Daniel Laan

I'm a landscape photographer and composite artist from the Netherlands with a moody visual style. My goal is to teach you what I know.

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

But 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.

That’s also where my visual style comes from today. With a passion for Science Fiction and Fantasy films and the art found in collectible card games like Magic the Gathering, I combined my love for the outdoors with the digital darkroom. 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.

So things really kicked off when I learned the ropes of post-processing my first landscapes. All of these combined were the cocktail needed to visualize what I feel when I’m in a stunning landscape by myself.

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.

A big part of landscape photography was teaching about it in the field. I started doing 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 are for a broad audience.

But not long after COVID I decided I wanted something else from photography. My online teaching became even more important and I got really fed-up with social media and the use of smartphones in a broader sense. As a growing business, not interacting on those platforms any more meant I had to go about other ways of sharing my work.

More on me below.

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.

How personality is shaping your art

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 and combine.

There is an odd collection of interests that shapes my mind. And I’m a firm believer that what you put in you noggin, contributes to what comes out of it. I love making music, but consume very little music. It’s the same with photography. Looking at other people’s work is inspirational to the point of me wanting to do that. Which is why I don’t look at other photography too often. I think cross-pollination across different creative pursuits is the most powerful driver of originality, even though that sounds incredibly pretentious. Thinking that my art is like that of who has gone before me is off-putting and a major reason for wanting to give up on all creativity. That’s why AI-generated art was so tempting to me. It’s almost like: a thousand people have photographed this rock, millions have seen it. Why do I have to photograph this and pretend it’s my idea? At least large language models are upfront about it. You know, we are also trained on large amounts of data. But our power lies in the ability to listen to music and see a painting pop up in our minds. Or look at a landscape in front of us and hear some distant echoes of a symphony composed just for this moment by a composer no-one has ever heard about before. At least that’s how my mind works.

Other eclectic interests and hobbies include star gazing and astronomy, space travel, the energy transition, plant-based living, metal music, synthwave, altered states of consciousness, increasing lifespan, trailrunning, mountain biking, immersive gaming, playing drums, guitar, bass and synths, the UAP-phenomenon, cinematography, front-end development, storm chasing, cats and their behavior, psychology… I think that’s most of it.

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