The landscape was my first love in photography.

I started my studies in photography after borrowing a camera from my mother when I was 17 years old.  I spent the day driving around my grandfather’s ranch in Northern Arizona taking black and white images.  It was an experiment really.  I was attempting to prove that photography was easy!  Just point your camera at something beautiful and you will have a beautiful photo.  I think a lot of people with their iPhone think that too and yet, their photos don’t seem to measure up.  That day, I had a bit of beginners luck, but it was followed by a year of pride swallowing failure and it was the failures that firmly planted the passion for this art in my soul.  I knew I could do it, but it was also challenging, and that is what made it interesting.

I ended up changing my major (from theatrical performance) to photography and started carrying around a large format, 4×5 camera.  This is the kind of camera you see in the late 1800s with the guy under a dark cloth, looking into a camera that looks a bit like an accordion.  It was a beast to carry around, but I thought I was going to be Ansel Adams.  Little did I know that I would stray completely from that format and favor documentary imagery and end up photographing people almost exclusively for the next 25 years.  But my heart still loves the vast, open horizons of my youth and while I don’t miss the weight of that old camera, I do miss the slow, methodical act of landscape photography.  So, I have married the two into one art form.  You will probably notice if you follow my work, that most of my portrait work and even my documentary work is a little bit portrait/documentary and a lot of landscape.  We all have our past.  Mine just doesn’t include skeletons and closets.  It includes a lot of hours riding on a horse looking at a vast, empty landscape.

This slideshow is a collection of landscape work I have made over the past eight years.  Many of the images come from jobs like weddings and portraits, others from my travels as I go around the world teaching workshops.  I have an endless supply of them, so you may see more of them throughout the next 30 days.

This slideshow was made with Adobe Premiere Clip. Clip accesses all of my photos in Lightroom CC and creates beautiful slideshows in seconds right on my iPad or iPhone. The beauty of Clip is that I can either make a super simple and fast slideshow, or I can further edit that slideshow or movie in Adobe Premiere. In this case, I did the entire thing in Adobe Clip and sent it right to the web.  You are seeing eight years of photographic work.  The slideshow itself took about 50 seconds to create with another 5 minutes of little tweaks to the timing.  The hardest part of making this slideshow was choosing the images and the music to go with it.

Speaking of music, this whole 30 Days project is possible because of Triple Scoop Music’s new subscription-based service which allows users to pay one monthly fee rather than per song.  If you are producing projects and need music, I highly recommend Triple Scoop Music.  The service is full of great original songs from independent artists.  License one song at a time, or sign up for the subscription service and use as many songs as you need, whenever you need them.  Learn more at www.triplescoopmusic.com

Music in this video licensed through www.triplescoopmusic.com

The music for this slideshow is called “Dark is Easier” by Stephanie Schneiderman

Unlimited music licensing plans are normally $995 per year and up.  However, right now, for a limited time, there is special pricing! Get yours for just $499 per year (annual billing) or $49 per month when you sign up this month.  If you only use one new song each month, you will save $221 this year.  At those prices, I will save $1,301 this month alone!  That’s pretty amazing.  Choose all the music you need all year long. Choose from over 35,000 hand-picked songs and soundtracks.  Click here to learn more: www.triplescoopmusic.com

Use the code “JAREDPLATT18” and save an extra 10% on your music membership!

If you are a Vimeo fan, you can watch this project unfold at my Vimeo Album

The following photo is me, traveling back in time to work with a 4×5 field camera. Funny how no matter how far back in time I go, I still have no hair…

For a complete list of my equipment, you can go to BHPHOTO HERE.