What it takes to be a travel and adventure photographer

"I like challenges," explains Canon Ambassador Ulla Lohmann, who has been a travel and adventure photographer and videographer for over 25 years. "For me, change is really good and challenges bring change. If things are too comfortable, they get boring. Any challenge is just an opportunity to work harder for my projects and to feel how much I want the story to be published."

Ulla's home is in Germany, but her work for organisations including National Geographic, GEO magazine and the BBC, has taken her to dozens of countries. Her particular passion is volcanoes and she has sometimes gone to extreme lengths to get the images she wants. One of Ulla's most dangerous shoots involved abseiling 600 metres inside an active volcano on the island of Vanuatu in the South Pacific. The unique and spectacular shots she took, just 50 metres from the lava lake, were the fulfilment of a lifelong dream. "The volcano felt so big and powerful and it made me realise that we humans are so small," she says, "but at the same time it really made me feel alive."

Travelling to exotic locations and shooting for prestigious publications and websites is a dream job for many people. But carving out a travel and adventure photography career isn't easy. To succeed, you need a range of skills and personal qualities including the ability to spot a unique story, excellent organisational skills and an unquenchable thirst for adventure. Here, Ulla discusses the kind of single-minded determination that has enabled her to succeed in this competitive field.

It can be difficult to become established in travel photography, but in Ulla's case her success was a mixture of serendipity, hard work and seizing an opportunity. She won a science competition at the age of 18 and used the prize money to travel the world and start regularly shooting stories for a monthly magazine in her home region.

While on her travels on the Vanuatu islands in the South Pacific, she met a team from National Geographic. After getting to know them, she offered to work as their cook. "Meeting them made me realise there are people who work as journalists who are storytellers with a science background, and this was the moment when I said 'I'm going to do the same thing'."

To get started, Ulla recognised that she needed more scientific knowledge before she could realise her dream. "I started to study natural resource management to understand the connectivity between people and nature," she says. "I also realised I needed to develop storytelling skills, because a lot of people can take great images but it's the story that makes you unique and stand out as a photographer."

Only the best stories are published, so it's important, especially when starting out, to take life's knocks and bounce back from them. Ulla's first story for National Geographic, about a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea that took her three years to find, was initially rejected.

"The picture editor looked at only three of my photos before saying no," she remembers. "I could have been devastated, but I was just intrigued – I said 'OK, how can I do it better?' He explained I needed to shoot it more in low light, to shoot with natural light as well as the light from fire and torches.

"Afterwards, I went back and shot the story again. Then, several years after starting work as an expedition cook, I had my first story published. This advice – to photograph the atmosphere and the feeling of a situation and not the object – is something I've carried with me through my entire career and it has helped me a lot."

Inevitably, travel and adventure photography cameras and lenses are often put through demanding conditions. When Ulla was abseiling inside an active volcano, the rain that fell was turned into damaging acid rain by volcanic gases, However, the highly effective weather-sealing on the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV she was using kept both the acid rain and humidity out.

Ulla has also photographed in a range of other challenging locations. For her ongoing 47 Summits project, she is photographing from the highest points of all 47 European countries, so her kit has to be robust enough to take the knocks it receives on these climbs. "Sometimes, you can only climb these mountains with ropes, so you have to pack really light. Some have permanent glaciers on top, which are very slippery," she says.

At other times, she has worked deep underground, such as in Slovenia's Križna Jama cave. She continues, "It was a big advantage to use the Canon EOS R5 there, because it has great low-light capabilities so you can just use normal torches to light the cave. It's much easier to use than flashlights, and more transportable."

Although travel and adventure photography has its obvious attractions – not least the freedom to experience other countries and cultures and the satisfaction of telling unique and fascinating stories – it also has its challenges.

One is 'office work', the sheer quantity of time it takes to research and plan a story – Ulla sometimes spends 10 years or more preparing for a shoot. The other is the amount of time you spend on the road, and she often spends 11 months of a year away from home.

These are not problems for Ulla, though. "I love researching and organising trips, and I travel with my husband and our three-year-old son, so I can maintain my normal family life," she says. "We're home-schooling our son and with the internet it is very easy to keep in contact with my friends. There are always reasons not to travel, but you can always find solutions – if you don't find a solution, it's because you don't want to do it badly enough."

A quarter of a century on from publishing her first stories, Ulla still gets the same enjoyment and sense of fulfilment from her work as when she started. "Every time I'm onto a good story I get goosebumps on my neck, and when I pull it all together and see the final project it's so rewarding," she says.

"I get as much of a thrill as I had in the very beginning, because I realise how powerful stories are, and how I can really change people's lives. When I do talks, I get a lot of feedback from people saying how I have inspired them to realise their own dreams, how I've changed their lives, and this is very fulfilling. It's what makes me do what I do."