In this interview, Bob Holmes explains one of the biggest things that he wanted to share was to always be prepared. Preparation is key to getting the shot that you desire, because if you’re not prepared, you’ll miss it. Read an excerpt from our interview with him to learn more.
You can watch the video here
“One of the biggest lessons I learned was, when I first started shooting professionally…it was in 1980…I was shooting for National Geographic in Pakistan, and it was the first time I felt as if I were a real photographer, I felt really good. I’d got National Geographic film, things to send it back to Washington, and I had three cameras, all with motor-drives. I felt like a real professional. And I was shooting in a little village in a very remote part of Pakistan, and there was a shaman predicting the future for the next year. And this was a unique experience, I was the only Westerner there. I started shooting, and there’s a lot of exciting things happening…
The shaman is getting high, smelling…they’d been drinking a local brew, which was awful…it was dreadful stuff. If you served it at Betty Ford Clinic, you wouldn’t have got any takers. And it was some fermented grain from this village, and he’s getting really high on that, and smelling juniper smoke. And then they dragged a goat to the front of this group of villagers, got a machete, chopped the goats head off, and the shaman picked the goat’s head up and started drinking the blood from the goat’s head…and it was very dramatic, obviously, and I ran out of film in all three cameras.
I didn’t have a single frame left in any camera, and it’s not the sort of situation where you’re just, “Could you do that just one more time please?” And it’s a huge lesson, you know, I’ll never let that happen again. I always made sure, even if I was…and I think, coming from an amateur background, I was very careful about costs, and I would always try to get 37 frames off a 36 exposure roll, and I hadn’t got out of that mindset. After that, if I got to frame 30, I’d take the film out…and Geographic was paying for the film, but it was habit. And I learned that you always have to be prepared, because you never know what’s going to happen, and that was a very, very valuable lesson for me.”
You can find more of Bob’s work here and you can watch his video here