What Inspires Me
It’s fun sharing stories about what inspires you to do anything, really. When I’m on a workshop and having the best conversations that surround landscape photography, we eventually land on the subject of inspiration. In this article, I want to take you through my gallery of inspiration. Please be aware that most images and videos in this blog post are copyrighted by someone else. That’s why I’m not hosting any of that content here. Fair warning, this gets geeky!
Anything other than photography
The title of this article is deliberate. “Who” inspires me is basically a moot point. I’m not really inspired by people as individuals, heck, I’m not even inspired by other people’s images anymore. I actively block out images from others in the hope that I’m not influenced by other photographers when I’m composing my shots. That must sound borderline insane. How can anybody being active in any field not feel inspired by their peers?
There are “too” many good photographers. A subset of those people are excellent at their craft, but due to the market being saturated and platforms where photography resides are abundant, we see a lot of photographs, even by just going online to our favorite websites. I struggle with both fear of missing out and consuming too much media as it stands. Social media has absolutely destroyed my productivity, and I’m slowly climbing back from that. So let’s talk about that media.
Magic: The Gathering
This collectible card game has been around forever. 30 years ago it was played at high school. Now I own a cupboard of carton. It’s the art and the ideas that the titles of those cards evoke that do it for me. I’m actually guilty of outright copying the names of those cards to give my pictures a title. I don’t really care about playing the game. Because when I do, I just stare at the art and forget it’s my turn. Yeah, I’m that dreamy. It’s mostly the art of the basic land cards that inspire me. The forests, swamps and mountains in particular. Especially of the darker Innistrad sets, where the lore takes the player to a land haunted by Lovecraftian creatures, angels, demons, ghosts and worried villagers taking to the streets with farming equipment.
“He Who Shelters All” - Named after an MTG card, inspired by the art of another.
Films & TV Shows
The stuff I grew up with inspired my particular visual aesthetic early on. It’s no surprise that Peter Jackson’s The Lord of The Rings had a big influence on me even picking up a digital camera. Andrew Lesnie’s cinematography was key in finding my voice in post-processing, but also in connecting my travels with bringing a camera with me.
“Dol Guldur” - If you look at the Return of the King closely, this particular green tint can be seen from the place where the Witch King resides. The scene where he mounts his fell beast and takes to the sky is what inspired this image of Speulderbos.
Some see Game of Thrones as a rip-off of Tolkien. Both in story as A Song of Ice and Fire and in execution as a TV show. But it’s the TV show that inspired me. Anything north of the wall is when I’m longing to travel to Scandinavia and Iceland again. In fact, a lot of scenes from GoT have been shot in Iceland. Its blood magic, travels along the King’s Road and the Iron Islands awaken a spark of creativity in me. The blue and tan of the Eyrie is how I decorate my house.
I heared the GoT themesong in my mind when I composed this shot in Scotland.
Stranger Things has these scenes where the glow of things from the Upside Down look completely alien. And I’ve been told by Albert Dros that my mushroom images seem to fit that cinematography. But I didn’t get the idea from that show that came much later.
“That creepy red light… it’s like it’s straight from Stranger Things”. Never heard about that show when Albert made that comment. But it’s weird and wonderful. Right up my alley.
Sci-Fi
Another big source of inspiration for me is hard science fiction. But you won’t see me photographing models of spaceships or doing astrophotography that much. What you need to know is that inspiration means something different to me than to others. Inspiration to me is anything that turns my creativity on; the intrinsic drive to create art myself. Science fiction like Star Trek, The Expanse and For All Mankind makes me yearn for a future in which most of our world’s problems belong to the past. I’m not saying the solar system in The Expanse is all peachy, but it does make me hopeful. And Trek creator Gene Roddenberry has always made Star Trek about people. Most episodes feature the crew coming into contact with an alien species that have absolutely bewildering customs and traditions that make you think about our own.
I often think about travelling to the stars. Most of my time spent on YouTube is about that. I thank Star Trek for that.
Dystopian sci-fi is also one of my favorite pastimes. Yeah, I’m referring to Blade Runner, The Matrix and the Alien franchise (not the bad Alien vs. Predator baloney). Some part of me wants to photograph cityscapes and its people. But I’m both afraid my gear gets stolen and that I might get shot or beaten up by some junks because I was in the wrong neighborhood. The fact is, I don’t like cities and don’t understand the need to all be cooped up in sky scrapers. And for an unknown reason, it’s that angst that I’d like to show you. Today, it’s the rise of robots and AI that will make the reality of these movies more probable by the day. Most Black Mirror episodes don’t even look that science fiction anymore.
This wall of ice inside an Icelandic ice cave looked like a xenomorph hive to me. So I processed with exactly that in mind.
Paintings
I was in the Dolomites with my friend Martin, I believe it was 2017 or so. We were traveling there by car, driving up from Venice Marco Polo airport. But we were delayed and too late to make the last cable car that would have taken us up to our hotel in the mountains. We called the front desk of our predicament and it was no problem for the hotel owner to drive down and pick us up in his truck. During the drive he invited us to see his private collection of paintings and artifacts from the heyday of mountaineering in the Alps and Dolomites. And a few of those paintings were absolutely striking. Of course you’re going to ask me which painters inspire me. I’m bad with names, so I don’t really remember whose work I was looking at. But I vividly remember this one painting of Seceda at twilight. And I wanted to do that with photography this trip.
“Amon Sûl” - inspired by that painting that night.
Painters I do like are Jan Jacob Cremer, Rembrandt and of course Albert Bierstadt. But I like Bierstadt for his controversy. Most of his landscape paintings are not painted from what he saw in front of him, but he combined elements of several places around the world to create fantastical composites. This is exactly what I do with most of my nightscapes. I hate doing those in one shot, because the quality I have in mind of foreground and deepsky or otherwise faint objects in the night sky cannot be achieved with today’s technology. I think Bierstadt was among the first widely recognized landscape composite artists.
“The Find of LV-426” - These cracks in the ice remind me of those eggs from Alien that you shouldn’t peek into. It’s another nightscape composite.
Music
The chance that you like the same stuff I do is slim. So far we’ve covered a collectible card game, a few nerdy tv-shows and a controversial painter. But when I tell you that I like atmospheric black metal (ABM), blackgaze, progressive death metal, instrumental post-metal, EBM, and darksynth. These genres have in common that loud passages often make way for long acoustic or instrumental interludes that take you to another place. Music like this has inspires me to shoot these moody landscapes. Most people love to hop on the boat of talking about inspiration, but when some guy or girl in black and corpse paint steps up to the microphone, all but some seek dry land. In the off-chance that you know, let alone like, any of these bands (that are often one-man-projects):
“Enveloped by Insanity” - Even my photos look like black metal album covers. I often hear music playing in my mind as I’m out alone, taking pictures of misty mountains and sprawling forests.