I’ve been shooting professional travel and landscape photography on and off for two decades now, spanning six continents, thirty countries, three books, and at least four times when I almost died. (The closest was getting trapped on a mountainside at 16,500’ during a volcanic eruption in Mexico. I still have chunks of the magma that rained down around me in my office).
This was long before the Instagram age when digital pixels and smart phones morphed photography into an instant gratification art—both in the capturing of images and sharing them. During all of those years trudging around the world, however, I learned two essential things about photography that have never changed and that every Instagrammer and photographer needs to know today:
1) Where and when you place your tripod or hold your smartphone are the most important elements of great photography (other than light,) and,
2) Location scouting for the best places to shoot in the first place is the most timing consuming part of photography—amateur or professional
Photographer Michael Lax, who shoots campaigns for carmakers like Jeep and Fiat Chrysler and lifestyle brands like Marmot, Shinola, and Bud Light, finally hit maximum frustration with the same challenges back in the 2017 and decided to do something about it.
“The time involved in researching the right locations for my shoots and the best time of year and day to set up there was killing me,” Lax tells me. “It was the biggest pain point to creating the high quality, amazingly-lit images my clients wanted.”
Fast forward a few months and Lax found himself at a wedding with one of his oldest friends Justin Myers, a confessed serial entrepreneur who was working in Vietnam at the time angling into product management, capital raising, and start-up strategy while the launching the country’s first digital bank called Timo.
“We’d love to stake claim that we were the first to conceive of the idea of Explorest,” Lax says. “But the truth is it’s been a desired concept in the travel and photography communities for many years. In fact, we regularly receive feedback from users claiming that they had thought of the idea of Explorest before us, but just never executed on it—and that’s really what it comes down to. Justin and I were able to execute.”
Lax and Myers called their solution “Location Insights” and built the Explorest app around it.
Since the wedding where the idea for the company was hatched, the San Francisco-based start-up has bootstrapped together $1M of pre-seed capital from family and friends to get Explorest off the ground—which has included hiring a core team of programmers, building the app, paying photographers, and launching their first locations. They also just completed a 6-month Growth Program with TheVentureCity, which also invested in the company and will assist them in raising their seed round.
Less than two years later, Explorest has expanded to Shanghai, Hawaii, Washington State, Oregon, Illinois, Michigan, and New York, and currently has over 1000+ locations, 200,000 registered users, and a community of 150+ professional photographers around the world who are constantly populating the app’s existing locations with new Insights and scouting out new ones.
“It was easy to dream up an app of the world’s best places to explore and photograph,” says Lax. “But to actually build it has taken an immense amount of blood, sweat, tears, and sacrifice from everyone on our team—including having my own personal photography career take a backseat in order to see Explorest to fruition.”
Now that they’ve checked the fruition box, scaling is next on Lax and Myers’ roadmap, which requires a concerted effort to build out the app’s subscriber base.
When it comes to photographing the world’s most amazing locations, however, scale and community also have the potential to go hand in hand with crowds, traffic, and human impact, which is why Lax and Myers have made conservation and education an essential part of the Explorest’s mission.
Since the outbreak began last winter, Explorest’s member base has been growing at its fastest clip ever, as easing travel restrictions, but continued fears of air travel, cruise ships, and staying in crowded resorts has forced most travelers in America, Europe, and Asia into their cars this summer for day and weekend trips within driving distance from home.
“In-app, we want to extend the ability to share photography and location-expertise into the hands of our users, not just our professional contributors,” says Lax. “We’ve started this initiative by recently rolling out a new ‘Community Photos’ feature that allows users to upload their own pictures from existing locations in the app—helping to lend new visual perspectives of each location for our community to enjoy. This is just the beginning.”
I’ve always been addicted to people who live their lives to the fullest. Most people’s memories fade over time. Mine become more crystal clear every day because