access. And so you're adding to what's been done. And for whatever reason today, I see there's a lot of aversion to this idea that you have to know what's been done because people want to believe that they're amazing and they want to believe that very quickly that, you know, you get out of school and you're like, I want to be famous. You know, I want big assignments and do this and that and you kind of, that's a hard game to win. there's a big difference between being hot for a year as a photographer and having a 30 year career. it's a marathon and a sprint. And I'd always rather be in the marathon conversation. And to be in the marathon, you have to do some basic field work and some groundwork and have some basic knowledge. So practicing having, Being fundamentally sound, but then also just learning who you are with a camera, because if you can't make original photographs, there is no chance that you will have a 30 year career, none, because there's too many people who can do everything. Jack of all trades, low level commercial photographer has a studio. What do you shoot? I'll shoot anything that comes in. I'll shoot a wedding. I'll shoot a portrait. I'll shoot a product. I'll shoot this. I'll shoot that. There's 10, 000 of these people out there. And what you end up doing is you get into these pricing wars where the price goes down and down and down because everybody's competing for these small jobs. That's a hard run. I'd much rather take my chances, have a part time job doing something else, learn who I am as a photographer, be able to make original work. And then when clients see that original work, they say, if, if we want that kind of photography, the only person who can do it is that person. That has value. That's why people still pay for photography is because certain people do things that nobody else can do. And there's value in that.

Raymond Hatfield: 50:32

So you mentioned being, not being a Jack of all trades. And if you want to have a 30 year career, you have to really be a master at something. You have had that 30 year career in your own words, what are you a master of?

Dan Milnor: 50:45

Wasting time. That's why you're

Raymond Hatfield: 50:48

here with me today. Yeah, that makes sense.

Dan Milnor: 50:50

Photographically. I don't know if there's anything that I would call my, it's hard to call myself a master at anything. I think that there are things that I've learned how to do well, and there's things that took me a long time to figure out, but once I figured them out, I think that they, they've helped. I think this is probably not a great answer for you, but I think what I realized a long time ago was that it wasn't enough anymore to just be a photographer. You need to be a more well rounded human being, because here's the funny thing. There's a lot of photographers out there, a lot more than ever. So let's say that you want a commercial assignment. And the creative agency that's in charge of assigning the photographer or finding a photographer, they're looking around, they're looking around. And when they meet with you, let's say you go to a portfolio review and there's, they're looking at ten photographers that day. And you walk up, and I walk up, and our friends walk up, and this art buyer's looking at you, and she's looking at your portfolio, and she's looking at my portfolio. She's not just looking at your portfolio. She's looking at you, and she's listening to you, and she's looking at your, how you're dressed, she's listening to your vocabulary. Does he have a sense of humor? Does he have a massive ego? And more importantly, are the clients going to like this person? Can I leave this person alone, on the set, with the client, and they will not embarrass me? Well, the clients like them. if something goes wrong, will they be able to handle it? what's their crew like? What's their plan B like all these different things that in photo school, they don't teach you anything about this. So you learn that being a photographer is about being a well rounded, intelligent human being that is continually on the hunt for new knowledge. The photography will come with practice and with sort of perseverance, but all the peripheral things to me are more important today than they ever have been because it's way more than the pictures. That's it.

Raymond Hatfield: 52:39

So I wasn't going to get into this for a few more questions, but is this one of the reasons why you are, according to your website, that you are a complete and total non believer of social media. Yeah. And that these platforms have done irreparable damage to human communication skills and attention span.

Dan Milnor: 52:57

Jeez, did I say that? Well, whoever wrote the copy on your website

Raymond Hatfield: 53:01

did.

Dan Milnor: 53:02

That sounds negative. Uh, yeah, yeah, in essence I believe exactly that, but there's a little background here. So, I don't like social media. I think things like Instagram, are proving themselves to be one of the most Detrimental, contributions to our society that I think I've ever seen. I always kind of joke with my friends. I'm not sure that as a species, we will survive Instagram, you know, it's unleashing level of consumerism on the planet that we simply can't sustain. It's unleashing battle against the environment that we can't sustain or can't win. But this goes way back. and here's the ironic part is that I was one of the first people That I know in the entire world to be on Facebook.

