Pictures of the Year

SPEAKER_01: I had just arrived and so I and I'm breathing hard 17,500 feet is no joke. I mean I had gotten sick all of us had kind of gotten sick on the way up I'd gotten particularly sick I can barely get my breath. That's Sadie Corrier she's National Geographic's deputy director of photography SPEAKER_02: and she's talking about the time she went on assignment to Mount Everest with photographer Corey Richards. We arrive and that day something was happening something I heard we heard over the SPEAKER_01: radio Corey needs to be evacuated and Corey kind of comes into the you know the the center of base camp which is like a huge city. He's like light jogging with an oxygen mask on and here I am barely able to talk. So anyway I hopped on and helicoptered really not planned at all. I didn't have money with me or a cell phone or my contact lenses I just signaled to him we couldn't even hear each other over the helicopter but I thought I've come all this way from the U.S. to be with this photographer to work with him to produce content for the magazine story and the iPad and Instagram and he's in a serious I thought potentially near-death situation. So I just hopped into the helicopter and boom down we went. I'm Peter Gwynn editor at large at National SPEAKER_02: Geographic and you're listening to Overheard a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have here at Nat Geo and follow them to the edges of our big weird beautiful world. This week Sadie talks about the challenges of choosing the photographs that appear in National Geographic. What makes a photo stand out from literally the tens of thousands of frames a photographer takes on assignment and which special photos stood out for her in 2022. More after the break. Fuel your curiosity with a free one month trial subscription to Nat Geo Digital. You'll have unlimited access on any device anywhere ad free with our app that lets you download stories to read offline. Explore every page ever published with a century of digital archives at your fingertips. Check it all out for free at natgeo.com slash explore more. Wait are you gaming on a Chromebook? Yeah it's got a high-res 120 hertz display plus this killer SPEAKER_00: RGB keyboard and I can access thousands of games anytime anywhere. Stop playing. What? Get out of SPEAKER_01: here. Huh? Yeah I want you to stop playing and get out of here so I can game on that Chromebook. SPEAKER_02: Got it. Discover the ultimate cloud gaming machine a new kind of Chromebook. SPEAKER_01: Hold on. Gwen we're getting paid to hang out. Yes indeed. It's been too long right? I know. SPEAKER_02: The adventure team. Podcast. Reunited in the podcast house. That's right. All right so SPEAKER_02: you've been at Geographic Now how many years now? You're 28. 28? Are you serious? I know it was 20 something. I didn't know it was almost you're almost three decades. Well yes but I know that one of your early jobs you worked for this legendary photo editor named Susan Welchman and what did she tell you as a brand new photo person? Susan always said trust your instincts. SPEAKER_01: She's told me that my whole in for three decades about everything about life about photo choices about the right thing to tell a photographer and yeah I so it comes down to trust your instincts. SPEAKER_02: So okay well so when you're you know when you're looking at photographs of photographers out somewhere in the world you know in the arctic or you know in the amazon how do you listen to your instincts when you're looking at the photographs? What are you looking for? I am looking to be moved SPEAKER_01: by an image. I used to be a photo editor for almost 20 years and I would receive tens of thousands of images. We would go through maybe 30,000 images on average for a story and you're moving through pretty quickly. You're just assuming you're going to pick something with good composition and the right light etc but beyond that you're looking really to be moved by the situation by the emotions on the faces by the moment maybe there's some element of surprise SPEAKER_02: right right so here's the thing when you're seeing tens of thousands of photos a year how what surprises you anymore? I think it helps to be a little bit jaded as a photo editor and to SPEAKER_01: have seen your fair share of penguin pictures or you know amazing drone shots from above of mountaintops or as you and I have worked together on a lot of adventure stories it really helps to have seen all the expected pictures because then you really can encourage that photographer to go beyond that and you recognize it when something special comes in right and you try to pre-game that with the photographer talking about your shoot list okay what are some you can't anticipate surprises but you set each other up with the proper research and familiarizing yourself with what other people have shot there you don't want to go in blind if you've never been to India before you don't want to be so dazzled by the color and the commotion that's going on in the streets that you're shooting everything because it's really going to look like everyone else's you know deli pictures so what is it that's going to make this story and these images special okay so I'm a SPEAKER_02: I'm a young brand new national geographic you know photographer or I have my first assignment and you're my photo editor and I'm going off into the world what do you what do you tell me SPEAKER_01: well like on the adventure stories we want a you know a sense of place but we want the emotions we want the downtime you know on adventure stories the biggest mistake is the