Meeting: Zoom

Our speaker this evening is wildlife photographer David Johnston, from Tennessee. Click here to see some of his work!

THE BEGINNING

I started my journey in photography in 2004 when I took a film photography course in high school. It was an amazing experience to shoot with film and then bring those images to life in the darkroom. There is definitely an enormous difference in film and digital photography. Film cameras taught how to get my light correct in-camera as best possible.

However, it was in 2010 that I really became obsessed with photography after I got my first DSLR camera. I decided to put all of my energy into photography to make it my life career. I knew I couldn’t quit my full-time job right away, but I could hustle with photography on the side until I could do photography full-time.

In 2014 I started my first blog and podcast called Photography Roundtable. I had a good run with the podcast and it enabled me to meet some of my best photography friends, teach, and run photography workshops in national parks in the United States.

MAJOR LIFE CHANGE

In 2017 my wife and I had a major life change. We moved to Haiti to become missionaries. My wife runs maternal health programs and I help with logistics and I frequently find myself being her ambulance driver. Even in Haiti I still wanted to do photography and teach in some way. So, I turned to YouTube to share my landscape photography ideas and techniques for people to learn for free.

RIGHT NOW

In 2019, we made the difficult decision to return to our home state of Tennessee which is where we live now. I’m passionate about helping people improve their nature photography with online video. Video content on YouTube, post-processing courses, and video tutorials are my favorite ways of helping people with their photography. One of my favorite ways of talking about landscape photography is through my podcast called The Landscape Photography Show.