Outdoor photographer and author of Dusk to Dawn www.glennrandall.com
A photographer, educator and writer based in Colorado in the USA, Glenn Randall has had his work published in Outdoor Photographer, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, the New York Times Magazine and many more. Ahead of a serialisation of content from the second edition of his book Dusk To Dawn: A Guide to Landscape Photography at Night, we talk to him about after-dark photography and what first attracted him to the medium.
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What was your route into photography and can you tell us about your journey so far?
As a teenager, I was inspired by the example of Galen Rowell, who managed to combine mountaineering and photography in a highly successful career. I graduated with a degree in journalism in December 1978 and made the naïve decision to begin freelancing immediately as a writer and photographer, specialising in the outdoors. In truth, I was primarily a writer, but I thought of myself as a photographer as well. Then in 1985, I lost an assignment from Magazine. The editor told me, and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘The writing is fine but the photography stinks’. I decided it was time to either sell the camera gear or learn to use it a whole lot better.
That’s when I really began to study the art and craft of photography. For several years, I shot outdoor adventure sports, such as rock climbing, ice climbing and mountaineering. Then, in 1993, with my interest in outdoor sports waning and my interest in landscape photography blossoming, I bought my first 4x5 field camera. I shot large-format landscape photographs for the next 15 years, finally switching to digital capture in 2008.
What led to your interest in after-dark photography?
I saw a slide show given by landscape photographer Grant Collier in 2011 with the first examples I’d seen of what the latest digital cameras were capable of capturing at night. At that point, I’d been shooting daylight landscapes for 18 years and felt I was on first-name terms with every columbine in Colorado. Night photography was becoming a new genre in its own right, accessible for the first time to anyone with a recent digital camera and a fast wide-angle lens. I shot my first Milky Way images from the summit of 14,267ft Torreys Peak and was immediately hooked.
Do you think this genre is becoming more popular, and h
