Updates on travels, adventures and news from Jess McGlothlin Media.
Happy to see this image, shot on assignment for onX Hunt a few winters ago in Pennsylvania, show up on the company’s home page this week. We spent several cold mornings out in goose blinds tucked into farmer’s fields in rural Pennsylvania and New Jersey for this shoot, and it was a productive few days!
It’s always a massive pleasure to work with Australia’s FlyLife Magazine. It’s a bit ironic to be an American writing about Tasmanian fly fishing for an Australia / New Zealand audience, but the fantastic editorial team let me have some fun with this piece, written after an October 2019 visit to Tasmania to explore and document fly-fishing on the Australian island.
I fell hard in love with Tasmania—its people, scenery, food, and—of course—its fishing. Thanks to everyone who made this visit a productive (and fun!) working trip. I can’t wait to get back some day.
Subscribe to FlyLife to read all about it.
“Life’s about the adventure, and while I’d wholeheartedly encourage you to focus on the moment and not worry about capturing images for “the ‘Gram” and other social media time-sucks, documenting a moment can be a way to save it for yourself. As a working photographer who spends a lot of my time in admittedly distracting, incredible locations, I’m always caught between staying in the moment and doing what I’m supposed to be doing—capturing images for my clients. It’s a balance.”
I had a lot of fun penning this article for NRS talking about my top ten photography tips for people on the water. Let’s face it, water of any sort (especially saltwater!) is not necessarily camera equipment’s best friend, but with a little planning ahead and awareness you can still keep the camera at your side in challenging environments.
Give it a read, and then let me know what else you wish I’d talked about in the article.
Had a lot of fun delving through the image archives and old notebooks to write this short piece for Outside Bozeman‘s summer issue. Fly fishing the backcountry of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness a few summers ago, chasing Yellowstone cutthroat trout with Absaroka-Beartooth Outfitters, has been one of my favorite stateside fishing experiences. Combine days on horseback, a comfy backcountry camp in the perfect location, most excellent people, and stellar fishing for ambitious Yellowstone cutthroat trout, and you’ve got the recipe for something amazing.
I’ve always had a love / hate relationship with making images in the dark. Nighttime shooting requires full concentration and not a little bit of creativity, usually while navigating some random outdoor setting. In this case, shooting winter waterfowl hunting in Pennsylvania, it involved hiking through marshy swamps in the cold pre-dawn hours to set out decoys and wait for the dawn to break and—hopefully—bring in the ducks.
This image was shot as b-roll during an assignment for onX Hunt photographing / writing about goose hunting in the Northeast, and I’m really pleased to see it make the cover of an Orvis catalog. Just goes to show that frozen fingers are usually worth the trouble!
Slowly, slowly… it’s beginning to feel like spring in the West. Eventually we’ll hit the hot, glorious days of summer (I’m so ready). In anticipation of the eventual arrival of summer, I gathered together a few of my favorite sun protection pieces for Men’s Journal. Give it a read, then let me know what your go-to piece of summer clothing is.
Had no idea this Chile shoot in February with Zach Lazzari and Skylar Lamont would be the last travel for a while. Most of these assets are on hold for another client, but really excited to see this “Van Tours” feature run on Men’s Journal, talking about Zach and Shale’s epic adventure through the Americas, fishing along the way.
Zach and Shale are two of the coolest travelers I’ve had the pleasure to meet, and it was such a pleasure to be able to head down to Chile and join them for one of the final weeks of their epic trip. This pair accomplished a hell of a trip over the past couple years… give the article a read for the full story.
Here’s a quick excerpt:
With each road bump, dust puffs up to coat the van’s driver, Zach Lazzari, and his co-pilot, Shale. The 11-year-old dog serves as traveling companion, nighttime guard, curious conversationalist, and convenient icebreaker: She’s an impossibly fluffy red mutt whom Lazzari found a decade ago in a Montana animal shelter. There, in a building full of dogs needing homes, Shale was the only one who ignored Lazzari. He knew it was meant to be.
The pair have been living in Lazzari’s tattered GMC Safari van since September 2018, when his marketing automation job at a Missoula, Mont., tech company began to feel more soul-sucking, and less like a job he could tolerate. He decided it was time to revisit an old dream: take the long drive down to visit the rivers he’d grown to love since his last season working as a fly-fishing guide in Chilean Patagonia in 2016, with Shale as his traveling companion. Along the way, he’d explore new water and fish corners of the world far, far removed from most fly anglers’ purview.
Lazzari quit his job and bought the 1994 Safari, abandoned in a Missoula alley, for a grand total of $900. It took merely a month for a quick build-out of basic living quarters…
I very remember coming back to Santiago after a week pretty well removed from the world and standing, filthy and in need of a shower, in the airport and watching the news. It was the first week of March, and in the space of a few weeks the world had started a dramatic change. Now it’s the first week of April and this trip feels like a lifetime ago. I still have faith that sometime this year we’ll be traveling again, and I’m already looking forward to the next adventure with Zach, Shale, and Skylar.
Thanks for reading, folks.
Quick little post here. Like most of us, like has been fairly turned upside-down these past few weeks. As we all adjust to the new normal of COVID-19, I’ll still be posting a bit here, and certainly on my Instagram. This will pass, like most things do, and some day we’ll be traveling again. Until then, I’ll do my best to provide a little armchair travel on that Instagram feed.
In the meantime, here’s a quick look at a recently-published ad for onX Hunt, using an upland hunting image that was shot on assignment with onX autumn before last right here in Montana.
Stay safe and healthy out there! Here’s to enjoying travel and fishing through an entirely new lens once this passes.
