Welcome to this week’s episode of Your Business Unleashed podcast. I’ve got a guest today who I’ve wanted to have on for a long time, and we just managed to finally go out for lunch a couple of weeks ago and arrangeO time to get him on, and one of Calgary’s most popular photographers. Neil Zeller, thanks for joining me, Neil.

Thanks for having me, clay.

Yeah, we’ve known each other for what, five or six or seven years now? Something like that, quite a while, I guess. Yeah. And I’ve sort of watched you and been with you through a lot of your journey, and I’m always impressed not only by your resilience and positivity, but man, I was just on your website again today, and your images are just shockingly beautiful. You nail it, man. And whether you’re coming in to do a headshot for us or if you’re out doing nature photography, I’m just constantly blown away at how you make a camera make that magic. So thank you for your gift to the world.

Well, thanks. I appreciate it. It’s a joy to share the things that I love. One of the things that I’ve tried to do from the very beginning is to connect with people with the things that I love. It’s easier to share and be a positive influence in this kind of negative world that we live in now. So it’s been one of the goals from the very beginning.

So take me back to the very beginning. I know you were doing something before photography, and you actually got into photography sort of late in life, if I remember correctly.

Yeah. I had a midlife creative, as I’ve coined that phrase now. At 40 years old. I went to Tracy, my wife, and said, I’m not fulfilled. I’m in this sales career. I was selling contract office furnishings to the big towers downtown in the heydays, and it was a lucrative career, and I was good at it, but it just wasn’t fulfilling. And I was turning 40 that year, and I ended up having to make some hard choices.

Not really that hard though, right?

Well, it was because Tracy stayed home. Her goal in life was to raise our son. And so she had taken that on. He was just turning six at the, and our main thing in life is to turn him into a good human being. And this is a decade later now, and things have worked out that way. But being a sole breadwinner and working for a company that supported me that way had a monthly draws, I had commission sales, things were going good to just kind of drop all of that, give six months notice in that career to become a photographer, which I wasn’t at the time. I had a beginner camera. I was an automatic setting shooter on the camera, but I chose to become a photographer. Took six months to learn. It took everything I had learned in business to that date in my commission, sales and the businesses that I had in the past and applied it to this new venture. And just on July 1st, 2013, just right out of the gate just went for it.

And so do you remember what your first job was? What was your first job in photography?

So I was pretty ballsy. I went to Mayor Nenshi’s office. He was in his heyday at the very beginning of his first term. And I went to his office in April that year as this new photographer. And I just, for some reason, I made an appointment with the office, met Franca, who’s his EA, and sat down with her and said, “listen, I want to follow the mayor during his campaign in October for his re-election, and I’ll just do it for nothing”. I’ve seen other photographers, Adam, Scotty for Trudeau and Susa for Obama and stuff. And I kind of wanted to be that for Mayor Nenshi. And she said, fine, whatever, maybe we’ll contact you. And then in June of 2013, our city flooded.

Oh, wow.

So I had had all these cheesy brochures printed up on orange paper that I was just going to drop off to all my old furniture clients and everybody else. I knew that saying, I’m a photographer now, so go ahead and hire me. Then our city flooded, closed downtown and cancelled that. But I got a call on the 7th of June, something like that. The city was kind of cleaning up from the major parts of the flood. The water had been receding, and I had been out every day during the floods from day one of the floods when the water rushed in and taking these photos of the city. And I had my new social media accounts for the photography side of things, and the water levels equated to the graphs of the reach that I had in my social media accounts.

(05:43)
It sort of matched it as the water got higher and higher, so did my social media account. So it was really interesting that way. But I got a call from the mayor’s office and said, listen, on Canada Day, on July 1st, we’re going to go around and do Canada things that are important to the mayor. There was a citizenship ceremony at Heritage Park. We had the Fort Calgary event. There was a few breakfasts that were going on. And so they invited me on July 1st, 2013, and that was my very, very first day as a full-time photographer. So I piled into the back of the suburban with the mayor and rode around with him on Canada Day. And they liked the photos enough that they invited me to hang out with him for the entirety of Sstampede that year as well. So for days and days and days, I was with him and stuff. And so you want to talk about a really, really sharp entrance into the world of being a photographer. One of the most visible things that have happened at Calgary was one of the most visible personalities and my name attached to all the assets that came out of that time. And it was a pretty incredible way to get my name out there from the very beginning.

