It may feel like yesterday that I first picked up a camera, but I’ve been at this for 13 years now. I have obviously changed a lot, going from a kid to the middle of my thirties. Nature photography has changed a lot, going from an activity practiced by photography nerds to becoming one of the most popular and trending hobbies and careers in the world. The combination of advancing camera tech and social media has morphed nature photography into something that would have been hard to imagine ten years ago. Some changes have been good and some have been bad, in more than one context.
Feb 2020. A thunderstorm sweeping the landscape west of Fish River Canyon.
The good is that more people are interested in nature and experiencing the kind of moments that photographers pursue. This in turn leads to better conservation awareness, more income for parks (public and private) and in most cases it allows us to take better care of our wilderness areas. Conversely, many of the world’s most popular photo spots suffer from over-tourism and places like Norway’s Trolltunga or New Zealand’s Roy’s Peak now have an hours-long photo-queue on most days, where you have to stand in line for a chance to capture the iconic shot without anyone else in it.
One of the greatest pros is that photography teaches people to see and to pay attention to every single detail around them. You appreciate the smallest of changes in nature – e.g. the smells and sounds on windless days or crystal clear days after gale force winds and rain. It opens your eyes to humanity’s effects on our planet – pollution, roads, power lines, litter etc. When you try to capture nature’s beauty, you are forced to notice everything that your brain otherwise tends to ignore for the sake of your mental well-being. I believe that nature photography and the countless people obsessed with it help to create more passionate naturalists who are speaking up for the protection of our remaining wilderness areas.
June 2020. Recent work of an overphotographed SA icon
Another downside is that there are so many incredible photos of places like Jokulsarlon, Torres del Paine and Blyde River Canyon, that people have become numb to the perfect sunrise/sunset image of such places. If a location becomes too popular, then it’s popularity as a photographic subject becomes self-defeating. Again, this has a good flipside – it drives people into more remote and inaccessible corners of earth in search of unique photos and undiscovered or forgotten places and this creates passionate conservationists willing to fight for the protection of the remaining wilderness.
At this point it is probably important to ask what the hell nature photographers are chasing and why a discussion like this is important? If you are reading this, then you are no-doubt very passionate about photos that epitomise the beauty of nature, whether you capture them or just view the work of others. It is an important question with a complicated answer and one that I ask myself on a regular basis.
My passion was initiated by two elements. The first was parents with a love of nature, particularly a family obsessed with indigenous flora. My father made sure that I saw the country and all its most beautiful landscapes in my childhood years. His passion for indigenous flora instilled a great appreciation in me for pristine wilderness by always pointing out alien plants in landscapes where they don’t belong. Certain experiences during these holidays left a profound mark and love of nature on me - seeing the sun set over Namibia’s desert coastline on a perfect winter’s day, experiencing a super-cell thunderstorm in the Drakensberg on a summer night, to name just two examples. The second was countless natural history coffee-table books from my grandmother, filled with what was likely the world’s best landscape photography during the nineties. Although I had no connection with the places shown in these books, I could see that they were of moments similar to the ones that I so fondly remember. When I see such special photos, the combination of emotional triggers and an ever-wandering brain can take me on a euphoric visual journey within my mind – a.k.a “get lost in the photo”. These moments, when the light, clouds and land combine to produce scenes so beautiful that they etch a profound place in viewers’ memories, are what I chase and endeavour to capture. Witnessing such moments unfold over earth’s most beautiful landscapes is, for me, one of the highlights of living.
Why these moments hold such meaning to me is a question ten times more complicated. It is most likely a trigger of childhood nostalgia, a satisfaction of the things I was nurtured to appreciate, possibly an element of my nature and a related evolutionary element of purpose and contentment…one can go one for ages to theorize about this. To complicate it even further, that is just my outlook, related to my nature and nurture. For others it is a completely different story and for many there may be religion involved, which has its own set of explanations. The point is, I know with relative certainty, that the reason I take landscape photos is an attempt to capture these moments onto a 2-dimensional medium, which if done correctly, can stimulate multiple senses and trigger those magical memories with myself and the viewer.
The problem we find ourselves in during 2020, is that the colossal oversupply of such images has done the inevitable – people are bored of them. No matter how perfect, you can only look at so many 10/10 photos of e.g. Deadvlei before you become emotionally blind to it. Nature photography’s overwhelming popularity is slowly choking it to death. Photographers are responding in two ways – the one is to digitally create more magic than nature can offer, which will eventually also choke itself to death as people become fed up with seeing oversaturated images with artificial glow peeking out of arbitrary gaps in the clouds. The second is just elbow grease – despite the popularity of nature photography, there are still so many undocumented places and vantage points on our planet, but every time one is captured, it becomes a little bit more difficult to find a virgin landscape that can still trigger that powerful emotional response.
July 2017. Deadvlei is one of the world’s most photographed landscapes and as a result, viewers have become emotionally blind to photos of it.
Where am I going with this? As I put the finishing touches on my 3rd portfolio website, things have changed drastically compared to when I put the 1st and 2nd up. Like most photographers, I ended up going down the workshop route and also pushing the gear I use, but the benefit of years of hard work is that those elements are now split into their own successful brands. The result is that I can now make my portfolio site 100% about the photos and the creative process, while leaving the workshops and sales nonsense to the other brands. Due to this, the release of new work has slowed down substantially, because I haven’t been capturing new places. In light of the changes that have been happening in nature photography, I have become more and more motivated to travel into the lesser documented corners of Southern Africa. I have a long list of locations that I haven’t been to as well as many that I’ve only visited briefly. We are fortunate to live on one of earth’s least documented continents, so the photographic opportunities are still plentiful.
December 2009. Africa still has so many places that remain virgin to the camera.
As my other businesses slowly become more independent, I hope to start working on that list and again producing images that can trigger viewers’ nostalgia and wonder. I hope to document the travels and creative process via blogs and social media stories, focusing only on photography. If you enjoyed my early blogs on creativity from many years ago, you enjoy reading photographers’ thoughts behind their work or you’re a passionate explorer, then I hope that you will frequent my website for original and insightful content.
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