We recently connected with Derek Sturman and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Derek thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you walk us through some of the key steps that allowed you move beyond an idea and actually launch?

I was originally interested in doing Video as a pass time, something I enjoyed right out of high school. So I bought a camera mainly just to do for fun, and at the time me and a friend would spend a lot of time outdoors in the mountains in northern Utah camping in the summers. While we were there I started to experiment with long exposure photography and just happened to catch the Milky Way in an image. I was hooked Instantly, and spent something like the next 6 months just chasing dark skies to get more images.

At that point I knew it was something I loved, but it wasn’t until I really started looking out there that I realized a lot of people really do dive deep into landscape photography that it became a sort of hook for me, so most of my early 20’s was spent just getting out to any place I could to photograph any kind of geological site I could.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Yeah so I am a Videographer/Photographer, and I teach people how to take better photos of the milky way.
I also work full time in Marketing, specifically social media and digital marketing for a company called 4Runner Lifestyle. I spend most of my time learning how to tell a story through content or create viral content that creates brand awareness or sell a product now, but I got my start as a landscape photographer which is where my real passion is.

Back in 2015 I discovered that I could use DSLR cameras to photograph the Milky Way Galaxy while camping in the mountains of northern Utah where I am from. Instantly I was hooked on Landscape Photography and hunting down all of the most unique geological areas to shoot Astro- Landscape Photography.

This of course led me into more and more outdoors activities to get to these places, a little bit of hiking, repelling, canyoneering, Snowmobile riding so on and so forth to reach these places. Since then I managed to gain a moderate following on instagram mainly, primarily I think from my Astro-photography images of the milky way. Since then I’ve spoken at many Night Photography related conferences, taught many classes, workshops etc.

I’ve recently started and online school called https://www.milkywayclass.com/ for some reason it wont work without the WWW but the Idea is that after years of trying to teach people in person, it’s just too much information to cover in a small amount of time, its years of learning for me I am trying to teach them in hours.

Plus they usually forget most of what I say in person like any normal person would, So I decided to create this lifetime course here online they can go back to and reference any time they want.

For me finding new places, and creating the highest quality images I can of strange, wild and lesser known places is a deep passion, and I spend a lot of my time searching google maps for new areas to explore.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

This business is strange and broad. Creativity is a double edged sword for most businesses and “creators”. I learned pretty early on that no one wants a $200 Canvas print of Mordor in their home haha, that’s just reality.

The secret to all money is to solve a problem for someone else. Take something that’s hard for them and make it easy, or demonstrate that you can make whatever it is they have has deep rooted value for their prospective customers. This can be problematic for someone in our field. If the things you are passionate about do not align with the needs of your clients, then naturally you will end a starving artist. But if you can learn to be passionate about some of the smaller aspects of a broader picture I think that is the door to a lot of success for people who want to make it in the creative/ content world.

My real true passions are:
1. Landscapes, I love being outside and finding and seeing beautiful places and I am very passionate about getting high quality images of those places. Obviously I don’t make much money or any just by getting a pretty picture, however many people want to know how I do it, so I can teach them which is one source of income.

2. This plays a long with #1, I am genuinely passionate about the quality of well done color grades, the quality of well done images, the quality of overall storytelling and a well done video. Even though it does not always match my interests I have learned to develop a deep love and passion for doing this in every project I do, so even if it is a video or a photo about a product I don’t care about at all, I find my joy and passion for doing it and motivation in the quality of its production.

I think this is something that took me a long time to learn to do. At first I struggled and fought saying, I am not passionate about… Oil drilling or Cars, or whatever it might be. But later learned that it doesn’t matter what you are photographing or filming, you learn from doing different types of photos and videos and it only makes you better at all kinds of work with these technologies.

3. I am deeply passionate about human psychology, and I have found that I enjoy learning about the science of marketing and connecting with individuals through brand marketing. Learning what makes things “stick” or go viral is a deep passion for me. I work a lot at my full time job now that has obviously taken me away from a lot of the things im originally passionate about, but I have found that a deep passion for these things has made it all worth it for me, and I think it has helped me to learn and grow in other ways many creative people I think are afraid to try.

In the end it really comes down to the feeling of creating something, making something you feel was done well with quality in mind, and being able to be proud of it.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

I think in the last 5 ish maybe 10 years that the trend has been to think that “Creative” people are very different from the rest of “Normal” working positions. And think this is deeply true and deeply false. Creativity is a gift when a person learns how to use it to actually create, but I think it’s also a curse to people who struggle to find the right channels to use that gift to actually create results.

The thing personally I have found hardest to make work is that I care deeply about Quality, over quantity. I never got into any of this with any measure of quantity in mind at all.. But that’s the issue is that the world runs on results, so there is a level of quality often times you have to learn to pass off ass acceptable, even when it isn’t even close to your best work because of time and resource restrictions.

In a perfect world I would focus entirely on making something high quality and well made above all other factors. Which is mainly because that is what I am passionate about, its exciting to me to see what new technology allows us to do with high quality images and video files. But often times I think many people don’t really care or understand until they see the side by side.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sturmanphoto.smugmug.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dereksturmanphotography/
• Twitter: https://www.threads.net/@dereksturmanphotography
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DerekSturman
• Other: https://www.milkywayclass.com/

  (must have WWW.

Image Credits

haha just me :)