INTERVIEW
JONATHAN ROGERS
The landscape photographer on starting out in the business and giving up chasing likes on social media
Words by: Lauren Scott
Hey
Jonny. Where are you in the world and what are you currently working on?
I’m currently touring around Scotland with several friends of mine. We’re travelling around in search of beautiful landscapes, which admittedly aren’t hard to find in Scotland. We are also collectively working and collaborating with several different companies, taking product images for them as we go.
Where did you start in photography and what made you start taking it seriously?
My dad served as an early inspiration to give photography a try. Even from when I was six or seven years old, he would take photos on our family holidays and he’d give me a small disposable camera with which to take photos. One in particular I remember was on the sandbanks surrounding Mont Saint-Michel in France. From then on, every family holiday I’d make sure I had a camera; it would usually be my mum’s small Canon digital camera.
For my tenth birthday, my parents gifted me my first camera –a Nikon Coolpix digital camera that I still have to this day. I continued to take photos only on family holidays and a few race meets that my dad and I went to at Goodwood and Silverstone. In 2013, my parents announced we were going to Lapland to see the northern lights, and this is when I really caught the photography bug. I was captivated by the snowy Arctic landscape and the northern lights – if you haven’t seen them, make it a priority. You’ll thank me later. I never got a good picture of them and was somewhat disappointed in myself.
Then at the end of secondary school, I found out I had the opportunity to go to Iceland as part of a geography trip. I loved geography, particularly volcanology, so of course, I knew about Iceland and how much of a stark contrast it was to anywhere I had been previously. I also knew that we would have a great chance of seeing the northern lights again and that I had another chance to get a photo of them.