Daniel Laan · Laanscapes

Every once in a while I tend to lose interest in things I was really passionate about before. While I recently learned that I am far from the only one, it was not long after COVID I saw the signs that this mode of operation didn’t work for me much longer.

I decided I wanted something else from photography. My online teaching became more important than leading others in the field, while simultaneously gotten agitated with social media and ubiquity of smartphones.

As a growing business, not interacting on those platforms anymore meant I had to go about other ways of sharing my work, so I worked on my website more to free myself up to actually take photos again.

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.

I dreamed about making a living by teaching what I’ve learned over the years in this period. A big chunk of that was teaching about landscape photography in the field. I started hosting workshops in 2012. First locally, then abroad. I love the Nordic countries in particular, but specialize in European locations where there’s a nice balance of desolation and having amenities in the area for a broad audience.

But at some point, I grew out of love with photography itself as a result. The reason is that teaching in the field can often be observed as trophy hunting for locations. This period did bring me a few very strong connections in the space of landscape photography with both peers who shared my dream of making this my job, as well as people in places of being able to make things happen for me.

So things really kicked off when I learned the ropes of post-processing my first landscape photos. Tutorial after online workshop followed for years as I wanted to learn everything about landscape photography as fast as possible. All of this knowledge combined was the cocktail needed to visualize what I feel when I’m in a stunning landscape by myself.

Landscape photography came later than Photoshop for me. 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. For a time, I found an audience on DeviantArt. Here my heavily manipulated work was not only appreciated, but it was also commended and awarded. Frequent pictures of the day; nothing too formal, but the recognition was a nice pat on the back.

That’s where my visual style stems from that described my work for over ten years. With a passion for science fiction and Fantasy films and later the art found in collectible card games like Magic the Gathering, I combined my love for the outdoors with the digital darkroom.

Few movies have been as influential for the way I think about the world and our future as the original trilogy of the The Matrix. I’ve studied the film intently since I first saw it on DVD in 1999 with my mom. Its deeper mythology inspired by Jean Baudrillard is what got me hooked and its scary portrayal of a future dominated by AI seemed like science-fiction back then. Nowadays it’s what drives my sociological critique and the this movie together with the open-minded philosophy and spirituality of my uncle is what made me question society more from that point on.

By the time I was twelve, I got hooked on digital drawing. First in Corel Draw, not much later in Photoshop. It must have been Photoshop 5 or 6. I dreamed of being a matte painter for the movies and started to put photos together at the computer that looked like fantasy or sci-fi scenes.

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 for a few years that I brought on holiday. Already I loved photographing the natural world. Even at a young age.

Especially in my early childhood, I was preoccupied mostly with drawing. I remember drawing ghosts, ufos and tornadoes, a few subjects I’m still interested in today in varying degrees.