And how audacious to start. I mean, you go from single income breadwinner to ripping off the bandaid for all intents and purposes. I guess a six month buffer is nice, but you’re right, that would be terrifying. But you did it and then you were audacious enough to just show up in the mayor’s office and do what you’ve always been doing, which is a little bit of selling, right?

Yeah, for sure. And I bought my first professional camera with my last tax refund. Yeah, it was a really interesting time. I had done some research on other photographer’s rates, and I didn’t want to put myself in competition with everyone. So when I came out, I needed to make a living. So I looked at how much money, what I was making, how much I was taking home, what my costs are going to be. I did quite a good analysis of what I was going to need every month. And I ended up coming out of the gate on my first sort of year of business as a photographer, three to four times more expensive than what the published rates were for most photographers. And most photographers are really good at undervaluing themselves right out of the gate. I’ve always professed that it’s easier to bring your price down when necessary than it’s impossible to bring it up as soon as you’ve set a price. So two things happened is one is people hired me. The work was good enough, the connection was good enough to the client. One of my goals from the beginning was to make them look good to their bosses that task them with hiring a photographer. So working really hard to solve those problems. I had learned enough in commission sales through my courses with a local consultant, Les Hewitt. I’ve done Dale Carnegie sales training courses and learn that you take care of you, answer all the questions you don’t sell, you answer all the questions, you solve their problems.

(09:06)
And so the other thing it did for me raising the prices is it took me out of competition from 95% of the other photographers out there, photographer, rightly so, or not from the beginning. There’s phenomenal photographers. They still blow my mind. They’re better than me. They take incredible art photography. They’re business photography, they’re advertising headshots. Everything are just incredible. And it’s something to aspire to. And I have done that for the last decade, but there’s always going to be someone better than you, but you can be the best business person too. And so I worked really hard on that to sort of make sure that I’m the easiest one to connect to. I’m the one who’s sort of watching the crescendo of the events so they don’t have to have these massive shot lists. People trust me to make sure I’m going to capture the things that need to be captured at these events to make sure their people look good in their headshot. And there’s sort of an extrovert’s world in there that I didn’t know existed that I’ve had to work on, but from the beginning, I’ve made it a task in my business.

Would you say you’re an extrovert?

No, I’ve never been.

I mean, this is all very extroverted stuff. When people come to you, they’re coming to you now because your whole brand and your whole image and everything online just screams that, listen, I’m going to have a good experience with this guy. And you go onto your testimonials and she’s right at the top, and you go, okay, this person’s good at connecting with people. And so I go, okay, nice. We’re going to have a good extroverted experience. But you wouldn’t consider yourself to be an extrovert?

No, I wouldn’t. It’s something that I am nervous before every single shoot to this day because A, I don’t know what’s going to happen. Right? You never know what’s going to show up in front of your camera. Even in the most produced advertising shoots, I’ve been in helicopters over oil fields in Grand Prairie. I chased the holiday train. I’ve been involved in brand new events. I’ve been the photographer for the opening of the Calgary Library platform, Calgary, the National Music Center, all these places that are brand new and sort of been charged with capturing these iconic once in a lifetime. I’ve been in charge of photographing first airplane landings when idle wise came, and these different airlines that have come, I’ve been standing on the runway as these planes have been landing, and I’ve one shot to get these photos. So I’m nervous all the time.

(11:28)
And I think that nerve actually creates a bit of an edge to me that takes the introvert out of me and makes me take all the steps to be that forward-fronted person. It feels diminishing now. But I used to joke that I was always the jester. I would do this joke where you get arms on the strings and I’m that guy to the people to make sure that they’re having good time. But it was kind of insulting myself a little bit with it. So now it’s more that I’m responsible for the look of this event, and I want to be a part of the event in a way that’s positive for everyone. Even the people standing in front of me. There’s seriousness to it, but there’s also a levity as well that I can manage now. But it takes a lot of time and effort to create that feeling and intention.

