The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Pelican brief takes the prize
Travel Photographer of the Year Marsel van Oosten is inspired by the natural world, says Michael Kerr
Marsel van Oosten offers an unusual kind of holiday. First, he doesn’t tell you where you are going, then he asks you to keep the destination a secret once you have seen it. The holiday in question, with the photography tour company run by van Oosten and his wife, includes the swamplands of Louisiana, where he has taken some fine pictures himself. So fine that they helped to win him first prize in the Travel Photographer of the Year competition. You can see those images, with his portraits of Van Oosten gets close to nature, below; and his shot of Northern gemsbok on a sand dune in Namibia, right For more of Marsel van Oosten’s work see squiver. com. pelicans off Namibia, at the annual TPOTY exhibition, which opens next Friday in London, featuring the work of photographers from 114 countries.
Why the secrecy? To stop beautiful places from being overrun, says the 49-year-old Dutchman, and to enable photographers to make a little money from hard-won and original images.
“The hardest part of landscape photography,” he says, “is knowing where exactly to set up your camera. Once someone has done that successfully, and you know where, in theory you can recreate the shot.”
Such copying, he says, has become more common as a result of geotagging (which adds latitude and longitude to picture data) and the posting of images on social media.
“Less than five years ago I was in Iceland in winter and there was no one else there,” he says. “Now it’s insane, busier than in summer. I’m convinced this is because of social media.”