Raymond Hatfield: 53:44

I went

Dan Milnor: 53:45

to New York to do an assignment and it was for someone that had something to do with the central park committee. So I'm talking to her in New York and she says Facebook. And I'm like, what's that? And she goes, Oh, this is new thing called Facebook. When you get back to California, you should sign up for it. And so I'm like, okay, I fly back to California. I sign up on Facebook. No one I know is on Facebook, not a single person. It's just me. And I'm on there and there's other people on there. And I'm like, Hey, this is kind of cool. And same thing when Instagram happens, I'm walking down the street in San Francisco. Friend of mine calls me and goes, Hey, there's this new thing called Instagram. You should check it out. I stop in the middle of the street. I download the app and I start, start taking pictures and posting on Instagram. So I was on these things long before any of my friends were on there, including all my friends who are basically given their entire life to the platform. But 60 years ago, I was here in New Mexico. My birthday is January 1st. I woke up on my birthday and I was like. I don't believe in this anymore. This is not what we were originally sold of what this is. I said, I am watching these networks destroy my friends. They are like skittish, scared little creatures who can't get through a conversation without looking at their phone. They're insecure. Their work has gone downhill and the work they're producing is only being produced to try to drive numbers on these social networks. And it's garbage. Cause it looks like everybody else's, it looks like content. So I called the founder of blurb and I called the marketing director of blurb, who was my immediate boss at the time. And I said, I know this is probably isn't going to go over well, but I'm deleting seven networks right now. And I don't ever want to go back on these networks. And the marketing director said at the time, she said, I hate them too. I think this is all, you know, go ahead. So I thought, Oh, that's great. And then the founder said, go ahead and do it, but write about why it is you're doing it. And so I did, and I did a post called why deleted social media, which is by far the highest traffic post I've ever done. And look at you paying attention to

Raymond Hatfield: 55:38

those numbers.

Dan Milnor: 55:39

Well, it's because here's something funny happened. So two weeks goes by and I went through detox. I would literally in moments of like calm, just pick up your phone, just to look at the first thing. I just pick it up for no reason. And I'd be in the field shooting and I'd go, Oh, I should check like Facebook. As I'm walking down the street somewhere trying to shoot, I'd be thinking about Instagram and I thought this is bad. So two weeks detox and then after two weeks I kind of came through the veil and I looked back and I thought, man, it's not good. So, I, wrote a post, the post did, got all this traffic, I don't know the specific numbers, but it was by far more than any post I've done. But something funny happened, it's kind of tragic, is that people began to write me asking for help. They were saying, I'm physically addicted, I lost my house, I lost my job, I lost my family, I can't stay off of Facebook. I'm on Instagram 60 hours a week, um, I'm nervous, I'm unhappy, I'm taking depression medication. So I had to write a follow up post and saying, I'm not a medical person. I'm not a psychiatrist. If you need medical help, please seek a medical attention or psychiatric help. But that's not my role. I, I'm just not qualified to help in that way. That post was six years ago. I get emails every week from people all over the world saying, help me. you know, I can't get out. And that's the, one of the things that's very interesting to me is that. I think all of us are probably touched by someone in our family or close to our families that has substance abuse problem, right? Either alcohol, drugs, whatever. It's pretty easy for people to say, Yeah, that's an addiction, it's too bad, get help, whatever. Then you move down the scale and you come to things like sex and gambling and you go, well, I'm a sex addict or, you know, I'm a gambling addict and you get a, there's a lot less people that want to say, yep, those are legitimate addictions. You know, there's a lot of people that go, well, those are just choices. You should just stop. Then you slide down the scale even further and you get to technology and there are so few people who want to admit. That's something like Instagram is a physical addiction, but it is, it is a dopamine physical addiction. And I have seen it ruined. So many of my friends who are photographers, who's just their entire existence is based on that app. And it's nuts. I don't want any part of it. I have, so I deleted all my accounts. And then about four years later, the marketing director at blurb at the time said to me, it would really help us if you had an Instagram account. And I said, never going to happen. I'm never going to do that. And so about 15 minutes later, I'm sitting right next to her. She says, I just created an account in your name. Don't worry about it. We will manage it. And I said, okay. And so two days goes by and I'm like, I better look at what they're putting on there. Cause it has my name on it and none. It's not their fault, but they don't know me. they're not intimate with me as a photographer. They don't know my philosophy. And so the work they were putting on the captions, the style, the look of it, I said, no, I can't do this. So I started managing the account and then that lasted until. Guess about six or eight months ago, and I thought why am I doing this I don't like anything about this I don't think it's helping blur really in particular. So I quit posting and I haven't heard anything. So