Hey, I mean, every time that we’ve ever had a session together, consistently, people are going, “Hey, Neil gets us smiling.” I don’t think that’s necessarily the jester thing, but the value equation to me, it is so interesting to think of what is the value equation of a photographer? And by the way, half of what you’re saying can apply to every entrepreneur. To price yourself higher, think about the business. What’s the extra value you bring? Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Play to your strengths. And you go, what is the extra value of a photographer? Okay, well, now we’ve got a photo for who is thinking “I’m not here to simply snap pictures of what’s going on around me. I need to create an environment that portrays the intention of the person who’s hired me and how do we do that?” And that takes a lot. I love that about you.

Yeah, I pay attention, right? I’ll study the event ahead of time. I’ll see who I’m working for. I get a lot of public relations and marketing firms that hire me for their clients. And so I’ll ask a lot of questions in those conversations. It’s never about the rate anymore. They’re happy with that. It’s about delivering the goods to them. And what are simple questions? What are these photos for? Are they for celebrating this event or is it for selling the next one? And that changes how I’m going to photograph it. Is it for you personally as a PR company? Is it for the clients? Are they doing newsletters later on? Do they have a marketing angle for this? So just sort of understanding going into everything that I’m working on changes how I act, how I react, how I plan and prepare, and where I stand in the room if I’ve got to be in front and apologizing to people for staring at my backside. As the bold photographer, you got to be out front, right?

Yeah. It’s super interesting. And I don’t even, I think about scalability constantly, and it’s like in your line of work, I mean, you are so it people want you. And it’s so interesting to hear you talk about these things and the contemplation that goes into a pre-shoot or whatever. Yeah. Anyways, it’s really neat. So you’ve done some cool things. You’ve taken people cool places. You’re about to take people cool places, always a fun conversation. I can just sit there and eat a lunch and listen to you talk about what you got coming up or where you’ve been. Why don’t we do that for a minute? Tell me about taking people places and what you’ve seen out there.

So I take pictures of the night sky, and that was always the thing that I used to protect my love of photography. I wasn’t particularly good at it. I was starting to understand night skies, which is an interesting genre in photography. It’s a lonely genre. It’s an introvert genre, which is really nice for some of us when we want to sort of recharge our souls. We stand outside at 3 o’clock in the morning leaning on the hood of our vehicle while the camera sits there and does the work once the settings are plugged in. But I used the night sky photography, Northern Lights, meteor showers, Milky Way work in the middle of the night to protect my love of photography because I knew going into business as a photographer, there could be an opportunity to resent the work as the business gets bigger and harder as it does, especially when things start rolling around like pandemics and downturns in the economy and whatnot, where we have to work extra hard to sort of make ends meet.

(16:02)
But I had people asking me, “Hey, Neil, I want to you take these amazing night sky photography shots. Can you teach me?” . I said, “sure, let’s go out.” There might be an Aurora storm during Milky Way season, and it’s the end of November. “Meet me at the Tim Hortons on McKnight by the airport at 10 o’clock at night and I’ll take you out for a couple hours, bring 40 bucks.” 14 people showed up and it was a great night. We had lots of fun. And so I started doing these little impromptu night sky outings and they turned out really good. And that grew into these trips. I now do trips like first 14 days to the Arctic. We go to Tanzania on groups. I have travel doctors that come to my open houses on events to Africa to talk about the things they need to do. I’ve got these teams of people that are around me helping logistics builders in countries and up north that are taking care of me to build these major events. And then I also back home, I’m teaching a two day beginner class, and I’m going on one day trips to look at canola, take pictures of deer in canola in July. I’m doing Marra Lake tours. I have my tour van that I have now that took years to get so am pretty fortunate that way. Pre-pandemic, we were looking at probably 85% of the business was teaching and touring. And obviously that was wiped out completely that I shoot major events and I teach. And that was completely gone at the time. And I think we were a couple years away from a hundred percent teaching and touring, and now we’re five years away post-pandemic.

(18:03)
But we were sort of getting back on track to get back to that goal. But Calgary supports me in massive ways with major events and headshots and the other things I do. So it’s been fabulous. But the teaching side of things has just been spectacular. The travel teaching, lots of work, lots of logistics, hotels, and the best restaurants. And that doesn’t mean the fanciest ones, but that means the mom and pops along the way. We don’t eat at chain restaurants. We make sure everybody has these culinary experiences along the way, connections in the van.

