If you have not met Scott Bourne, today you are in for a real treat.   Scott is giant in the photography industry, and yet quietly goes about his business helping others to improve their own photography skills.  Scott’s contribution to the photography industry spans decades. He founded This Week in Photography which went on to be one of the most popular photography podcast shows on the web.

He’s a man of many skills — a teacher, an author, a new media producer, and a technology enthusisast.  Scott travels the world giving lectures and workshops on various aspects of photography, and is most famous for his work as a nature and wildlife photographer.

Scott’s current online endeavor, Photo Focus, is an online magazine about photography.  Scott publishes articles several times a day with the intent of informing, entertaining, and educating people who are interested in photography.  And he does!

With over 48,000 followers on twitter–and that group keeps growing– Scott keeps his audience entertained with thoughtful quips and lots of fantastic prizes!  You can Follow Scott here.

All images are gleaned from his Flickr stream, used with his permission.  I love the variety of images throughout, and how it shows Scott’s personality.  That is one thing I really love about photography–how the photographer’s personality really comes out in their images.  You can tell something about a photographer by the images that they choose to capture, and how they capture it. 

While Scott’s online presence is vast, and his work in photography is ongoing, it has been so great getting to know Scott personally.   He is full of wit and easy to talk to–he  always has an opinion on any given subject.  You also won’t find Scott without his signature hat and Tommy Bahama shirt!

Today’s interview is a little different from the other Coffee Breaks, in that it is more of a conversation with Scott.  His insight on relationships is worth the read alone… relationships not only with clients, but with anyone and how to manage them in your life.  He will also share the number one impediment to financial success… and the answer might surprise you.

JOY: Hello Scott! Thanks for joining me today! I’ll dive right in and ask you about Learn: what do you wish you would have known when you first started in this industry?

Scott: I wish I would have understood the importance of relationships way sooner than I did. Relationships with vendors, photographers, other clients. I was under the impression when I first started that if I did my job, made a good image, I’m supposed to get paid and that was all that was required of me. I didn’t understand that what people were ACTUALLY paying for was the relationship, and the photos were just a by-product of that. It cost me a lot of money when I started out in my career. I didn’t value relationships as much as I should have, and it was only when I started to value relationships that my business started to take off.

For instance, when I did weddings a long time ago, I was sort of cut and dry –I mean, I’m a business man, and this is a business transaction. But that didn’t go over well with brides at all. When mothers of brides would get in my face I would point out in the contract where it said they couldn’t…. I had no mentor, I didn’t belong to any associations… I just thought, “hey, you’ve hired a photographer, and I’m a good one!’

But as I grew up a little and studied business and studied marketing I started to realize that MOST business, frankly, are the relationship. People want to pay for a relationship! If you are the best photographer in the world, but you don’t have a good relationship with the bride, she’s NOT going to give you referrals. Conversely, –and this is the part that people are surprised at– you can frankly suck at photography, but if the bride loves you and people say, “how was the photography?” she’s gonna say, “It was great!”

You find out how to become a better portrait artist by having a better relationship with your client. And I have a different relationship with my current client…. I no longer photograph brides, now I photograph bears and wolves! And I actually get to know them by reading everything about them… about their habitats, their eating habits, their life cycles, their culture, everything.

Joy: I love your bird images and I love the story that goes along with all of your images!

Scott: All my images that are my gallery edition images–and I only do about ten a year — all comes with a story.

Part of what I feel like I’m doing now is speaking for the wildlife. They don’t have anyone to speak for them.

We all live our busy lives, day to day, our drive-thru kind of existance, and we don’t stop to look at how many feathers are on an eagle, and how detailed those feathers are, and what it’s like to watch a baby wolf being fed by its mother.There is a lot going on in the natural world that we just walk by and miss. And since the animals can’t speak for themselves, I may be a poor spokesperson but I do my best to speak for them. And that has a lot to do with the storytelling behind my images.

When I work on my images I work on pre-concocted images… images I may have imagined years before in my mind, and then I go out and try and find it.