newer photographers will shoot all the key moments but they're not when they're totally exhausted after 14 hours on the mountain and cold in their tent I want those pictures too I want just the heating of the water and I want to see the chapped lips and uh and see the exhaustion on their teammates faces so that's really challenging because the photographer has to have a lot of stamina and this goes far beyond just adventure for divers but they have to continue to shoot when they think they're done and you know for the um for the divers shooting people culture stories it's you know it's so important for them to feel embraced by the communities that they're in sometimes if it's a sensitive situation the camera isn't even out yet and they're just getting to know the people and become accepted by the community the family if they're in a small you know living room or um it's getting to know building that trust and then starting to work the situation and staying you know sometimes it's staying another day or few days past when you think you have it all and it's that it's the it's the then you catch the serendipity or you see a certain scene a certain if it's an urban setting you you you have all the elements in place but you just need as one photographer likes to say john stammer likes to say that needs a pterodactyl flying through the frame so you you see the scene you see the buildings the light you know okay in the morning the light comes up a certain way but it just needs the kid going by on the bicycle with the dog chasing her it needs something else to kind of bring it to life well you know one thing too like SPEAKER_02: i'm curious about this because i remember back in the day like you know anytime you wanted a big landscape shot you had to get a helicopter right and getting helicopters in places sometimes it was just either crazy expensive or illegal or you know you just and now it's like every photographer travels with a helicopter in their back pocket it seems like so i mean like in terms of that like drones and you know some of these new tools like has how is that do you feel like we're getting to see more or i'm a huge drone i have my own drone i kind of set you up for that because i know that you like love the drones um i think the drones are really empowering um i think a lot of SPEAKER_01: the divers have embraced getting the skills to use it and they have a lot more control um about what they're shooting you don't have to pay for gas you don't have to it's cheap you know you buy your drone and you fork out the thousand dollars or a few thousand dollars but then you're in complete control of where you are i mean there are definitely advantages to having a helicopter or a fixed wing plane etc um for certain situations but i think it's really thrilling for photographers to be able to shoot their own and control it um and that goes for stills and video and and from the drone are you seeing pictures that you never saw before because of technology like this either SPEAKER_02: the drone or i don't know go pros or underwater drones or i do think yes because the sheer cost SPEAKER_01: you know of having a plane if you have a drone with you for the six weeks you can pick and choose and have it at any oh you see it you see at three in the afternoon we're get we're going to get a great storm this evening then you can you're prepared and you can get that and you don't have to be in it and you don't have to be in it that your drone might get spun around a little bit but no i i think it um well yeah yeah i i just love aerial photography and and shooting it myself so i i'm psyched that the photographers have um a lot of them have embraced this skill well let me ask SPEAKER_02: you this so like the photography education of the public seems to have completely gone a whole nother level i mean my kids are on instagram they're focused on camera angles and and filters and everything but that seems to be that's that's almost worldwide right you know is is is that having an effect on what you guys do or do you think people are just there's more of an appreciation of what you guys do now because people are doing it themselves probably both SPEAKER_01: i think it's really turned up the heat there's a lot of people who can take a single great image you know obviously what national geographic does is storytelling visual storytelling and that is you know you have an elite group of people not just limited to national geographic but professional photographers know how to tell a story um and national geographic photographers know it um you know as much as anyone um you know the neat thing about um what our social media has done um i heard one photographer it was actually joel sartori who said my you know his photo arc project that he works on he can put out information about a species that's endangered and convey that information through a compelling video or still and that can see exponentially more millions you know eyeballs instantly or that can be shared with exponentially more people than he ever could have hoped for back in 1995 or whenever he started the photo arc series or whenever anyone started shooting something when it was just print and um so that's really exciting especially for those who are trying to affect change and um and those who are passionate about conservation environment anything that's um really we can just reach so many more people and we're reaching all ages you know and the tiktok audience is looking at we have we have a new tiktok account as of two years ago now i i got to be on our tiktok account when we did endurance that's right it's the only thing