Daniel Laan

I'm a landscape & mushroom photographer, digital/composite artist & prompt composer from the Netherlands with a moody visual style. Using whatever means I feel like to create images that I love looking at myself and hopefully entice you to think outside of the box, while teaching you how I think and what I do.

Bio

For me, photography started when I was about nine years old and held my dad's Pentax for the first time. Then I moved on to disposable Kodak cameras that I brought on holiday for a few years as a kid. I loved photographing the natural world already at that age.

But by the time I was twelve, I got hooked on digital drawing. First in Corel Draw, not much later in Photoshop. I dreamed of being a matte painter for the movies. That’s also where my visual style comes from today. With a passion for for Science Fiction and Fantasy films and the art found in collectible card games like Magic the Gathering, I combined hiking and landscape photography to enjoy the outdoors even more than I already did. Things then really kicked off when I learned the ropes of post-processing. All of these combined were the cocktail needed to visualize what I feel when I’m working the landscape. Suddenly, I knew kung fu and Laanscapes was born.

As soon as I followed my heart, my photos, articles, tutorials and reviews were published in many magazines around the world and on even more websites. Fstoppers, PetaPixel and Landscape Photography Magazine to name a few. My co-authored book “Woodscapes” got published in Dutch and German in 2020. My full-length e-books “Woodland” and “Call of the Mountains” and my most recent publication “Musings of a Landscape Photographer” are aimed at an international audience.

Later was teaching the transformative qualities of photography through international landscape photography tours, where the focus lies on getting the most out of you instead of the landscape. My main body of work are the mystical, moody scenes I find not in nature, but in the depths of my own mind. Nature serves as a host and a source of inspiration to materialize this painterly approach to fine-art photography. Outdoor photography served a cathartic purpose that kept my life in balance.

Nowadays, my focus has changed. Most needed COVID to start working from home. I started doing that after the world became even crazier. With renewed interest in teaching through my post-processing videos, I have so many new projects on the horizon. And now that AI image generation is actually creepy good, I dabble in that as well.

Most of my life, I felt I am different. I care not for politics or fast cars or having the latest gadgets. I care (worry) about the environment, look forward to human settlement on Mars and hope that artificial intelligence cares enough about its creator. The opinions of peers (I’m not sure I have any) do not interest me. As such, I am completely free to photograph, draw, create, composite, and prompt.

Small things matter to me as well. As I'm writing this, there's a happy cat purring on my lap and I smile looking at the trees outside that survived another grueling, 9-month autumn.

Work & The Environment

Because of my emotional attachment to our planet, every 10% I earn through photography is going directly into various sustainable projects. While I have considered joining organizations as Greenpeace, 1% for the Planet and so on, I think that our contributions make much more of an impact if we know exactly where our money is going.

So with every workshop you book with Laanscapes and every video you purchase, 10% of that fee is reserved for rebuilding the forest, protecting wildlife, funding light pollution awareness programs and efforts to get rid of plastic. The goal is to find and support environmental projects that strive to transparently restore the balance on Earth.

A Word on 'Reality' and Photography

Looking through the viewfinder for more than a decade makes you think about the world in more than one way. My attitude towards photography and art have changed significantly over the years. Here's what I have learned thus far.

Different lenses record the landscape in a different way. A fish-eye gives us a very different perspective than a 300mm telephoto lens. So do tilt-shift lenses. These can truthfully represent mountains as they appeared to you at the moment of capture, but can also wildly distort reality.

We also perceive reality in different ways. Your perception of red for instance, may very well look different to my red. This brings me to how photography acts as extension of my vision of the world.

My work often looks very different from what you might see when you visit the same location. I believe this makes my landscapes unique and evocative, since they not only capture the light and the land, but do a pretty good job displaying my emotion at the very moment I pressed the shutter. As such, I think that anything goes as long as I am feeling happy with it myself.

My art is never about recording the landscape. Crossing lines is my bread and butter. Laanscapes is an artful expression of my love (and sadness) for the natural world, not a statement against it. I regard post-processing to be an integral part of the art of landscape photography and an extension of self-expression. To be good at using software like Photoshop requires skill and dedication, just as much as knowing your way in the darkroom.

Interviews

• English: “Interview with Daniel Laan About his Photographic Adventures” // Aug 2020

• English: "Interview with Daniel Laan" Iceland Photo Tours // Nov 2019

• English: "An Interview with Daniel Laan" Terra Quantum Territories // Nov 2018

• English: "A Look into a Fantasy World" Photolemur.com // Feb 2018

• Dutch: "Daniel Laan in Beeld" Natuurfotografie.nl // Dec 2016

• English: "Daniel Laan" Shotkit.com // Oct 2016

• English: "Stellar Interviews" // Mar 2014