Raymond Hatfield: 58:45

But now they're gonna go back and look Why

Dan Milnor: 58:49

are you not posting yeah, but you know, I think anyone who gives themselves two weeks away from social I think you'll be amazed because if you can survive two weeks, cold turkey, no access, no like sneaking peeks, no nothing. If you do two weeks, you will look back and you will see it in a very different light. I can almost guarantee that it's going to make you at least take pause to one, how much time you're putting in and two, how fake it is, how phony the entire thing is, there's a big difference between being a good photographer and being someone who knows how to build following. Those are both. Those are both legitimate skills. Absolutely. Building a following is a legitimate skill because it can give you the freedom and independence to operate on your own. But don't confuse the fact of someone with a big following is a good photographer. Because very often those two things do not overlap. so then

Raymond Hatfield: 59:41

let me ask you a question. Because Canon, not too long ago, had hired a photographer to do an ad campaign. And then they ended up letting that photographer go. Because, even though they said that this photographer was well suited for this ad campaign, she didn't have enough Instagram followers. So she let her go. So, this is just horrible to hear. it's devastating to a lot of new photographers. How has, not having a social presence affected you and, I suppose, for lack of a better term, your ability to, to get work? Thank you.

Dan Milnor: 1:00:13

Well, a couple of things. Number one, for Canon to do that, it's just dumb. That's just a dumb and it's short sighted and then it looks really, the optics on that looks really bad as well. But that's, all the companies are doing that and the companies are lost, right? Because all of this stuff came on so fast, they were caught so flat footed and they're playing catch up. And a company like Canon, Canon is a very conservative, slow moving company that's a little bit like a big cruise ship, you know. You turn the steering wheel, basically, what am I blanking on the, uh, you know, the, the ship.

Raymond Hatfield: 1:00:43

Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

Dan Milnor: 1:00:44

The wheel, yeah, there we go. You turn the wheel with the ship, it doesn't just turn left, it keeps going straight for, like, eight miles, and then it slowly makes a turn. That's what these companies are like, and they're lost, because they're, the mark, the industry's going away. Professional photography industry is disappearing. And people are not buying equipment like they once were. And these people are, the companies are a little bit desperate. They're a little bit, crazed, trying to figure out what the next trend is. And so that's a hard thing for somebody like a company like Canon to have to overcome and Sony's in the same boat, like a Fuji or whoever it is. They're all in the same boat. I mean, all these people are, they're all pandering to Instagram followers. And the crazy part is for a company like Canon, I shoot Fuji, company like Fuji, they're going after these Instagram stars, 99. 9 percent of all those images are made with. They're not made with Fuji cameras or Canon cameras. It makes no sense whatsoever. And instead of slowing down and actually hiring somebody who could make original work, that's going to last longer than five minutes online. That would be interesting because there's plenty of people using Canon equipment in the world who were doing amazing stuff. I was able to do a project a couple of years ago with a guy named Ron Haviv, who's a war photographer, documentary guy out of New York City. One of the founders of the seven agency, Ron's Canon shooter, right? Just off the top of my head. Yeah.

Raymond Hatfield: 1:01:56

Yeah.