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the main thing is the community. I remember you telling me early on about your Facebook following, or I think it was Facebook following, you had a Facebook group going or something, and anytime you’d announced, Hey, I’m going to, just for the record, I don’t think you sell education on photography. I think you’re selling experiences, right? You’re selling in a whole experience. I get to go sit in the van for however long with Neil, and I realize he’s introverted, but he’s going to make it happen, and we’re going to go shoot some pictures of

They don’t think I’m introverted.

No, I know, right? But you do. Yeah, exactly. And that’s the beauty of what you do. Does that push you out of your comfort zone or you’re just naturally good at it? Or

Where I’m out of my comfort zone is in the corporate photography side of things where I’m a Saskatchewan farm kid. I took the sales job because initially I was uneducated. I did sales, worked out, got an entrepreneurial spirit, which has sort of driven me to create and find ways to quench my creative soul as well. But when I’m teaching, I am in my element. I have realized that. I tell my son, I said, do the things you love right now. Don’t worry about what anybody else is doing. Do everything you love right now, I took me till I was 40 to embrace my inner nerd, and it feels like a regret for every year before that I tried to be something else that I tried to be what that sales group thought I should be, what the world was pushing me to be in that sales and entertainment world that I just didn’t fit in as a square peg, round hole.

(20:40)
But since I turned 40 and I did this, I’ve been able to be myself 97%. And when I’m teaching and touring, it’s a hundred percent me. I get to express myself in ways that are me to the joy and grace and benefit of everyone around me, including our service providers. The experience that I provide isn’t just for my customers, my clients that buy these trips, that come on these trips, these experiences I demand. And we have conversations during and before the trips, I demand that my people share the experience with every single person around us. We’ve called it flipping the script. We’ve had servers in restaurants in Dawson City where there’s only two restaurants open and the server goes from restaurant to restaurant for breakfast, lunch and supper. And we see them all the time. And my first comment to them is while they’re getting seated is, you deal with everyone.

(21:42)
Okay, we’re good. We have time. My group is happy here. If we get water on the table, that’s great for now. Come see us when you’re ready. I know you’re really busy. And honestly, they get so shocked by that because they’re getting beat up by people all day long, and it just changes everything for them. It changes. And our people are happy now. They realize that we just get to have a conversation, relax while we’re waiting. But then we’ve taken all the pressure off of the servers, drivers, everybody around us, even to the point where I’ve created these little catchphrases, these philosophies in my traveling and touring. And my favorite one is post pandemic. People are, if you haven’t grieved, if you haven’t gone through the four stages of grieving of our past life, especially for travel and vacations and whatnot, because if you’ve noticed in travel that it’s not the same, our world is very, very different now.

(22:40)
I watched a comedian in March of 2021, I think it was coming out of the pandemic, and he said, everything’s going to be a little shittier now. You just have to accept it, right? If you’re not grieving, if you’ve not grieved fully for your past life and you’re still sort of fighting, you’re still in denial of what it is now, you’re going to have trouble. So when I’m touring people and nothing goes exactly as planned anymore, everything out of my control, whether it’s hotel rooms and restaurants and roads closed, and the things that happen on our trips, the clouds come out and the northern lights are behind the clouds kind of thing, right? But you can control the positive experience.

And so the philosophy is when you’re faced with adversity while travelling, handle at minimum, that adversity with grace and optimally with joy. And what happens is when you do that, it just takes just a shift in your mind to just go, okay, we’re handling this. The person who is in front of us that is presenting us with this challenge, if you deal with them with grace, it’s going to turn everything around to the point where they’re going to work harder for you to help solve this problem. As opposed to you pulling your hair out and screaming and yelling at them, blaming typically, it’s not their fault, it’s not. Whatever’s happened is so out of control from everybody. What happens is that puts you back on the path that you were meant to be on as opposed to pushing that river the entire time. And it sets you back on your correct path, and the things that you were supposed to see that you’re supposed to experience on that tour will now begin to happen again, as opposed to you being sort of so frustrated

Just listening to everything you’re saying, I’ve got this theory about the before times, and I call ’em the before times and then, and you go, what? I think if something good has come out of this, I think that we got so immersed in our digital selves before in times it was coming to a sort of a, I didn’t like where it was going. And what has come out of the pandemic that I think has been positive is what I say is we’ve got this renaissance of human connection happening where people are craving to be in front of other people in live connections with people. And we’re doing this on Zoom right now for the benefit of my YouTube channel, but if it wasn’t for the YouTube channel and I had a proper camera set up, I’d ask you to be in the office just better. And I think that a lot of people are craving that, and you are with your business, you are directly scratching that itch for you positive, awesome human experience, right? Yeah. And I think that’s pretty cool.

