Click here for his introduction.
Note – I asked Eric to be informal in this interview and transcribed what he and I said, word for word. Eric Cheng is a professional photography who specializes in underwater photography.
Haegwan Kim (HK) Why did you decide to be a photographer?
Eric Cheng (EC); That’s actually a really good question because I don’t feel like I ever decided to become a photographer. So, I was trained as a computer science guy, with music as my main passion, and I ended up working in the software industry in a start-up and then one day I looked around and I realised that a lot of the other people around me were actually enjoying what they were doing. I enjoyed certain aspects of technology and the challenges of building software, but I didn’t fundamentally care what the company did. I just didn’t care and I felt like, maybe, in five years or in ten years I might be in the exact same situation that I was in that day, and so I left my job. I was not really a photographer — I was a hobbyist photographer. I had a camera, I knew how it worked, I took pictures of my friends… and I took some time off and I did a little bit of travelling.
At the same time I was doing contract work on the side, just to make money, and just randomly, I decided to go on a scuba diving trip. I was also a scuba driver, but I only had 20 dives, so I was an amateur diver, and on that trip I decided, well, maybe it might be fun to take a camera underwater. So, I took a camera underwater. I took a bunch of pictures, and I put them on my website – which is what I do for everything – and one of those pictures was chosen to be published. They’re not very good pictures — they’re actually terrible — but it was at a time when people were experimenting with digital photography and so one of my photos was an example of digital photography underwater, which was very rare at the time. And so, it was published and then I ended up being hired by someone to do satellite web coverage on a photography expedition.
On that trip, I met a working professional underwater photographer and became friends with him . Anyway, I started making friends with people in the community. And I love the underwater world, and taking a camera underwater was something that really made me love to dive, but it also made me love photography at the same time. So, it was really wildlife and learning about marine life and all the strange things underwater that inspired me to take pictures more, and over the course of a few years, I really transitioned from being a serious hobbyist to someone who is considered to be a professional, and since then, that’s what I’ve been doing.
HK; When your work shifted from amateur to professional; did you think that was a risky choice? Because working in the field of art is quite difficult for many people, in terms of earning money.
EC; I guess I have a couple of answers to that, and the first would be that I had saved up enough money — in the short term — to be able to buy my equipment and to travel, and so I wasn’t under financial pressure in the beginning. That allowed me to do photography on my own terms and at the same time I, of course, created a website for it, which became a popular community website for underwater photographers, and so I’m half a publisher and half a photographer. So, the publishing aspect, you know, we had advertising income and because of my position at the website everybody would always solicit me into travel. They would want me to come see their boat, which means I get to travel a lot for free. I also won a bunch of amateur photo contests, which had trips as prizes, and so in the beginning it was really something I was doing on the side and I was just trying not to spend money.
As long as I didn’t spend money I could do a little bit of contract work on the side in software and be okay, but in terms of surviving financially – I saw too many people in the industry I was in make a lot of money and not get happier. They were not happier. And all of us who were working in that industry were relatively successful financially in that it was pretty easy to make money, and no one was starving. No one was struggling to meet their basic needs. So, everything above that was just complication in their lives. They were getting upset about why a particular accountant wouldn’t accept them as a client. I just don’t really care about those things. Of course, I think about it being much harder to make money in this industry than it is in my old industry, but I’ve gotten to see so many things that most of my peers in that industry — my old industry — will never see. But I don’t think it matters because they, actually, either don’t have the curiosity or the drive to go see those things anyway, so they’re just as happy here as I am out there.
HK; How did your degree of computer science at Stanford help or affect on your career as a photographer?
EC; Well, underwater photography is highly technical. That doesn’t mean that you have to be trained as an engineer to do it, but I found that, actually, most of the people that I take on trips, or most of my customers in the industry, are technical in nature. So, they’re photographers or doctors and they have some kind of trade that requires some amount of understanding of equipment and technique. And so I think it helped – that logical thinking and multitasking and those sorts of things helped, at least, to understand the fundamentals of photography. But past that point it’s not about technique or those fundamentals. I think those are the prerequisites to allowing you to express yourself creatively. And I feel like a lot of people that are in training for underwater photography are actually still struggling with the basics. They either are not strong divers, they don’t have buoyancy control, they’re struggling with the environment or they’re struggling with the gear, which is a huge part of [underwater] photography.
HK; This is sheerly my curiosity, but what was the best picture so far?
EC; I guess that depends on how you define best, but the ones that have been the most recognized… it’s a picture of a juvenile turtle with its flippers over its head and its mouth open and it looks like a cartoon, and that was forwarded around the internet. In fact, I get it forwarded to me all the time. My mother forwards it to me… but a lot of people have seen it. It’s been on magazine covers, it was in the Smithsonian. It was clearly recognized from the first time I showed it. The first time, one of the editors for Dive Magazine saw it. He grabbed it for the cover immediately and it’s been on lots of magazine covers since and it’s been all over the place. But, what’s funny is, I took that picture on accident. So, we were releasing these turtles that never made it out of their nests, so they were raised in a research lab… oh, that sounds terrible, but they were raised, studied a little bit and then released when they became a certain size. And they were small and fast, almost impossible to shoot when you’re at the surface and you’re being thrown around by the surface of the water.
So, I was literally holding my camera underneath this turtle and just swimming with it, taking pictures and one of these pictures came out, and as soon as I saw it on the screen I was just hoping that it was in focus.
HK; Is that your favourite picture?