Dan Milnor: 1:01:58

Let's say that I had X amount of money for budget, and I have no idea what his social following is. No idea. I don't care, but that's a guy who's capable, if I had budget, to say, okay, Ron, Is there something happening in the world that you've always wanted to do that you haven't been able to do and what can we do with it that's completely different, that's going to make people look and think in a different way? That's an interesting marketing campaign to me. Not pandering to a social following thinking that their following is going to be your following. So for me, I'm in a unique spot. So in 2010, I decided I did not want to work as a photographer anymore because I'd done it for 25 years, almost 30 years, and I just wanted to do something else with my life. So it was a Tuesday afternoon. I just deleted my email account and I'm like, I'm done. I'm out. And my wife said, well, what are you going to do? And I said, I'm going to move to New Mexico and I'm going to change my career. And so I was kind of lurking around California still. And my phone rang and it was the founder of blurb, a woman named Eileen Gittens. Eileen said, I've been on Blurb's advisory board going back to like 2007. And she called and said, Hey, I heard you're not, what's up with the photography thing? And I said, yeah, I'm going to move on and do something else. And she said, why don't you work with us? And so what started as kind of an informal part time thing within six months was a full time job. And it's been by far the best job I've ever had in my life. It's been, it's great helping people make books. There's been a lot of travel. I've been able to see the industry from a direction that I would have never been able to see it as a photographer. And I work with photographers, designers, artists, illustrators, educators, all over the world. Australia, Europe, Canada, the US, etc. So it's given me this great perspective. And the other thing it's done is it's allowed me to, when I pick up a camera, only work on the projects that I want to work on. So I don't need to do assignments anymore, I don't have to do sheets I don't want to do. but here's the funny part. This sounds so counterintuitive, but it's important. The second I said, I'm not a photographer anymore. I started being. People would come to me and they'd go, Hey, you want to work with us and do this? And I'm like, how did you even find me? The fact that I had disassociated myself with being labeling myself a photographer almost opened the door because what I realized was more important than the photography was the fact that I was somebody who has ideas, right? I read every day. I try to spend as much time as possible thinking about things. I'm constantly trying to educate myself about things that I don't know about. I'm reading a book right now about the San Andreas Fault and just ironically after the quakes of last week. And people are like, why are you reading that book? And I'm like, cause I don't know anything about the fault. Nothing. Oh, by the way, you know, the guy Richter, from the Richter scale. he, um, apparently never experienced a heavy duty earthquake in his entire life. And. After he passed away, he owned a house in Northridge, California that was then in possession, I believe, of his son, which was filled with all his stuff. And in 94, it burned down in the Northridge Earthquake. Talk about Talk about irony. Yeah. But here's the weird thing is when your knowledge base expands beyond photography, you're suddenly interesting to people far beyond photography. So I was able to do something last year as well, a contract for a creative contract for a year with an organization that's in an industry that I know nothing about. And they came to me and said, look, you have interesting ideas, you know, we want to hire you for a year. We'll give you a contract. We'll do this and that. And so I did that. And I wasn't looking for that. It's not something I particularly wanted to do, but I thought, okay, this is a challenge and they did not want a photographer. even though I did photographs for them, they wanted someone who had creative ideas,

Raymond Hatfield: 1:05:32

you know,

Dan Milnor: 1:05:32

how do you get this group to talk to this group? And if you're going to get this group to talk to this group, what are you going to make? In the middle, is it a film? Is it a still? Is it a copy? Is it a magazine? Is it a book? Like, how's it gonna work? And so, I have ideas like that.

Raymond Hatfield: 1:05:45

There was so much there to unpack. what a journey. okay, I gotta, I gotta It's a mess. No, no, no, no, no. It's not a mess. It's not a mess. Just this whole time that you're talking, I'm thinking, Oh, that's a great point. I wanna go off of there. That's a great point. I wanna go off there. That's a great point. I wanna go off there. But at the same time, I still have a few, uh, questions that I really wanted to touch on today. one of them was blurb. I know that you're a huge proponent of, creating books, especially, you know, not being on Facebook, not sharing your images on Instagram, but having that physical, copy there yourself. talk to me about, creating that book, talk to me about that first time. Well, I guess I have to rephrase the question because you were in the, uh, position to have your images printed in a newspaper. So now that maybe people don't have as many images printed in a newspaper, what do you tell people about getting their images printed in a book?

