Current Issue

Vision Quest

By Christopher Hann

Ten years ago, as a footloose bachelor of 35, David Simchock clocked out of the corporate world and set out on a journey that would turn his life upside down. With a nest egg of savings, he left his suit-and-tie job as a manager for a large power company in England, where he’d resided for five years, and set out to scratch a long-festering itch to travel. He had no itinerary but had a mission to create a meaningful experience. So off he went, to Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Chile, Thailand, Laos, Nepal. After a year of traveling, he says, “I wanted to keep going.” And go he did — across about 25 countries on five continents over the course of three years. He would learn to speak Spanish in Ecuador. He would journey up the Amazon for eight days aboard a stranger’s aluminum boat. He would serve as a toastmaster at a New Zealand wedding. And he would spend a

month motorcycling from France to Italy, with a detour along the way to attend the San Fermín festival and watch participants run with the bulls in Pamplona. “You can live on $10 a day in some of these countries,” he says. “If you drink beer, it gets a little more expensive.”

When it was over, when at last he returned to his native New Jersey, Simchock would take the lessons he’d learned from three years on the road and parlay them into a successful new career — one he could do in his own back yard.

Simchock, now 45, stands in the finished basement of his studio in Pennington that serves as the headquarters for his photography business, Vagabond Vistas (vagabondvistas.com). The venture is a direct result of his wanderlust. When he started traveling, he carried a Nikon F80 (later upgraded to a Nikon D700 digital SLR) to capture thousands of images: unsmiling elderly men in Peru, laughing children in Vietnam, street scenes in Krakow and Kathmandu. Everywhere he went he would show his work, and the response was always the same: “These are really good. You should do something with this.” Do something with this. He agreed, but do what?

When he returned home in 2002, Simchock figured it out. Never mind that he held an engineering

degree from Rutgers and a master’s in technology management from Stevens Institute of Technology. Never mind that he was a self-taught photographer, with a portfolio that lacked a single professional credit. He was determined to make his living as a travel photographer. In 2003, his first year in business, his photographs were published in The Star-Ledger (a Buddhist temple in Thailand), The Washington Post (a food market on the Mekong River in Vietnam), and The New York Times (Moai statues at Rano Raraku on Easter Island). More recently, as the freelance market dried up in 2009, Simchock turned his business eye to teaching the craft that he’d taught himself.

He describes his foray into travel photography as “a natural marriage of my passions.” Even in grammar school he had an artistic side. “I was always the kid in class who got the most attention for the pictures I was drawing,” he says. When he graduated from Ewing High School in 1982, his parents bought him a 35-millimeter Minolta.

These days Simchock teaches workshops for as many as six clients at a time, from “Introduction to Digital Photography” to “Photographing Children.” He also conducts tours around the streets of New York and Philadelphia or on the leafy riverside trail that runs through Ken Lockwood Gorge in Hunterdon County (one of Simchock’s favorite spots for fly fishing). He approaches the task with workmanlike sobriety. “I’m not there just to show people around,” he says of his tours. “I go for eight hours and teach as much as I can.”

And his clients come back multiple times. Two years ago Toni Lewis of Pennington completed a

course on vacation photography and last fall she took Simchock’s tour of Philadelphia. Although she was trained as a visual artist, Lewis says she had never taken up photography. She took her first lesson with a point-and-shoot digital camera. Today she brings her Nikon D60 wherever she goes. “He really loves what he does,” she says of Simchock. “He’s aware of everyone’s interest. He wants to make sure that you feel as good about photography as you can possibly feel.”

Not surprisingly, Simchock has not stopped moving. These days he’s writing a photography column

for a group of community newspapers in Mercer County. He’s expanded his photography business to include music festivals, last year shooting both the XPoNential Musical Festival in Camden (featuring Sharon Little, John Gorka, and The Peace Creeps) and the All Points West Festival in Jersey City (featuring Jay-Z, Coldplay, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs). He’s even having fun shooting weddings and pets. “But not,” he insists, “posed studio shots of a poodle with a cute little ribbon around

its neck.”

Ten years after setting out on the journey of a lifetime, Simchock is back home in New Jersey, doing what comes naturally. It’s funny how sometimes you find what you’re looking for without even searching.

Current Issue

Vision Quest

Further Reading