SPEAKER_02: i've done at national geographic my kids have ever paid attention to it hey dad's on tiktok SPEAKER_01: he's done finally made it um big deal in our house yeah so i know you've been holed up in a SPEAKER_02: secret location saty working on our pictures of the year which is a collection of the best pictures of you know 2022 that we'll have in our year-end issue i mean these were already sort of the cream of the crop you know pictures selected out of thousands for each assignment and now you're picking sort of from that group so okay so this year like roughly how many pictures do you think i mean ballpark figure do you think all the photo editors here you know looked at total one second SPEAKER_01: i'm just gonna do quick math she's got a calculator she's like adding let's see uh oh we are you know SPEAKER_02: math was gonna be part of this right bet we're at two million or more so this is like the really SPEAKER_02: this is like the beatles greatest hits i see you got a photo here from kela yuan um we actually caught up with him this year for the podcast and he talked about his project with indigenous people in california burning their lands to promote a healthy ecosystem when we got out of the car SPEAKER_00: we were looking at this devastation this burned out hulk of a wreck of our of the vehicle and nothing left of the structure except some tin sheets on the ground that were all burned up and the first thing she did was she hauled out a bucket from the car and i asked her hey well i didn't even ask her i was just watching her i was like what's in the bucket you know and and she started tossing acorns around and she said this is an opportunity this is an opportunity for me to heal the land by planting these acorns here you know right here in this place originally there weren't that many oaks this is a chance for us to heal the land and she said also that in healing land and planting the acorns and doing cultural burning all of this is also a chance for me to heal myself so keely you guys sent him to grainland on a different SPEAKER_02: assignment so what's what's what's this picture that you've chosen of his from greenland yes so SPEAKER_01: he is on uh this big grant project on indigenous conservation and greenland was one of about five locations he's going to this project is ongoing and the pictures are just starting to roll in and the photo editor malory benedict sent me this frame and um what is so interesting about it is you have two people pushing their strollers in snow you cannot see a road everything is icy and snowy you have a couple of you have a pickup truck and an suv in the background and a couple of atvs and uh you know the gentleman is is in the in the at the front pushing one stroller um clearly baby inside and everything looks a little chilly and then uh a woman is behind him whether it's his wife i'm not sure assume might be his wife is behind him just kind of watching his progress and i guess he's not moving fast enough because she's she's not moving but what's so interesting is that you know i would not have expected people to push strollers in the middle of greenland on snow you you actually have no idea there's it's it's almost white out conditions in the distance you can barely see the mountain range there's no roads that we can see the the strollers probably only moving you know an inch at a time it's got big knobby tires too i see it's like big knobby SPEAKER_02: tires on the stroller but the neat thing about this picture is that it just makes you stop at SPEAKER_01: least someone like me who's from you know a farm in southern virginia we probably wouldn't be pushing strollers on you know ice and snow but anyway it stops you and that's the whole point you want a picture to stop you in tracks for your split second read the caption take it in it turns out they are on their way to an annual dog sled race um so anyway these are the family outing SPEAKER_02: there's a family outing on the in the remote ice of greenland all right so moving along here we've got with this next image can you tell me tell me a little bit about that one so max stone was SPEAKER_01: shooting a cypress forest in florida at night and uh this is a beautiful shot that he has lit the gorgeous trees mossy you know you you're in kind of you're in a cypress swamp gorgeous kind of purpley blue tones to the sky a little bit of a few clouds in the sky and suddenly totally serendipitously he did not know this was happening spacex was launching a falcon 9 rocket and it it streams through his frame so he has three frames boom boom boom of this rocket going through and when i said that i love it when when an image has a little extra something going for it and this would have been a gorgeous quiet beautiful nature scene without the rocket but you know to know to know that that he didn't even plan that and to be honest we chose the picture and had it in the mix for two months before i fully read the caption i thought it was a shooting star or you know i thought it was really cool but the fact that he didn't even plan the rocket to go through is crazy and it's perfectly in the middle of the you know and it's just above the tree line yeah it's this amazing moment and you have an osprey if you look really closely just to the left of the rocket high in the trees above the greenery just perched and completely unbothered is this little dark gray and it's an osprey sitting on the top it looks like he's watching the rocket right he's just kind SPEAKER_02: of sitting back yeah it's like this is the classic pterodactyl right you have this beautiful cypress and there's your