Frans Lanting

Frans Lanting:
He photographs birds, places, mammals, people, the environment, fish, frogs, and nature. I like his use of repetition, pattern, color, light and shadow to compose images. I looked at his images of birds and tried to do similar techniques with my seagull shots. He likes to capture their eyes to draw you into the photograph. I also looked at the environmental pictures to get new ideas for my documentary project. His portfolio "larger than life" is very interesting to me. He has elephants, antelope, penguins, polar bears, rivers, lions, impalas, cougars, dolphins and birds. He usually has a repeated form with no real focal point, or he has 1 strong focal point with a very pretty background.
He was born in Rotterdam, Holland. His photographs are regularly published in National Geographic, for which he is a photographer-in-residence. He is also featured in Outdoor-photographer, Audubon, and Life.

"I don’t like to talk about that too much," he said, looking out of the window over the dunes into the fog bank that moves from the Pacific onto the California coast almost every afternoon, where it stays until the next morning, a mellow mediator between sky and ocean, and ocean and land. The question which Frans Lanting avoids is supposed to lead to the topic of his work as a wildlife photographer.

His success came fast. He arrived at the peak of his profession in only ten years and has been able to add a new dimension to it. His stories, which normally take shape during long months on vacation, bring life to remote geographic names like South Georgia, Madagascar, Botswana, and often create the public image of these landscapes and animals for a worldwide audience.