Joy: How do you do that? If you have a pre-concocted image with a wolf, how do you work that out with the wolf?!

Scott: You don’t work it out with the wolf, you work it out with nature. For example, my most successful image, “Cranes in the Fire Mist” is a shot that is based on something I saw from my mentor, Arty Morris, 13 years ago. He had made a photograph at a location we go to every year in New Mexico. I wanted to make my own version–so I thought, this is the most likely time of year, this is the most likely place to go… it is just going to involve patience. So I just sat down and constructed what needed to happen.

I ended up going to that place for 13 years, 10 days at a time, 130 times before I got the shot. A whole series of things needed to happen for me to get the shot I wanted: I needed the sun to rise in a cloudless sky, the wind to be from the west, I needed the birds to still be there and not have scattered because they were chased by a coyote or whatever. I needed a mixture of of cranes, and different geese, and I needed two or three birds to fly in from the opposite side so the scene would have balance. I needed it to be exactly 32 degrees because I wanted there to be mist and that is the way you get mist, it has to be exactly 32 degrees. And it took me ten years to get the shot.

Joy: That is a crazy story.  (If you want to see that shot, click HERE. )

Scott: I’m a crazy guy. That’s the way I work. I concoct a scene in my mind… and the other thing I do that few other people do… I am a musician so I actually write the music in my head that will go with the slideshow as I’m shooting. It gives me a deeper sense of connection with the subject.

Joy: So, what are you continuing to learn? And tell me more about your take on relationships.

Scott: As for continued learning I try to read as many magazines and books and blogs and go to as many conferences as I can… even though I teach at a lot of conferences, sometimes I’ll just go back and sit in the audience and one of the instructors will say, “Scott, what are you doing here?” And I’ll tell them, “well, I already know what I know, I need to know what YOU know!” So I think continued learning is really important.. it keeps you young, it keeps you engaged…. as a matter of fact, right now I am totally, completely immersed in learning the video side of convergence… the mixture of these hybrid cameras with video built in. I spent the last six months working on this almost every day.

Here’s my advice on how to maintain relationships… put every single person in your life ahead of yourself and to care about everyone more than you care about yourself, and put them first. It’s very hard to do, but there are rewards that go beyond any ability to describe if you are able to do it.

Joy: How do you then negotiate too many relationships in your life?

Scott: That’s easy. I don’t. That is a place where it is better to say, if I’m going to call it a relationship, rather than an aquaintance, you have to be careful about your relationships, and pick and choose who you are going to get that close with. In order to really have a relationship with someone in my world, I basically give them my heart. I give everyone everything I’ve got, I don’t hold anything back. So you can’t do that with a hundred million people!

I have a different relationship with all the twitter followers, etc, than someone that I really know. But in general, if I have a client, I try to genuinely put their needs ahead of mine. if that means I lose the business, I’m ok with that. If they say, I want you to do this, and I know there is someone down the street who does it better, I’m ok with sending them there–I’ve been living my life that way for several years now and I’ve reaped a lot of benefits from it and I believe that it works. I believe that if you love on everyone that you meet as much as you can that everything will work out for you. If you are stingy with your love, you are gonna lose. I did! It took me to become an old man to figure it all out.

Joy: If you are friends with a client, do you find that they try and take advantage of the friendship?

Scott: You know, all my life people have tried to take advantage of my friendship and basically my rule is to let them. That’s part of loving others ahead of yourself and letting them deal with their own consequences. I mean, I’m not talking about letting people steal from you, but I feel like if they go ahead and go down that road and they do take advantage of me, it is a sign that I’ve misjudged that relationship and I’ll use that as a valuable lesson to myself to say ok, I can end this relationship now… without a lot of drama or anything like that… you can use that as a clear marker that it is time to move on, and whatever lesson you learned there is probably pretty cheap compared to what it would have cost you had they stayed in your life.

Joy: I wasn’t expecting that answer, and I really like that!