Dan Milnor: 1:06:37

So a couple of things. 1993 or 94, I made my first trip to New York as a photographer, which at the time is what you did. A lot of people still do that. New York is where the people. With who make decisions are based. It's where the people who have budgets are based, et cetera. And so I went and I showed my work to photo agents at the time, primarily. And. I realized that not a lot of these people, believe it or not, had a loop or a light table to look. At the time, your, your portfolio was a single page of 20 slides. Like, you threw it down, threw it down on a light table and they looped it and they went through. And I was like, God, there has to be a better way to do this. So I went, I left New York, went back to Phoenix, went to the newspaper, went into the design department. And I said, I think I want to make my own book because that would be way easier to read than this page of slides. And they were like, ah, go away. You're an idiot. Takes too long. You don't know what you're doing. Blah, blah, blah. So three months later, I had my first book, which was not really a book. It was like glorified oversized color copy that was laminated and bound. And I made 10, all I could, I could only afford 10 copies. You could do this at Kinko's now in like five minutes, but I was like, oh my God, this is a book. This is great. And so what I did is I took a list of the ten clients that I really wanted to work for, National Geographic, German Geo, Stern, all these magazines around the world, and I was like, I'm gonna send a copy to them. And of course, this was snail mail and no announcement. Just blindly mailing these things off. And a funny thing happened was they started contacting me. German Geo, my phone rang. And And it was this very heavily accented German accent, female voice. And she's like, we got your portfolio. This is unbelievable. How did you do this? What is this? You know, and they were so intrigued by what I had was able to do. And then the photo editor at the national geographic at the time, a guy named Kent Coberstein, he wrote me a hand, like full page, handwritten letter saying, we've never seen a portfolio like this before. Like, how did you do this? And so that's what got my bookmaking on the road was all the way back in 93. So when blurb came along, it was sort of a natural progression of that. But the book is very important. And the funny thing is you have, you know, the digital online technology proponents. And I think all those things are great. Digital online and technology are all fine, but there is a different level of consideration when it comes to print, especially high levels of the industry, because print signifies a couple of things. And number one is it signifies. Concerted thought specific thought about your work because there's a big difference between putting your portfolio on an iPad And putting it into a book form because the book makes you think Forces you to apply critical thinking to your work. What's the best image? What's the cover? What's the sequence? What's my edit? Is this good enough to last in this book? Or is it not good enough the same thing what happened back in the day when you go in the dark room? I'd go shoot I'd work for a day I'd come back process the film and in your head you're like sort of compiling what you have or you don't have and I would mix chemistry I would get in the darkroom, I would take my negative, get it in the enlarger, put it in the enlarger, turn the enlarger on and stand there and stare at this thing and say to myself, is it good enough? Is it good enough for me to spend the next three hours making one print of this image if it's not good enough? There were times where I sat there and I go, it's not good enough, and I took it out of the enlarger, I poured the chemistry back into the bottles and I left because I didn't have something. So the book is a great way to get your head around what you actually have. And the book is confrontational because you have to put your phone down to look at it. So when you go into a meeting with someone and you hand them a book, they're not looking at the book and looking at their phone at the same time. They have to take it. They use both hands. They flip through it. It's tangible. And they're so inexpensive. And I mean, even if you, did a copy of a book and no one in the world saw it except you, it's totally worth it. I do it all the time. By the end of day tomorrow, I will make the first, I'll print the first test copy of the magazine that I created from Albania.

Raymond Hatfield: 1:10:40

Wait, wait. So, I've shared this on the podcast before every year I make a family yearbook, of me and my wife and we have two kids and, before we had children, I quickly realized I am making all of these photos Okay, lemme step back. when I, uh, was growing up, I would go visit my grandma and we would look through those shoe boxes of images and they were great. And then when they were done, yeah, they were done, we would put them back. And then the next year I'd go back for summer and we'd look through them again and, after getting the, what, what the iPhone four or whatever. And then, getting into, digital SLR photography. I'm taking all these photos. That's only half of the equation. You're never looking at them again. You'll make them, you'll create this image, you'll edit it, whatever. And then you never look at it again. And I thought to myself, and luckily this was right before we had our first child, Charlie, that I didn't want that to happen, and luckily, Lightroom has a partnership with Blurb to be able to create books, and that's what I did, and every year since then I have done so, and I can tell you that one of my favorite memories every single year, as time has gone on, is the second week of January when we get that book in the mail, and then the family sits down, we all sit down together, and we look through the book of our previous year, And then that of course sparks, well, let's look at all the other books as well. And that to me brings back the joy of photography more so than even taking the photo. because oftentimes you kind of forget what had happened, especially if it's just a snapshot with a cell phone in that moment, but getting it in print is really, really something special. So I love what you're sharing. I love blurbs message trying to make photography tangible. and just get it in your hands because that is the missing piece of photography.

Dan Milnor: 1:12:22

Yeah, you're doing, doing an annual book on the family is way more difficult than what I'm doing. but what you're doing, the annual with the family is what a lot of people that using blurb are trying to do. And there's a million ways to get derailed. you shoot a lot of photos, you don't know how to, where to store them. You don't know how to, can't catalog them, you can't find them, and so there's a lot of things to keep people from doing this. I think one of the things to, to toss out the window is the idea of a perfect book. You know, people, I've seen them just grind themselves to a halt because, Oh, it's gotta be perfect, gotta be perfect. I don't know what a perfect book is, I've probably never seen one, and if I did see one, it's probably gonna be really boring. I'm in Albania and I'm shooting and every night I'm designing. I'm taking the work that I made that day and I'm designing a magazine. So when I left Albania, I had 90 pages of magazine already fairly well thought out. I am changing it around quite a bit now, but by. I sort of gave myself a deadline of this Friday saying I want to have the first test copy. And then when I say test copy, it's a test copy. It's not perfect. It's not even remotely close. There's going to be a million things wrong about it. But to see it in print, is a whole different ballgame. To me, print is the great equalizer because again, the online photo community and in many ways, there's a lot of people, very successful people in the online photo community that have never printed a single photograph. And I'm not talking about dark room printing. I'm talking about any kind of printing. And so bookmaking for them it's like climbing Mount Everest. They go, well, I don't know how to do that. And I saw it. I saw it in my photo students going back 10 years ago where people would like, I used to teach in Latin America every year, go to Peru and teach a workshop and people would shoot 10, 000 images. And I'm like, I had someone shoot 22 gigs one morning, shoot in one morning, and then I try to edit on an iPad. And I said, why would you shoot 22? how could you possibly do that? for her, it was about quantity. she'd been listening to online community. People talk about, you know, well, the first 500 images of the day don't count, because they're never going to count. I'm like, who told you this? This is absolute insanity. So I was there, I was in Albania for two weeks. I shot about a thousand pictures total.

