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Georg Popp
Georg has been working as a professional landscape photographer since the early 1990’s.
Together with his wife Verena Popp-Hackner, the Vienna based couple always works in long term projects, usually with a specific book or exhibition in mind.
This is a little overworked version of a posting I made on Facebook this past November. It grew kinda long, I confess, for a relatively simple concern I had and still have. A tiny simple thing, which currently worries me, maybe even scares me a bit. And it had to be fairly long – not only because I needed to practice my English – but because on Social Media everything tends to be ripped apart and turned upside down until the initial point is completely lost. Plus, let’s face it, it was lockdown in Austria – everyone had a lot of time to worry about a lot of things but had a little extra time to checkpoints off the list, that usually get lost in the daily merciless hamster wheel. I was stuck in between working on my Cypress Swamp book, thinking about things, things I need to write in the book, thoughts I wanted to express, stories I would like to tell. Instead, I decided to write this text.
Where to start…maybe here: When in 2015 I managed to win a category in the world’s most prestigious nature photography awards, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, with one of my cypress swamps images, it did ring a bell in the head of a number of photographers, who run photo tours. In 2016 the first commercial photography tour, purely dedicated to nature photography was taking place in the swamps. Not long after that, there were more.
The cypress swamps are such a fairy-tale forest, yet they were fairly unknown to the wider nature photography community. At the time of revealing the WPY winning images, in autumn 2015, it was just one of many images I had taken during a time span of roughly five years of exploring the swamps on a regular basis. Every year in autumn I would fly over and spend several weeks, paddling in the swamps from before dusk until way past dawn, trying to get some good imagery. By no means an easy task, as I was strictly shooting 4x5” large format in the first few years. Only with the arrival of the Nikon D 800, did I start to mix digital with analogue. Mostly because there were so many great views to be seen but were in such deep water, that setting up a tripod was not an option.