The Photographer’s Roundtable: 5 landscape photography pros discuss the state of photography

 

 

We can learn a lot about photography by listening to other photographers and who better to listen to than experienced professional photographers? With their extensive time in the industry, pros have learned what works best, what might not work as well, ways to create a successful business and perhaps most importantly, what drives them as artists. It is one thing to listen to a single photographer give a presentation, but it is another thing entirely to listen to a group of photographers from the same genre of photography have an open conversation with one another. This is exactly what Adorama and moderator Kishore Sawh have done with their new video series, The Photographer's Roundtable.

This first episode focuses on landscape photography and brings together five photographers: Erin Babnik, Pete McBride, Keith Ladzinski, Jacob Riglin and Chris Burkard. Sawh gets the discussion rolling right off the bat by asking the group, who have many years of experience among them, “Is photography today as important as it was 10, 20 years ago?” As Sawh points out, we are inundated by images today and about every two minutes, we as a society collectively produce more images than people did during the entire 20th century. In this kind of landscape, how do we create meaningful and impactful images? How can we produce work which separates itself from the visual noise? Perhaps a large part of finding success is establishing an immediate emotional connection with the viewer. 

 

The featured photographers in the inaugural episode of The Photographer's Roundtable, from left to right: Pete McBride, Erin Babnik, Chris Burkard, Keith Ladzinski and Jacob Riglin

With the advent of competent smartphone cameras and with Instagram showing off more of the world, perhaps some of the mystery and intrigue of landscape photography has worn off. If there is such a thing as a saturation point in landscape photography, it could be the case we have reached it. If so, how do these five professionals keep people engaged and interested while continuing to create impactful and meaningful work? Keith Ladzinski weighed in on the issue, “Photographers especially, if you have an audience [like social media], locations get blown in the sense that you might go to some really cool location, as soon as you geotag it and people respond to that photograph, it’s natural that people want to go there and experience it for themselves and photograph it for themselves…it’s definitely getting harder to make a unique photograph.” To see how the others responded to this difficult question and many more, watch the full video below.

There will be more episodes of The Photographer’s Roundtable to come from Adorama and Kishore Sawh, so stay tuned to Imaging Resource for additional episodes as they come live.

(Via Adorama)