Today we’d like to introduce you to Derek Sturman.
Derek, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I started out experimenting with Video back in high school, it wasn’t ever something I saw as an actual career avenue, more just a hobby or interest that I enjoyed learning about. At the time back then Photography really had no appeal to me, I didn’t like the restrictive nature compared to video. I bought my first camera right out of high school just to make dumb videos with a couple of my friends, that was a canon T5i, the same one we had used in my advanced video classes senior year.
That first year graduated a close friend of mine got me a job working full time as the marketing/graphic design supervisor for an Oil Fracking Company.. this was naturally way over my head for an 18 year old, but I had a lot of experience goofing with photoshop and illustrator in high school and just applied it as best I could which forced me to learn a lot very quickly.
Around that same time, my first summer out of High School, I did a 4 night camping trip in the Uinta mountains not to far from mirror lake with a friend of mine and brought that Canon T5i. I had only really only heard about long exposure photography but never really tried it myself. At the time I did not own a tripod so I just set the camera on the ground or propped it up with rocks as best I could. We were actually using a laser pointer to write and draw things on the side of my car when I realized I was getting some stars in the background. I experimentally set it facing straight up and caught the milky way which happened to be arching overhead that night.
That pretty much had me hooked from that moment on. I had no idea you could actually get that much detail in the milky way with a consumer camera like that. We spent the rest of the night driving around to different spots and taking experimental shots of the milky way. Then pretty much every moonless night for the next 5 years I was out alone in the dark somewhere trying to get the Milky Way over many of Utahs weird arches or natural rock formations.
Since then I’ve spent a lot of nights not getting any sleep, and branched into day time landscape photography as well. I’ve been pretty fortunate to have worked with a lot of cool partners and brands including Google when they were first launching their Pixel phones and their astrophotography tools in their camera app, and a lot of other Camera and lens companies. Lately I’ve been lucky to speak at different photography conferences in Utah and Colorado and offer workshops and tutorials on how I get my images to others through local Camera stores like Pictureline here in Salt Lake.
This sort of accidental career path also landed me with my current Full Time Position working as the Director of Marketing for Escalante Outdoors, which has several DBA’s (4Runner Lifestyle, Tacoma Lifestyle, Tundra Lifestyle and Overland Depot), where opportunities through these brands have taken me to a lot of cool places including Thailand.
Ultimately I am passionate about Travel and Landscape photography and I travel as much as I can to collect these images and give Travel advice to others looking to visit. With the Hawaiian Islands being a common spot I’ll visit 2-4 times a year.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Yes and no as everyone would say. I wouldn’t recommend this exact road as a carreer path to people I don’t know well, and I think that is primarily because it’s never straight forward, there’s always guessing and troubleshooting to make it work. Obviously I also work a Full Time Job which thankfully is very compatible with my regular Photography business and a lot more reliable. With that said if you are extremely ambitious and willing to make some sacrifices in your time and really take some risks I’d absolutely recommend it.
Sometimes It feels like its too good to be true and too easy to be real, others I really wonder what I am doing. Seems like the further in you get the easier it gets though to me, starting out it was tough.
One of the most discouraging things is you think these photographers go to a spot and just get a great photo… well 99% you’ll get terrible weather or conditions, often times to get one final image I’ll visit the exact same location 3, 4 even 5 or more times before finally getting one thats useable.. So it’s really frustrating when you first get started but when you get in the pattern of going back and realize the first time you go anywhere you are only there to learn about it, so you can plan return trips.;.. it gets a lot easier.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I think where I have had the most attention per se is in my Astrophotography (landscape photos taken at night featuring the stars or the Milky Way) That was a huge passion for me when I was getting started and it was most of my work. I think I was lucky because I got it into it right before it seemed to have sort of a Boom a couple of years in when suddenly the whole of social media become aware that digital cameras could do that type of thing.
I was pretty relentless as an 18-24 Year old kid, I would drive 10+ hours with no sleep on a whim to get photos, just any chance I could get. See a good weather and alignment opportunity somewhere in the California Desert and just decide to go that night and try and pull it all off in one weekend, you know that sort of thing. I remember that period being particularly rough haha, no formal sleeping arrangements just an air mattress in the back of my car, a lot of caffeine since I would be up usually most of the night if not all of it shooting and it would be way too hot in the summer months in the desert to sleep in the day.
I still think that the way I shoot Astro Images is a big part of what’s set me apart for the most part. Typically for me one final image is made up of many individual images to get the cleanest result. For those who are not familiar, basically taking photos at night really pushes cameras to their absolute maximum capabilities, most of them if you were to just take a single exposure (one Image) you would have a noisey terrible quality image. That’s why I will use techniques or tools like Stacking and Star Trackers to help me get much cleaner results. This means that instead of taking one photo I might take the same exact photo 20-30 times to let software create a median of those images.. Image noise is random so I can collect more detail across those 20-30 frames. I also will use tools like star trackers which rotate the camera retrograde to earths rotation to negate star trailing in images and let me shoot much longer exposures and collect more light from the night sky.
This process means that instead of a 30 second time frame to get 1 image I am usually closer to 30 minutes to an hour per image, but in my estimation the quality increase I achieve makes it very worth it.
Now days I am more integrated in the social media marketing world for my full time job as well as shooting images in the daylight. One of my stronger skills I would say is the art of making something go Viral or harness social media for brands to gain followers and views quickly to secure brand awareness. I manage the social media pages some of them since they where less than 150K followers to now over 450k. Creating reels with the goal of reaching Millions of views, some of them hitting more than 60M views. So a lot of what I do now is focused on the simple techniques of creating good original content intended to go Viral.
What would you say have been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
Who dares wins. That’s an old phrase usually attributed to the founder of the British Special air service Sir David Stirling. You could also use the more modern nike motto “Just do it”. More than anything most of my success I think has simply been either luck or purely because I was willing to do something that people thought was too inconvenient to be done that way. Taking action has always been the best method for as an uneducated person haha so to speak at least in the sense that all of this was self taught and by experimentation instead of through conventional educational outlets like formal college education.
A lot of times the things that need to be done to take advantage of an opportunity are uncomfortable, getting up at 3 am to shoot the milky way or spending a whole night without sleep etc. These aren’t incredible feats or massive accomplishments, they’re just small little inconveniences and for that reason many people won’t make them because there isn’t the same immediate glory so to speak. However in my opinion whenever an opportunity comes up like this if you can ignore the little voice saying “that’s really going to suck” and just do it, remember that the person who takes the most action wins, it goes a lot smoother for me.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sturmanphoto.smugmug.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dereksturmanphotography
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DEREKSTURMANPHOTOGRAPHY/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DerekSturman
