If you look at my job through Facebook or Instagram, it looks like something you’re simply not allowed to complain about. I fly around Europe, photograph dogs, walk around beautiful cities, teach photography, meet people from all over the world, and come home with photos I love. It’s pretty hard to ask for much more than that.
 

And it really is the best job in the world for me, but it’s still a job, and sometimes it’s fucking hard.
 

Maybe the first thing you need to know about my career is that I do all of this from Israel. And yes, Israel is actually pretty close to Europe. I’m saying this because over the years I’ve met enough people who were surprised to discover that we’re not somewhere past Australia, next to Antarctica, or on the moon. A flight from Israel to most of the destinations where I work in Europe is around three and a half to five hours. On paper, that doesn’t sound too bad, but in reality, for an Israeli flying to Europe, a flight is almost always a full day of travelling.
 

Israelis, both in Israel and abroad, are advised to arrive three hours before an international flight because of the security procedures (we also have security questioning before check-in – and yes, I packed my bag myself), and I usually prefer flights that leave at five or six in the morning so I don’t waste an entire day at my destination. Which means that if you meet me in Europe on the day I landed, there’s a pretty good chance I left home at around 1 AM and didn’t sleep at all that night.
 

Since the October 7 attack in 2023, my own daily life inside Israel has actually remained pretty normal most of the time. I wake up in the morning, work, walk the dogs, Yael works, we go to the supermarket, there’s a very normal routine, nothing unusual. But flying from Israel has become something that’s very difficult to build an international career around. Airlines leave, come back, cancel, change schedules, Ben Gurion Airport closes and reopens, and sometimes one security incident is enough to turn a simple direct flight into a particularly creative route through Cyprus, Athens, and even Egypt once (don’t ask difficult questions...) or somewhere else I never planned to visit.
 

A round-trip ticket to Europe for less than $600 already feels like a bargain. Just today, October 1, 2026, I bought a ticket to the Netherlands for November for almost $1,000. The Netherlands. Not New Zealand.
 

In June 2025, I was in Denmark when the conflict between Israel and Iran started. It lasted less than two weeks, but during that time Israeli airspace was closed, tens of thousands of Israelis were stranded abroad, and repatriation flights only started arriving later. I spent four days in Athens until I managed to catch one of the first flights back home.
 

After the ceasefire, there were still a few months of tension, threats and headlines, but slowly everything went back to normal again. And this is something that’s a little difficult to explain to someone who doesn’t live here: at some point, even the most dramatic news becomes background noise. People keep talking about Iran, both sides keep making threats, and meanwhile we wake up in the morning, go to work, go to restaurants and plan the next flight. By the end of 2025 everything already felt completely normal again, and by the beginning of 2026 the talk and threats were just something you heard in the background, not something you actually stopped your life for.
 

By the end of February 2026, we were already completely ignoring the news. To me, it was just headlines trying to get clicks. I flew to the Netherlands, taught a two-day workshop, had another two fun days of shooting, came back to Israel, and everything worked like a Swiss watch. A week later, friends of ours from Austria came to stay with us, we spent a week showing them around Israel, they flew back home, and everything had been perfect with them too.
 

Three days later, four days before I was supposed to fly to another workshop in Germany, Saturday morning, exactly 8 AM, a siren.
 

It was a siren announcing the beginning of a war. For me, it was a siren announcing cancelled flights.
 

The clients had already paid. The classroom was booked. My host was waiting. One of the students was supposed to come all the way from the United States. And you can’t exactly tell everyone, “Okay, we’ll do it next week.”
 

Israeli airspace was immediately closed to civilian flights. At first, of course, nobody knew for how long, but within a few hours it was already clear that this wasn’t going to be an evening, or a day or two, and by that evening we already understood that it would be at least two weeks before the first few flights would start leaving the country. My heart rate went up and I felt like my world was collapsing.
 

My host was amazing. Phone calls, messages, more calls, moving things around, and eventually we managed to move the workshop to October. Actually, just two and a half weeks from now, assuming Trump and the Iranians don’t decide to surprise us again.
 

For my next three workshops in March and April, in Austria, Belgium and Poland, I had already found much more creative ways to get there. I boarded flights where we weren’t even allowed to bring a suitcase, so boarding could be fast and the plane could get into the air quickly before the next alarm. I had to buy everything. Yes, everything that just crossed your mind. Only my photography gear came with me in a carry-on. That was it.
 