pterodactyl except for it's it's like a ginormous rocket-propelled pterodactyl yes and just as a little side note i wrote um max said that this is the second time that space SPEAKER_01: spacex has photobombed something that he was shooting i guess that's what happens when you shoot things in florida but um hey man you gotta be prepared for whatever whatever transpires SPEAKER_02: all right so our last picture we've got a good friend of mine katie orlinsky he's got a picture of a taper what's a taper i don't just i don't know what a taper is SPEAKER_02: it's a four-legged gray thing i've stumped the photo the director of photography but no i'm kidding aside well it is sort of bore-like little longer legs and pigs SPEAKER_01: dark brownish with a gray face it's got a longer looks like a pig i guess i could see that the SPEAKER_02: family resemblance yeah not quite as bad as a pig a little longer legs and certainly in a much SPEAKER_01: longer snout so almost not quite like an anteater but it's got this kind of strange looking head yeah it definitely feels like an amalgamation of other animals i i've seen maybe yeah that's not SPEAKER_02: fair to the taper no disrespect to the taper lovers out there it's a and it's an urban this is a beautiful picture though actually i mean this is a lovely representation of a taper it is SPEAKER_01: it really it really is beautiful so this picture was taken at a national park in brazil and what i love about it is it looks like a diorama there was this very heavy fog that day and the taper is you can't tell if it's real or fake it's standing on on the orange dirt which is right in the foreground of the picture and you have grass right behind the taper and then we just have yet again nearly white out conditions with fog and a little spot of sun in the distance and the taper has just one hoof you know raised one leg raised and really you could be in a museum exhibit like you don't know is this real or stuffed you know and there's just something lovely about the quality of light the face of the taper is kind of a light gray and the rest of the body is dark gray it's just a moment frozen in time and katie said she had this amazing experience where this taper came through the mist and followed her down this road like you know alice in wonderland or i don't know what i kind of want to be there with that experience but anyway i'm so glad that and this is a lady taper i'm so glad that this taper paused for a moment for katie to make this frame i think that's kind of maybe the interesting thing too when you talk to photographers that SPEAKER_02: have they're photographing animals and i think that's the thing as a viewer too that when you feel like you're in the world in that way and they're the animals connecting with the photographer they're connecting with all of us in a way and i feel i sense some of that here the capers looking at us not in an aggressive way but in this almost sort of like regarding who is this person with this strange device pointed at me out of the fog i think that's a really great point and SPEAKER_01: i had i hadn't thought about it with this picture but you're absolutely absolutely right i think just like with photographers who are building trust with communities i think probably next level is photographers trying to build trust with animals because there there is just that animals reading other animals reading reading humans reading your behavior and whether you're threatening or accepting katie had to um you know i don't know how skittish tapers normally are but but katie's just uh just a warm you know katie is just a warm lovely person and would not have presented herself as threatening and i think you know when we think about our photographers who are so gifted with shooting natural history how they have to stay so quiet with their body language and even um i remember again nick nickle's talking about how he had to bow his head around gorillas and show subservience and you you want to indicate um that i'm not a threat to you and please let me take your picture just like you do with humans um that's that's pretty cool yeah SPEAKER_02: okay so you've seen so many great photographs in your career um but is there one photograph one national geographic photograph that sort of is the quintessential like i mean when you close your eyes if you sort of is there one picture for you that you think about like it sort of stands kind of in for the phenotype of national geographic photographs i think the picture that resonates for SPEAKER_01: me the most just because i have um because it's not only a great image but i have a personal emotional connection to it which is always what you want it's a picture that i have um on my wall at home was shot by west giles and it's this incredible scene underwater of this cave and it's this beautiful mix of blues and the water is just so clear blues and greens you have these stalactites uh these giant columns you know come at the top of the front going from the top to the bottom of the frame and four dark silhouette divers kind of sprinkled throughout the frame and the neat thing about this is west described how he choreographed this because it's really challenging to to work with divers who who these weren't photo assistants these were scientists and other divers on this expedition and we were doing a whole story about this group of scientists and divers working in the blue holes and so up above on the on the boat you know on the boat before they all went down west basically walked them through what the scene was going to look like and told him told everyone where he wanted them to be