Panoramic Landscapes By Koos Van Der Lende

Koos van der Lende is a South African landscape photographer specialising in creating amazing panoramic compositions showcasing the beauty of Africa’s natural environments.

Originally from South Africa, Koos emigrated to the Netherlands with his family during his teens, where he went on to study at the School of Photography in The Hague. After completing his studies, Koos revisited South Africa, which prompted him to immigrate back during the early 80s. Following two decades of working as a commercial photographer, he left the studio in 2002 to pursue his true passion of shooting fine art landscape photography.

Koos is currently based in Pretoria, but shoots all over Southern Africa and abroad. His panoramas are all captured as single frames on slide film using a Fuji GX617 medium-format panoramic camera, and he achieves the incredible colours by waiting for the perfect light, and making use of additional artificial light sources where needed. The very wide aspect ration of the 6×17 format really lends itself to creating an immersive cinematic atmosphere, drawing the viewer into a the story behind the frame.

He is also dedicated to the entire analog process, shooting multiple frames per scene in order to capture the changing light, as well as fine tune the exposure through push/pull processing – he spends days in our lab carefully inspecting each slide!

Koos himself will feature prominently in a documentary filmed at Orms earlier this year, covering the discontinued E6 film process. The short film is in the final stages of post-production, and we’ll share it as soon as it’s finished.

Here’s a small selection from his vast collection of panoramas – remember to click in each image for a larger preview. For more of Koos’ work, visit his website, and if you’d like to read more about him, be sure to catch him in Paul Bruins’ interview with 10 of South Africa’s top landscape photographers.

Photographs shared with permission.