Galen Rowell, died at the age of 61, in a plane crash in California, with his wife Barbara. Rowell was the most famous outdoor photographer in the world, regularly shooting features for National Geographic during a life spent touring in remote countries around the world. Galen Rowell was a man who went into to the edge of the sea, the mountains, into the desert, to the last great wild places in the world to be absorbed by their grace and magnificence. That is what he did for himself. He shared his vision with the release of a shutter, creating photographs as timeless, as powerful and as stunning as nature itself. Moments of magnificent, he always shot in perfect light, glided into emotionalism at times, especially in his later work. Rowell was a populist, on a mission to share his technical insight with recreational photographers and indomitable to share a romanticized vision of the American scenery in particular.
For Galen, experiencing sceneries as close up as possible was at the centre of his work. He spent most of his time in the field looking for the accurate mixture of light and form. This attachment reached its apotheosis exterior of Lhasa in 1981, when a rainbow strokes the roof of the Lama's Potala Palace, Dalai, which was Rowell's most eminent image. Rowell had to chase transversely the valley to line up the shot properly, quite factually chasing a rainbow.
Galen wanted to be fond of and feel that all his best photographs had tough personal visions and that a shoot that does not have a personal vision or does not communicate emotion fails. The scenery is like being there with an influential personality and he was searching for the right angles to make that portrait come across as significantly as feasible. Galen Rowell was ardent about photography and went to bizarre ends to get the shots he visualized. The bulk of the book deals with his viewpoint of photography and how he achieved what he did.
Galen wanted simply to motivate and it made his effort commercially flourishing. His effort was hastened after he married, Barbara, who was at the time a communications director. She took over the business side of Rowell's forever intensifying archive, offering him his most excellent position in outdoor photography. And later on, she developed her own photographic career alongside Galen’s
Galen explains that he never set out to photograph a landscape, nor did he think of his camera as a means of recording a mountain or an animal if not he completely needed a record shot. And his first thought was always of light. Galen began taking photos in the natural world to be able to show the whole world what he was experiencing when he climbed and explored in Yosemite. He started to realize that film perceives the world differently than the human eye, and at times those distinctions can make a photograph more powerful and outstanding than what one actually observed.
Challenges
- Galen says that it is a real challenge to work with the natural features and the natural light.
- It was a challenge to look at the real world and adhere to the ineffective hope that next time his film will somehow stand a closer similarity to it.
- Working on the nature, it was a challenge as he could face natural calamities such as landslides and floods which would risk his life.
- Also poor quality photographs were not marketable and that spelt loss for Galen.
Galen had a passion for nature and this made him successful in his photography industry. He is well known because of his ambitious attitude in nature. Galen realizes that the combination of pictures and words together can be really effective and he explains that unless he wrote his own words, then his message was diluted. The basis for writing is that all his most powerful messages about the fates of wild places that he care about need to have words as well as images. I therefore take into heart all his techniques to apply to my photography as I have noticed there is ups and downs in everything in life
