About Travelshooters
Hello, I'm Bruce Stidston. I'm the owner of Travelshooters and I've been working with professional photographers and creating award-winning images throughout my career. Starting out in some of the world's best-known advertising companies and then running my own ad agency, I've hired and coordinated photographers, studios, models, fixers, hotels and ground support teams as part of complex international campaigns for the best part of 30 years.
At Travelshooters, I don’t lead tours and I don’t teach photography. My key role is to cherry-pick top-class professional photographers who are experts in a particular country or region, and work with them on designing and leading imaginative photography tour itineraries that I would want to go on myself.
My career as a brand-builder and image-maker has given me a pretty good instinct for this. I've learned how pro photographers work and I've had the pleasure of working with some pretty fearsome talents (and temperaments!). I've studied their styles, pored over their portfolios, bought their stock images and worked with them on turning new visual concepts into film and pixels. I can tell fairly quickly whether a professional photographer has the rare combination of technical competence, creative judgement, local knowledge and teaching skills that defines a Travelshooters Shoot Director.
(I call our pro photographers Shoot Directors: although they’re talented and published photography professionals in their own right, on my tours their primary mission is to orchestrate the creation of wonderful images inside your camera — not their own. The term Shoot Director reflects this fundamental shift in emphasis.)
Our mission
Travelshooters’ ultimate mission is to help amateur photographers explore the world, meet fascinating people, learn to take better photographs — and have a roaring good time doing it. I've written more about this here.
The access to local people is very important to me. As a keen amateur photographer myself, I want to be guided and mentored, wherever possible, by photographers who live in the region we're shooting, who speak the language and understand the subtle local weave of curiosity, caution and custom that governs the meetings of strangers.
I don't want simply to take photographs of the local people we meet. I want them to collaborate in the photograph I'm making.
Every time we get invited into someone's home to meet their family and drink their tea, I realise how important this is. I don't want simply to take photographs of the local people we meet. I want them to collaborate in the photograph I'm making. The difference is about courtesy, respect and active participation. Of course, it's not always possible to engage in this way, but it's the model I aim for and it bugs me like crazy if I come away with images but no names, no addresses and no promises of future correspondence. I don't want to be a photo-burglar.
With Travelshooters, I'm able to select exceptional photographers and photo-journalists who understand precisely what I'm after. If you choose to travel with us, you'll shoot alongside these photo-magicians who plan, with me, each day's adventures and often pluck great visual encounters out of thin air. My clients tell me, time and again, that these privileged encounters have been the highlight of their photography tour with Travelshooters. I'm delighted: that’s our mission.