Raymond Hatfield: 1:14:25

And this was all on film? Yeah.

Dan Milnor: 1:14:27

No, this was all digital. yep. And, I edited a hundred and ninety three. That was the first sort of one star big chunk. And then that went down. To about 50 pictures. And then within the 50, there's about 20, that would be pictures that are, would, will sort of be the nucleus of what the project is, but that's in that, I don't think any of those we're going to knock anything in my sort of top 20 lifetime work out of the way that's the trip really wasn't about that, but, yeah, it's fun.

Raymond Hatfield: 1:14:56

Yeah, it's

Dan Milnor: 1:14:56

a jigsaw puzzle.

Raymond Hatfield: 1:14:58

I would imagine. feel like I could sit here and talk to you for another, two hours or so. But, really do want to be conscious of your time. You have shared so much with me. Daniel, my next question is, how can people find you online? Obviously, you're not going to, say, Facebook or Instagram. So, would you like people to find out more about you?

Dan Milnor: 1:15:16

The easiest way to find me online is a website called Shifter, S H I F T E R, and it's dot media not dot com. So shifter. media that has like the audio interviews that I do. It has, there's one tab of photography, which rarely ever changes because I'm lazy. It has a creative tab that talks about books, other people's photography, other people's books. I have an adventure tab that talks about cycling, hiking, fishing, climbing, et cetera, which I do a lot of. And there's a tab about yoga, which I'm a big fan of. And it also tab about Lyme disease, which I got six years ago. And there's a global community of people that are all suffering from the same thing. There's a lot of stuff on there, probably more than anyone wants to see. but there is some good photography stuff from time to time.

Raymond Hatfield: 1:16:00

I love it. I'm going to go check that out right away as well. I will put the link to that in the show notes. So if anybody's interested, just, Whatever podcast app you're listening on, just swipe up and you'll be able to see some of Dan's images as well as links there. But, Dan, again, thank you so much for coming on and sharing just a piece of the knowledge that you have accumulated over the past 30 years of being a photographer. I've really enjoyed my time with you today. So again, thank you so much for coming on.

Dan Milnor: 1:16:25

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. And I hope that somebody, actually gets something from my weird views.

Raymond Hatfield: 1:16:32

if anybody did, it was me as well, but I know, I know that plenty others will, too. So again, thank you so much.

Dan Milnor: 1:16:37

Yep. Absolutely. Thank you.

Raymond Hatfield: 1:16:39

All right. Big thanks again to Dan Milner for coming on the podcast. Today's action item that if you implement just one thing that will move the needle forward in your photography, it's this print your work to critique it. You can either take a recent shoot that you did or you can go out and shoot something fresh. When you get back home, upload all of those photos to get printed. In the us, you can use something like CVS or Walmart or Costco, you know, to print up just four by sixes. I think printing up 104 by sixes should cost about 10 bucks. Yeah, they're not archival prints, they're just something to help you change the way that you interact with your images. So there's no need to edit them or do anything to them. Once you get all those prints back, lay them out in front of you on a table. The act of physically cuing through your photos makes the process so much more immersive and gives you a different, and I would say better understanding of what elements stand out to you in a photograph to make them a keeper. Now that info, once you go through all these photos and you're like, oh, this stands out and that stands out, that's why I'm picking this photo. You can now use that information going forward as you pay attention to those specific details while you're shooting. In turn, you're gonna get a higher hit rate on the images that you capture. And who doesn't want that? This is about turning a quick digital process into something slower, something more intentional, something more tangible, and that will change your mindset on how you view and capture images. Now remember, don't forget to join us in the free and amazing beginner photography podcast community because we would love to see there. To join, just head over to beginner photo pod.com/group now. That's it for today. Until next week, remember, the more that you shoot today, the better of a photographer you'll be tomorrow.