Yeah. The community that’s built inside the van is one that I’m incredibly proud of. We’ve had people meet on my tour and been married.

(25:36)
We’ve had people meet and for the first time in their life and now travel the world together, best friends, family vacations together. And it happens often. People find like-minded folks that you would never find elsewhere. I am less and less and less and less on social media now for so many reasons and more and more and more kind of hosting and creating these sort of in-person events that people just love to be a part of. So yeah, it’s been an interesting time since we’ve opened back up again. It’s really been, there’s a divisiveness that happened during Covid, but there’s also a connectedness within our own groups.

I’d agree with that. So tell me some business lessons you learned in Tanzania. I know you got some great stories from there.

First time I went to Tanzania, it was pre-pandemic. I had gone on spec through another logistics provider, and the one thing he did not do was create an expectation for us to know what was going to happen. And on a trip like that, when people are paying tens of thousands of dollars to go on a trip, you have to lay out the expectations. You have to let people know what it’s going to be like and this person. And we were surprised all along. Everybody on the trip knew it was kind of a scouting trip as well, and there was a discount available for that trip, so nobody was upset about it, but the expectations were never laid out, even including how much money you take out of the bank before we ended up all broke on the road.

Ouch. In Tanzania, that’s probably not a good place to be out of cash.

Yeah. Everything is a cash society over there. So we found there was a brand new bank in this tiny little town in the middle of nowhere. And it was like this oasis of cash that we, because we were all pooling our money to pick tips and buy food and stuff along the way. And it was interesting. The other one was how long the trips are, how long the trip is, and how rough the roads are and whatnot. And so the biggest thing I learned in that one was to just really, really spell out the expectations. So the next trip, the post-pandemic that we went on was spectacular. Everybody knows, everybody knew what to expect, everybody every day I was able to sort of lay it out. I took over the logistics myself knowing what I knew, but the other one was the human connection.

(28:20)
We go to a place like Tanzania. People travel. There’s a lot of people travel to expand their way of life, but there’s also a real subset that demand their way of life on tour. And the demanding ones are the entitled sort of the people who are looking for their food. This food is bad, mine is better at home or whatever. Let’s not make it about that. Let’s make it about sharing these experiences. So the second time we went, I made sure that we were ingrained into the people where we connected again with the folks that are working. Immediately when we arrived in camps, I made connections with the people and enabled them to let their guard down a little bit to be themselves and show us their way of life. And we were brought into the fold everywhere we went in ways that sort of made the other tables, even in camps where there was more than us in camp, you could see there a little bit of jealousy because we were getting a different level of service, a different level of sort of connection with the people, and there was maybe a language barrier from some of them that they couldn’t.

(29:33)
There’s no way to cross it if you didn’t know English or Swahili. It’s a tougher connection. And I tried to learn some Swahili too. So yeah, learn the phrases in the language. I think that’s, you learn how to say hello my friend in the local language. So I’ve done that. “Jami” is “hello my friend” and they appreciate the effort.

The whole customer experience thing, map out the journey and set expectations upfront. I mean, I can’t think of a better example to do that on than a trip to a foreign country that is, we’re talking, I’ve never been, but I just got back from Southeast Asia and it’s totally different. Totally different. It’s totally different. And so to go in with, I’m going to have my McDonald’s bacon and egg, and I want my double, double, and have those expectations going in because nobody’s reset those for you. I mean, what a good lesson in business. What can I expect from our interaction that I’m paying you for? What can I expect here?

Yeah, I tell people that the logistics side of things, the scenery takes care of itself. We don’t talk a lot about that. These are photographer enthusiasts, right? That’s the easy part for me. The managing the experience is the big one and making sure that they understand what’s coming up. We sit around. Here’s another thing I do on every single multi-day tour that I host is at supper time. Every night I lay out what we’re doing tomorrow and what the options are and what the challenges might be. I look at the weather, I look at our opportunities, and we’re there for a reason. We’re there for genres. We go up Northern Saskatchewan to find whooping cranes. We go to Cypress Hills to find big skies and night skies all over the Southern Alberta looking for deer in canola, drink canola season out to Mara Lake for sunrise.

