Spot relies on beautiful imagery to deliver a compelling place-discovery experience. Here, we interview seasoned travel photojournalist and Tiny Atlas Quarterly creator, Emily Nathan, about creating a well-rounded, honest portrayal of a location through photos.
Though visual storytelling is the catch-phrase du jour, few do it as compellingly as Tiny Atlas Quarterly, the addictive independent travel magazine concepted, created, and compulsively cultivated by Bay Area photographer Emily Nathan.
Tiny Atlas is a lesson in passion projects.
Emily worked her way up from being a hobbyist middle-schooler with dad’s 35mm in hand to stringing for the AP, traveling the world on assignment for big-name magazines, and cultivating a roster of high-profile advertising clients (Apple’s a regular).
And then she launched Tiny Atlas Quarterly.
It was 2012. The magazines she and her peers were shooting for wanted the expected shots—only. The shots you’ve seen a thousand times. “But the shots photographers really love — the ones they put into their portfolios — are usually those that were never published,” she says. “Those with more interesting compositions, or a personal slant.” From the desire to spotlight these types of shots sprang the idea for Tiny Atlas.
Four years later, Tiny Atlas counts photographers like Dan Tom and Michael O’Neal as contributors, has 100K+ Instagram followers hanging onto its every shot, and possesses one of the most rabidly used hashtags around: #mytinyatlas. With a cool 1.7 million submissions, it is the travel tag courted by everyone.
And inclusivity is Tiny Atlas’s mantra. Amateurs are featured on their Instagram account as often as pros, they strive to fill their pages with a local slant, and their curated gallery shows display photos taken by their community (like the Tiny Atlas Solas show happening at Greenpoint Terminal this weekend). Even ideas for the Solas camera bag they’re launching via Kickstarter were crowd-sourced from working photographers, whose input was distilled down into the final stylish design created in collaboration with Alite Designs.
Each of the magazine’s lush travel stories is a deep dive into a location—an immersive telling of the place and what it means to be there—so we asked Nathan to share the types of shots she seeks out when on the ground, using images from a feature story she shot in Scotland.
Read on for her take about the pieces necessary to create a visual whole, and follow Tiny Atlas on Spot here.
Scenic Landscapes
“I had this photo teacher—who I actually didn’t like at the time—give me what I later realized was the best advice I ever got: When you’re taking a photo, you need to know what you’re taking a photo of. This is especially true for landscapes. And this is a question that most people can’t answer. Ask somebody who just snapped a shot of the Eiffel Tower, and they’d say: ‘The Eiffel Tower!’ But what is it about the Eiffel Tower? The light across it? The people with their backs to you looking up at it? In this shot, I’m not showing you everything—I’m focused in on the way the light hits the brilliant green on this portion of the old ruin.
Dan Tom is a wonderful landscape photographer Tiny Atlas frequently works with, and even with his most sweeping shots, your eye is always drawn to something. There’s a color story there. Or a person for scale. There’s always something particular, something specific, something to focus on. And that’s what you’re going to remember in a photo.”
Atmospheric Interiors
“So often I’m surprised by what places that I’ve seen in photos look like in real life. We try to capture what it’s really like to be there—we want to show places that feel like humans inhabit them. Generally, when I’m shooting interiors I pay a lot of attention to texture and light. I also tend to seek out strong compositions, I’ll let structural elements guide the lines of the shot. I tend to shoot 50mm on a DSLR because it helps clear the visual clutter — it’s an automatic edit that helps clean up the shot because you just can’t fit that much into the frame. You’ll see a portion of a room, not the whole thing.”
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Local People
“If we’re shooting a lifestyle story for TAQ, we’ll work with local models. We always try to hire people who are from nearby and have a connection to the place and its residents. If we’re shooting people on the street, we look for anybody who stands out as an interesting individual. We try hard not to portray people as others—like the tanned, tattooed Fijian posing with coconuts. Instead, we try to capture a person’s personal experience, their work, or them interacting with friends and family. What does a day in local life truly look like? We try not to shoot tourists. And we’re not shooting selfies. You need to look outward, observe, and interact with people. Shooting people is a collaborative enterprise, asking for permission and having a conversation.”
Delicious Food
“Food is a quintessential part of the travel experience. To shoot it, make sure you have natural light. If you’re at a restaurant, ask them to turn off the overhead lights if you can, or sit near a window. I’ll order things I know will photograph well. It’s much harder to make roasted meat look as good as a colorful salad. When I’m ready to capture the meal, I try to work backwards from reality. Rather than styling everything for a perfect-perfect photo shoot, I prefer everything to be arranged naturally for eating, then I start shooting while the meal is happening. At TAQ, we want the sense of the person sitting there. I love human elements like hands or the waiter. And I actually love phone pics of food — the phone camera lets you get real wide and fit in a lot.”
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Close-Up Details
“I’m a looker. I like to retreat into looking at things. I try to immerse myself in a place the way that the people who live there do. What is here? Why is it interesting? And often it’s the details that drive the narrative of the visual story. When I set out on a trip, it’s always in the spirit of not knowing what the end result is going to be. Before I arrive, I don’t know any of the pictures I’m going to get. But when I’m on the ground, there has to be a reason for a picture. And the details create a robust story of where I am and why I’m there.”
Movement and Motion
“Travel is movement. You want to see energy and motion — it gives you a sense of being there. I generally don’t like a lot of blurred movement though; it feels dated. I like seeing people walking, hair moving, clothes blowing. To capture motion, you have to wait patiently for someone to pass by at random, or you have to ask someone to walk through a space. And sometimes you might need to ask them to do it again. If you’re shooting models, you’re moving with them — walking backwards while they’re walking forwards. Asking them to do it five more times—50 more if you must—to get the shot.”
Lifestyle Moments
“These types of shots give places a sense of humanity. That people are actually here and inhabit the space. It’s based on reality. I’m allergic to fake-looking pictures. If a shot doesn’t make you want to go, it doesn’t go in the magazine.”
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Emblematic Symbols
“There’s nothing wrong with going to the iconic place, say, the Eiffel Tower, or seeking out an iconic scene like stacks of the local, traditional textile. But when you’re dealing with quintessential shots, you don’t want to take the same picture that you’ve seen a million times before. Don’t approach these photos with a certain picture already in mind. Show up, and look around. What do you see? What is interesting? Why? Find your own picture.”
All photos courtesy of Emily Nathan for Tiny Atlas Quarterly
