Antony Spencer
It might feel at times like very inch of the Earth has been snapped and shared, and that the same shots of the same locations crop up in magazines or Instagram feeds with wearying familiarity. But landscape photographer Antony Spencer goes to great lengths to find fresh scenes and subjects, and his own take, whether that means riding helicopters over little known river deltas in Iceland, chasing thunderstorms across the plains of the United States, or exploring deep into the frozen wildernesses of Norway and Greenland. “Originality is a huge thing,” he says.
Based in Dorset, Antony won the prestigious Landscape Photographer of the Year award back in 2010, just a few years after seriously taking up photography. He now guides workshops and tours around the world – including, increasingly, some of the world’s most remarkable wildlife locations in Kenya, Norway, the USA and Namibia.
To get the photos you do, do you need to be quite obsessive: out in all weathers, early starts, long patient waits for the right conditions?
Yes, absolutely. And quite often I think, the more severe the weather, the better the photograph can be. Obviously, shooting in the middle of a hurricane or something crazy isn’t ideal, but stormy atmospheric conditions can throw up the best light.
My favourite thing that I get to do is stormchasing, which I take tours to in the US. To be around