EC; It’s actually not my favourite picture. I really like it and I’m glad that I at least like a photo that has been successful, because that’s often not the case. Some of the photos that I like more are pictures that potentially represented some kind of development in my own photography and in the way that I look at things, or some realisation I had underwater that resulted in something that I had never done before. And then certain photos are linked to feelings I had when I took them, especially photos that were taken in close proximity to large marine mammals like whales and things like that. You can’t capture that kind of feeling in a photo or video. You just cannot capture it. So, those photos, for me, are just reminders of how I felt at the time.
HK; Cool, I want to talk a little bit about your life with music. I cannot see clear relation between music and picture – listening and seeing. Could you just tell me about your sense on that relation between music and pictures?
EC; Sure, it’s funny that most people don’t feel like they’re related because, mathematically, they are absolutely, 100% percent correlated. Everything in the audio world can be related to the visual world through an equation and, of course, I don’t think that way, but people who study computer graphics find a lot of similarities between that and acoustics for sound engineering. But for me, they’re totally separate. I don’t really feel like I can link them at all because they’re also very different worlds. Because I still have a lot of friends in the music community, and when I’m spending time with them everything is focussed on the music and the photography is just something that I do that’s a bonus. I can take pictures of what they’re doing and share it with people, so that could be interesting. But for me they’re very different, and also they’re different because the music, for me, is tied to a particular instrument, which I can’t travel with.
So, it’s been a real struggle for me, a challenge, because when I’m traveling I’m totally cut off from music and it’s not something that I’m able to continue very easily because of my schedule. So, these days I really treasure the moments or the time that I can just spend playing music, and just recently – a couple of weeks ago – I did an intensive chamber music workshop for ten days and that was really special and you get to play for hours every day. And actually, on Saturday, we’re playing a concert, just two groups that were chamber musicians at the workshop. We’ll play a concert together, and that may be the end of music for me for the whole year.
IV Hahaha, that’s a heavy moment. As my research is on the law of success I was just wondering your definition of success?
EC That’s a good question. I guess my definition of success would be if you ended up in a situation where you could do something that was rewarding in some way for you. I guess that’s where I would cut it off because for me it means something different because I feel like I also want to make a difference, somehow, and I’m not exactly sure what that means. I struggle with that as well, because I’m taking all these pictures of interesting subjects in isolated places where nature is still thriving and most of my friends think I’m on vacation all the time. From the outside it looks like I’m at fancy resorts and hanging out in the sun on the beach or something, but that’s really not what it’s like when you’re out there and it’s not what I’m focussed on, either. I hate being in the sun. I have to be in the sun all the time, so I don’t go out and sit in the pool with a drink.
It’s just not like that… and what I’m looking for is a way to tie my photography to either scientific progress or artistic expression or conservation. If an image I take can change someone’s mind about using resources from the ocean, then I consider that to be success for me… and so, those are the three things that I’m always thinking about when I’m shooting. I don’t think I would ever be satisfied if I just took pictures and got paid for them and even more so if I targeted my photography towards photos that were commercially successful — that would be commercially successful. I would think that would, for me… would not be success. It would just be a living.
HK; Can you tell me your advice to be successful in general sense?
EC; I guess I have to think about this carefully.
HK; Haha, sure take your time.
EC; I’ll tell a quick story — or an anecdote — first. A lot of acquaintances will express envy to me… or jealousy. It’s not really jealousy but they say, you’re so lucky — you can do all these things and you can go out and travel and see all these… you can go to the Bahamas or you can go to Indonesia … and the South Pacific… and you spend time there, but a lot of these people who are saying this to me are in the exact same position I was in before I started doing it, in that they have some amount of a safety net in finances. They could very easily take some time and go pursue something, even if they don’t know what it is. They can go travel somewhere and do whatever it is that they’re interested in… but they don’t. And I think that’s really the only difference between what I did and what they’re saying I do, if that makes sense.
HK; What pushed your back when you were at the position? Is that risk-taking stuff?
EC; Yes, absolutely – I think it’s taking risks but it’s taking risks within the boundaries of your situation, whatever that is. Because, of course, there has to be some amount of… you have to be able to account for your needs, and that would be some amount of comfort. Whatever your comfort level requirements are, you have to be able to account for. If you can’t, then I think it could be really painful to take these risks and I’m not sure that I would have done it in that case. I’m serious — a lot of people ask… young people, or high school students… they ask, how can I become a wildlife photographer, and I always say, do something else. Go make sure you have a skill that can keep you afloat in life, because photography can happen in your spare time as well.
You can – so, this is what I actually tell people to do – I say, go take a picture every day or always have your camera with you but, more importantly, share your work. So, start a website and post a picture and a paragraph of text every day, or every three days, whatever you have time for, and if, in a year, you haven’t been noticed, then you’ll be really glad that you did something else. And if you have, then you’ll know that you should continue pursuing it. So I think it’s really foolish to take unnecessary risks. It’s foolish to just leap because you love something so much that you think you can do it, but if you actually can’t do it… maybe you actually have the talent for it and you’re not recognized — that’s a different issue and that’s a possibility… but it’s also realistic. Art is not a meritocracy – good art goes unrecognised, often, until people die… and then it gets discovered, so there’s no guarantee that you’re going to be successful financially, in your field, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t been successful artistically or creatively. So, I think there’s a compromise there. It just has to do with being pragmatic.
Haegwan Kim is a writer who was born in Osaka, Japan in 1989 and grew up near Tokyo where went to a Korean school for 12 years.
