TTIM 29 – Travel Photography as a Side Job with Andy Bitterer

My guest for this episode of the podcast is my long time friend Andy Bitterer. Me and Andy have a lot in common, but one thing that truly sets us apart from many other travel photographers is that we both still have a full-time job–doing stuff other than photography–that keeps our families well fed. We take photos in our spare time, but photography is our true passion and our side job, so we try to practice it as much as possible. That often means exploiting every business trip we take for opportunities to visit new places and create new images.

Andy Bitterer is an award-winning freelance photographer from Hamburg, Germany. As a frequent traveller around the world, Andy focuses mostly on travel and nature photography, but his interests also include event, portrait, architecture, and fine art photography. His work has appeared online and in print, from news websites and corporate intranets to book and music CD covers, magazines, and various marketing collateral.

Andy started in photography in the early 1970s, with a Voigtländer 35mm camera from his dad. His first SLR was a Minolta SR-T 303b, accompanied by a few Sigma and Vivitar lenses from 16mm fisheye to 600mm mirror tele. Andy switched to Canon in the early 90s, still in 35mm film land with a EOS A2E, but by the time the Canon EOS 10D came to market, all his analog gear went into a closet and was replaced by digital stuff. Being an IT pro, that last step was fairly easy. After all, with a master’s degree in computer science, navigating a digital world is daily business.

I have been wanting to interview Andy for a long time, to ask him how he manages to make work, photography, and family travel coexist peacefully and productively. Of course, with him being a very busy guy who is often on the road, it took some time before we could find the time to record an interview, but we finally succeeded. If you too are doing photography as a side job, you might be interested in listening to this episode.

Duration 29m 57s.

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Music for this episode: “Zanzibar” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/