This week’s episode is a special one. During the latest Out Of Chicago Summer Conference, Ugo was the moderator of a panel discussion about the State of Landscape Photography. The panelists were three very well-known landscape and outdoor photographers: Josh Cripps, Ian Plant, and Bill Fortney.
What ensued was a lively and, at times, humorous discussion about the joys and pains of being a professional landscape photographer, interspersed with reflections about the direction the industry is going: Are we seeing a resurgence of “natural” photography? Is it still possible to make a living doing outdoor photography? and more.
As the panel went on for about 90 minutes, we split the recording in two parts. This is the first part; the second one will be published next week.
Apologies for the audio quality, which is not at the usual level of quality. The microphones in front of the stage picked up a bit of background noise, but we think it’s still intelligible and the contents of the conversation, which are what really matters, are too good not to share.
We would also like to thank Chris Smith and the staff at Out Of Chicago for giving us the opportunity and the means to record this. If you’ve never been to Out Of Chicago, you should definitely attend it and we’ll certainly be there again next year.
Duration 53m 05s.
Music for this episode: “Zanzibar” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Good panel, BUT it is ironic because Ian and Josh both push post processing techniques through their video tutorials. Don’t believe me just check out there web sites. I personally own some of their videos. Don’t get me wrong I am a huge fan of both these guys. Bill Fortney stated something to the effect of shooting straight out of the camera to produce a natural photo without post processing. If you shoot in JPEG aren’t you letting the camera post process the scene based on its image data base? I agree adding a different sky or adding objects is not natural but the majority of the people who support these guys can’t afford to travel the world like they do. Furthermore, if Nikon, Canon, Sony, etc had to depend on the professionals to maintain and fund their companies they would all shut their doors. This is a multi billion dollar industry and it has been created by non-professional photographers, the annual vacationers, who want to capture their vacation to show their friends. Finally, Ian talks about not sharing locations BUT he will build a whole tutorial around that spot and then want to sell it to his followers. Thank GOD Ansel Adams shared his location and his techniques or the photography industry would not have advanced like it has. Now the more people want to go to a location the better the chance of public support to preserve the location for future generations. No two photographers will capture a scene the same way.