Scott: Old guys know stuff!

Joy: Lets talk about Grow. Talk about ways that you’ve been growing in the last five years, ways that you feel like you are still growning and how you reccommend others grow..

Scott: The way that I feel like I’ve grown is that I want to share as much as I can, and in the process of sharing you get into a teaching role, and there is no better way in the world to learn but by teaching. Teaching is the best way to learn something. I grow because I’m trying to share and teach. You have to become a subject matter expert to have any value!

My favorite thing to teach is self esteem. It is the number one impediment to not being financially successful. I particularly like working with women photographers who all for some reason seem to have issues along these lines. I try to free them up from that and get them to understand that they are good enough by concentrating on the right things. They all think its about their photography and it’s not! If you remember what we said before about relationships, you’ll remember it is not!

I point out that there are many better photographers than me who don’t make as much money as I do and there are many situations where I’m a much better photographer and they make more money because they are better at the relationships. People look for crutches and excuses to fail, that is my experience. They give themselves permission to fail…”if I had Scott’s camera, if I had Scott’s twitter followers… then I could do something” but chances are it wouldn’t change a thing for them.

Joy: I can see why you and Dane Sanders get along so well. He has a similar mantra.

Scott: Well, I would say Dane’s workshop is one I would recommend. The people who are going to Dane’s workshop don’t realize that all their issues are going to be called on. They are using all their excuses as a crutch for not being successful and not have to deliver. For example, if someone decides they are not dateable so they won’t ask anyone out, it is comfortable place to be in, no danger or threat of rejection. And rejection is worse than lonlieness for some people. So you have to deal with these excuses and crutches. You have to decide to be done with those excuses for not being successful and move forward from that, and once you do amazing things start to happen.

At the end of the day you have to decide what is important to you and you have to balance your life. If it is truly in your heart to go out and protect people’s memories… I take every photograph as if it is going to be the last photograph ever made of that person or animal. I don’t take this job casually at all. This is a career that can really make a difference.

Joy: We’ll end with share. This has to do with any sort of charity work you’ve done or ways that you give back to the industry or ways you’d recommend people give back…

Scott: Just be generous with your time, and your knowledge and your relationships and your assets… that is the way to live your life. When you do that things come back to you in a way you wouldn’t believe. That is why I try to do three blog posts a day and have over a thousand blog posts at photo focus and don’t charge a penny for it, I’ve done hundreds of podcasts and don’t charge a penny for it.

I’m trying to help people, and trying to share. They may not agree with me, they might not like it, and then they can move on. But I’m trying to do what I can. If someone wants help from me I give it. Just be generous. It will never be a bad thing and you will live a much more productive life not just as a photographer but as a human being. Too often in the photography business we forget about the value of a good hug or a nice sunset. Beyond what it looks like on film. When you get old, you realize that the timer is clicking away and you start to value every single solitary experience in such a way that you want to take big bites out of life. When I watch a sunset I dont read the newspaper, I watch the sunset!

Joy: That is a good point about some issues, that I’ll admit I have myself, about the whole “online social networking” thing… iphones, twittering… and I think there is a great place for that, but I find that it makes it difficult for me to be present. So instead of watching a sunset I’m thinking, “ooh, i’ll take a picture of this and twitter it!”

Scott: That is really simple. My phone stays in my pocket. If I have you in the room, I don’t care about my phone. I’d rather be with YOU, a real person. If I’m with people who can’t do that, I don’t spend time with them. I don’t want to feel like I’m on a date with someone’s iphone. I think that all that social networking is great, and I think it is tremendously valuable, but its primary value is to facilitate THIS… one on one and in-person connection, where we are sitting together, talking, and experiencing the same space together. That is worth more than gold. When you get to that space, then put the phone down!

Joy: Good rule, Scott! I have a friend who is going to institute a new rule when he takes people out to dinner: check your phone at the door. No tweeting during dinner allowed. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today, I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you for sharing yourself, and I know that our Jules Cafe readers really will appreciate it too!