Who is Landscape Photographer Ian Plant?

I often get asked the question how did I get into landscape photography? And I like to tell people that I took the scenic route. I've always been interested in the outdoors ever since I was a kid, I would go hiking and backpacking and rock climbing and canoeing and things like that, so I've always loved the outdoors. I bought my first camera when I was 23 years old, I had just finished up my first year of law school and I was working for a big firm in New York City. So it was the first time in my life that I actually made any money. So I went out and bought my first camera which was almost 20 years ago, it was a Pentax K1000, an old-style film camera, the workhorse camera for a lot of people who started in photography and I was immediately hooked. I realized then that I just made a huge $100,000 mistake on my law school education, because I knew that I didn't wanted to be a lawyer anymore, I wanted to be a photographer. But it took quite some time for me to actually realize my dream of becoming a photographer. I graduated from law school, I worked for eight years at a big firm in Washington DC, 'cause I had to pay off all that big law school debt. And it took me some time to develop my skills as an artist, as a photographer. But after eight years of working for the man in the big corporate Washington DC law firm I just decided one day that I had enough, I quit my job. I jumped into being a professional photographer full-time and I have never looked back. My focus was almost exclusively on landscape photography. My love and passion for nature was really important to me and I wanted to express that, that love of the landscape through my photography. Through the years, I've branched out into other forms of photography. My first foray into something different than landscape photography was in the wildlife photography. And in more recent years, I've gotten really interested in doing people photography, street photography, travel photography and now I'll pretty much shoot anything. I just love photography, I love the art of photography, I love capturing those magical moments that will never be repeated. And so I've really expanded my artistic vision, I've really expanded the types of photography that I do and now I pretty much photograph anything that catches my eye. But my first love has always been the landscape and I find myself coming back to it time and time again. This world is a really fantastic world that we live in, it's a beautiful place. There are so many incredible, wonderful, beautiful things around the world and I hope to see as many of them before I die. I keep a running bucket list of all the places I wanna go and the list gets bigger and bigger, 'cause there's so many different places of this world to go. So I never seem to make any progress in making the list smaller, but that's great, I hope to be continuing to discover new places for the rest of my life and I'm not gonna be able to see it all, but I'm gonna see as much of it as I can. What I love about photography, what makes photography magical to me and what makes it different than other forms of art, is the fact that photography is tethered to the moment, tethered to reality in a way that other forms of art really aren't. And I work really hard to be out there, to capture those magical moments when they occur. I don't really like concocting them on a computer. There's a lot of photographers who engage in extensive Photoshop manipulation to create the magic in their images and I'm not really a big fan of that. I prefer to have a genuine, an authentic connection with the reality of the moment. So I work really hard to be out there as much as possible and I wait for these magical moments to occur, these fleeting, ephemeral moments that lasts only for a short period of time, I love capturing them with my camera and preserving them forever.