(31:23)
Setting these expectations. I sit around on the overnight trips and lay out the day, have a great conversation about what’s going to happen. Then I ask them two questions. We go around the whole table. First question is, what was your win today? What was your win? And your win can be anything from sometimes it’s like, well, the person we met in this cafe, I’m always sort, we’re a conspicuous group. When we pull into a cafe in Saskatchewan, and it’s like where all the farmers come in and sit at a table and we show up at nowhere in this van, and we get a lot of looks, and I’ll connect with those looks. I’ll say, Hey, good to meet you. And we’ll have these conversations. And so we go around the table and have these wins and everybody shares that, right?

(32:10)
And there’s always the common ones. If we saw a leopard in a tree in Africa, I’ll take it off the table. I said, you can’t use the leopard in the tree just because everybody’s going to use that one. It’s such a spectacular moment. So there’s got to be something else. And the second question I ask, and once they know what’s happening tomorrow, once they know what happened today, maybe there were some technical challenges with cameras. Maybe there was somebody elbowing me out of the way or whatever. How can we help you achieve your goals tomorrow? And what that does is two things is for me is it lets me understand what to look for them. I’m not skipping over them in a way that is unintended, but still skipping over them. Maybe they’re looking for wild flowers on the side of the road. Maybe they’re looking for a specific bird that people that are, some people that have a specific bird they need, and the second thing it does is it puts everybody on everybody else’s table, right? They understand what they’re looking for. If we are stopping, “Hey Jim, there’s that birdie you were looking for, right?” Let’s get that right. And everybody’s cheering for him now as opposed to tapping their toe going, when are we getting on my thing?

You’ve just created a bunch of more community, a different level of community.

I do two major events for these Africa trips. One is a sort of a preview of the event to try and sell the event out. Everybody can come to this open house. It’s not like a timeshare. We’re going to get shuttled off to the side but it’s going to give you all the initial details to make an informed decision on spending a bunch of money. Second one is once everybody’s paid up and ready to go, I do a pre-event and we talk about all the expectations and what we’re going to go through and where we need money and how we’re going to eat. And yeah, you’re going to have to use a Squatty potty in a gas station, and that VIX Vapor will rub you to put it on your upper lip before you go in there, and

(34:05)
Little tricks that we can make sure that we end up making sure everybody’s comfortable with. Yeah, it’s a fabulous way to have everybody connected. And the one thing I tell them in this event before we leave is you and I point to one of them are a hundred percent responsible for that person. Point to someone else, their satisfaction of this trip. I said, we’re there for nine. We we’re on the safari for nine days. It’s such a short amount of time. If you have grievances, if you have any issues going on, please air them. Please come to me. Go to the person who’s potentially unaware of what they’re doing to you. Whatever we’re grown up people, let’s make sure that we are not wasting a single moment of this with grievances.

More great business lessons in there. Expectations, transparency, accountability, community. I mean, this is a set of core values. These are your core values in your business, and you’ve got them defined pretty much through your presentations on these trips. I love it.

(35:06)
Neil, what else do you want to talk about today? What else do you want to talk about? Because the other thing that comes to mind for you is I don’t want to spend a whole bunch of time on overcoming adversity, but you’ve been able to shift your business on a dime quite a number of times, and I am always amazed at how you come up with the ideas to do that, and you’ve pulled through, so I guess congratulations, and maybe we don’t need to talk about it much more than that, but if you have any advice for others who are dealing with some adversity and need to shift and are scared or whatever, what would you say to them? Because really good at it.

Yeah. I don’t think you need to put yourself in a position where you are one-dimensional. What you do that makes your living might get wiped off the map on March 18th, 2020, to a point where you are absolutely, completely done with the business you had created over the previous seven years. Don’t be afraid just to do almost anything to survive that. We’ve seen a guy up north called Pat Kane, a phenomenal photographer from Yellow Knife. He took a picture of his neighbour through the glass and out front of his house, and I said, that’s it. Three days after, we were all locked down on March 20 20th, I think it was a Sunday, I called down to a neighbour. I said, “Are you home? Go out on the porch and let me take a picture of you.” This is when we were all scared of connecting and being more than 40 feet from each other.