Then came weird connections, landing in other countries, trains, routes I never would have considered before. Landing in Prague to get to Vienna? What didn’t I do... The show must go on. Even if back home Yael and the dogs have to go down to the shelter when there’s a siren.
 

Leaving them behind in a situation like that broke my heart and took all the wind out of my sails, and I usually have pretty big sails. I felt completely switched off throughout my time abroad. I made a huge effort not to show it. I didn’t want the attention. That wasn’t why I flew there.
 

And that’s exactly the problem. Most of the time, everything is fine. But once everything has gone wrong, it becomes very difficult to believe that everything is fine even when everything is fine.
 

Besides all of that, there’s another big piece of baggage that always comes with me from Israel, one that doesn’t actually go into the belly of the plane.

When I walk into a classroom in another country and stand in front of people, I always want to get through the sentence “Hi, I’m Meir, I’m from Israel” pretty quickly. Somewhere in my head there’s always the possibility that someone in the room, for whatever reason, didn’t know that detail about me, and isn’t going to like it very much. I’m not there to talk about politics, I’m there to teach dog photography, but I also can’t ignore the fact that I come from a country that people currently have a lot of opinions about, in all kinds of directions. So I always have a few answers prepared in my head for that situation too, just in case I need them.
 

And the work itself? Today, every workshop I teach has a local host. I’ve organized a few workshops in Denmark completely on my own, but I realized I need help from someone local. Someone to help me find a good classroom that doesn’t cost a fortune, find suitable dog models, help with promotion and communicate with the local community. My host finds potential models, I go through them and decide who fits and who doesn’t, and there’ll be another article about that here at some point too.
 

And of course, somewhere inside all that planning, there’s the weather. For workshops, I try to have a Plan B in case of rain, and if necessary, we put on a coat, grab an umbrella and try to make soup out of the water. With private shoots abroad, you can’t just postpone until next week, and that’s one of the reasons I don’t take deposits for those sessions. The price of that is that sometimes people cancel at the last minute and I’m left with an empty slot in another country, without enough time to find someone to replace them. That’s a price I’m willing to pay to work in the way that feels right to me.
 

The hotel part, by the way, I actually love. I really enjoy finding a nice, slightly fancy hotel, or alternatively a good apartment in the city center with a supermarket nearby and a kitchen. And if the supermarket has frozen curly fries like they have in Austria, I’m sorted. These are the things that make me really want to relocate.
 

And after I’ve survived organizing all the flights, hotels, dog models, classroom, promotion and stress, I get to the part where I stand in front of the class and teach. I can be sick, tired, exhausted, after a night without sleep, but the moment I stand in front of people, I sharpen up. I genuinely think this is what I was born to do. There aren’t many things I love more than teaching and standing in front of an audience.
 

I used to be in a death metal band, and I was the guitarist. The audience has changed a little over the years. Fewer black T-shirts, more cameras and lenses, but the feeling is similar. An audience can make me feel twenty years younger within seconds, which is probably a good thing, because my body doesn’t cooperate quite as much as it did when I started a decade ago.
 

Just this week I was talking to a colleague about the fact that for more than ten years I’ve naturally and consistently woken up before 6 AM. Even on days when I have absolutely nothing to do. I simply don’t know how to wake up late. Once I went to sleep at two and woke up at seven, and it felt like most of the day had already passed.
 

When I started photography, I was 30. My body was just something I took for granted. I could lie on the ground, get up, bend down, carry gear and keep going without any particularly unusual consequences.
 

Today I’m 40. I make sure I walk, I work out, I take better care of myself, and over time I’ve learned the hard way that your body and your time aren’t infinite resources. Getting up too quickly isn’t great for your blood pressure, not drinking enough isn’t great for your kidneys, and worrying that a thousand-dollar flight will be cancelled four days before a workshop probably isn’t doing amazing things for your heart.
 

Sitting in an office and answering clients on the phone would probably help me grow old much more gracefully, but I’d die of boredom long before that.
 

And in the end, after the wars, the sore muscles, the lack of sleep, the stress, missing Yael and the dogs back home, the cancellations, the rain, the hotels, the trains and the endless hours in front of the computer, just to get to a city abroad, photograph there for two hours, and come home with one photo that makes me think, “Fuck! I created this!” – it’s worth everything.
 

I do all of it because I know that one day, before I die, my life will flash before my eyes like a movie, or so they say, and it’ll be the best movie I’ve ever seen.

And now that you know what sometimes happens behind the photos… was there anything here that surprised you? Tell me in the comments.