so with a normal photo assistant they'll stay put for a couple of hours with a light and light the stalactite and whatever i mean you're talking it's kind of pitch dark down there so you really do need them to hold the lights in certain direct in certain specific ways and so he choreographed it and then they all go underwater and he said oh you know then you know they're sort of short attention span so you know five minutes in one is forgetting where to point the light and it's no longer highlighting the stalactite and soft over here so it's kind of a miracle that he pulled off this image so one of the challenges on this was SPEAKER_02: these guys weren't using normal scuba gear so um west and the entire diving team were using SPEAKER_01: rebreathers which allows them it's like a diving apparatus a breathing apparatus rather that um allows you to stay underwater longer because it takes your recycled exhaled hair air and turns it back into oxygen that you can breathe in again and reuse you still have to watch how fast you're going through it but you can stay under longer the tricky part is that they often malfunction and i remember distinctly at our final show of images when weth said he had had over 20 friends it might have even been close to 30 friends die using rebreathers both he and the expedition leader kenny broad have many have lost many dear friends using rebreathers so there were multiple instances of near-death experiences on this expert on this story you've probably seen in movies and no maybe from maybe you're a diver i'm not a diver but where you're holding on to a line and you're going deep into a cave and you have this guideline just in case you get disoriented really easy to get disoriented especially if you trigger something and the you disturb the water so that you can literally not see and then you're very disoriented you don't know up down left right so what happened to wes is he thought he was exiting and he was going into the cave and his teammates including kenny broad and at least i think two others were starting SPEAKER_01: to run out of air so they literally were were riding on whiteboards back to and forth to each other how much air i have a third of a tank and you have there's rules with diving you know i'm not a pro diver but you you you can't stay you have to start for your own safety you have to start heading back up and wes and kenny had known each other like decades and they're all very tight friends you know you're in this unfortunate situation of having to communicate with the team about um who's gonna who's gonna go after wes he's clearly disoriented something's happened what has happened we don't know who has enough air to do that luckily wes got oriented and came back out and and survived that and we had a amazing story in the end i mean the pictures were so interesting and surprising and wes was like a kid in a candy shop or like santa claus he was bringing us pictures that we would never get to see that most people would never get to see and he was so excited i mean wes was probably mid to later 50s and it was like he was a 12 year old saying you know look at the big fish i caught or whatever you know he was as thrilled about getting to share these pictures and we were as thrilled to get to edit them and work with them and figure out what was going to be a two-page spread and half page spread and so it was really neat for him to be shooting for national geographic he was so dedicated and wanted to really hit it out of the park for us so i think he was i know he was very proud of that whole story it's just incredible and then what makes it even that much more special to me is that the day that the the wes received the advance copy of the issue and about a day later he was on an easy dive and he had a rebreather incident and he passed away so he was such a special photographer and it was such a special story and then we have this crazy amazing picture and so for me it just is like the penultimate for me the penultimate photo because of that personal connection after hearing about so many amazing images and the stories behind them i'm guessing you probably SPEAKER_02: want to see what we're talking about check out our 2022 edition of pictures of the year it's available on newsstand starting december 15th are you interested in learning more about kela yuan well we've got an article for you that explores his path to becoming a nat geo explorer and photographer to see max stone's photos take a look at his website maxstonephoto.com he specializes in photographing swamps the everglades in florida bay katie orlinsky's photos go far beyond tapers way far you can check out her work from around the world at katieorlinskyphoto.com that's all in the show notes they're right there in your podcast app this week's overheard episode is produced by elana straus our producers include kyree douglas our senior producers are brian gutiérrez and jacob pinter our senior editor is eli kurtz and our our senior editor is eli chin our manager of audio is carla wills our executive producer of audio is devar aralan our photo editor is julie howell ted woods sound design this episode hans del su composed our theme music this podcast is a production of national geographic partners the national geographic society committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world funds the work of national geographic explorers keela yuan katie orlinsky and max stone michael tribble is the vice president of integrated storytelling nathan lump is national geographic's editor-in-chief and i'm your host peter guin thanks for listening and see y'all next time