(36:40)
We were locked in our homes, and so I took this picture and then set up ticketing and created this, the “porch portraits,” and then I went to 650 people’s homes over the next four months and took pictures of them on their porches, and that survived us. That is something that I photographed five families in the seven years before that, and then I photographed 650 families, and since then, I have photographed 30 families or more. It’s not something I wanted to do, but doing it with grace and joy, again, going back to that sort of adage, when you’re faced with adversity, if you minimally grace optimally with joy handling these things, it can change everything. It’s survived us. I was in the positive news cycle from the first four months of COVID, right? There’s a few things that I’m known for. One is the holiday train, the floating train on the Lethbridge Viaduct.

(37:42)
The Peace Bridge was the thing that I helped change Calgary’s minds about the Peace Bridge when it first came, when first opened Portraits is another one, Northern Lights and a thing called Steve in the sky, in the night sky that I helped identify first, which has given me, if you Google me, those are kind the four things that come up, and it’s another guy in Oregon. His name’s Neil Zeller, spelled the same way, and he’s an insurance salesman. I’ve never met him, never talked to him, but I feel like he’s mad at me because if he Googles himself, he’s got to go probably 40 or 50 pages back before he finds anything on him.

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The other thing I’ve done, Clay, that has changed, especially on the teaching side of things, is I will hire subject matter experts. Toward the end of COVID-19, I hired a train expert — a CP Rail employee who is a locomotive engineer. He’s part of the heritage department that runs the business and holiday train, and I hired him to come out and be an expert to help us find and photograph trains. I went to the Calgary airport and hired an air traffic controller to be a subject matter expert on my tour, and we went all over the airport and took pictures and the next time we do it, we get a tour of the tower now that everything’s opened up again. So that’ll be a lot of fun. I hired Harry Sanders, he’s the Calgary’s historian, Harry, the historian, and we walked down Stephen Avenue and he pointed out all these historical things on Stephen Avenue and in back alleys around there.

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I also hired Chris Fisher. He wrote the cult following book, the “Birds of Alberta ” 20 years ago, and I’ve hired him for many things, bird-related, because people love birding, right? They’re photographers. Once you get better and better at photography, birds become part of the thing you want to chase. So he’s actually co-hosting my Africa trip. He co-hosts my Northern Saskatchewan trip. I’ve learned, so don’t feel like you need to do things and learn things by yourself. You can bring these subject matter experts in and be a part of your team to help support your goals and visions in what you’re doing.

Yeah, don’t go it alone. Great lesson. Great lesson.

So one of the things I want to do more now that I have the van is I can create, and I’ve done it, some very, very cool corporate retreat kind of outings. I can put eight people in the van, and we can have these sort of meaningful outings where I don’t just teach photography. I teach seeing, I teach how to connect with our environments around us, wherever we are, how to hone in that little piece of light as opposed to, and this can stem right from taking pictures on your cell phone to your big camera, whatever you have, but the outings are always meaningful in a way that how we connect in the van and how I’m able to show people how to see things differently and better in smarter, maybe more efficient ways, looking for the anomaly,

Improve the human connection. You’re really good at that. So I can imagine, I can see those being grown really good ideas for corporate teams, frankly.

Yeah, so corporate teams are bringing me in to talk. I can speak on various subjects, from basic camera functions to some of the things we spoke about today, and the grace and joy and that connection, how to see better. Putting yourself in the path of great potential is another one, right? One of my other catchphrases is if you put yourself in the path of great potential, you’ll get lucky almost every time. I’ve got people that say, Neil, you’re lucky. You’re lucky all the time. How can I be lucky all the time, right? Yeah. Maybe I’ve done the work; maybe I’ve done the research. Maybe I’ve put myself in the exact right place for this intersection of this moment to happen, right? We are scouting for snowy owls right now to make sure that when we do this, no tours later in the month and in January, that we know exactly where to go to get lucky,

Right? The separation is in the preparation as one of my business coaches used to say. Well, thank you so much. At a minimum, grace and optimal joy, Neil Zeller, thank you so much for joining us today.