German-American rock climber and a photographer and filmmaker Renan Ozturk is planing for a National Geographic project shooting in Mt. Everest and created a 5-episode as he takes behind the scenes look at this ambitious project.
In this first inspirational video in this series, he tries to answer maybe the question that most adventure photographers get asked the most – why?
Climbing dangerous mountains or traveling to remote places with very little help can be extremely dangerous (not to mention expensive and difficult. So why do it? Each photographer might have a different answer but for Ozturk, besides the thrill and the actual adventure, there is also the wish to tell a compelling story with pictures and videos and maybe make an impact with his art (many of his work has to do with climate change and preservation).
This isn’t the first time that we cover one of Ozturk’s videos here on LensVid. We actually published a different video he created this April and here is a short background about him from that article:
Ozturk was trained as a scientist but after he finished his studies he decided to give up a comfortable academic career and travel the world to shoot in some of the harshest environments and challenging locations around the globe.
He is both a stills shooter and a full-blown cinematographer which is a trend that we see more and more with nature and wildlife storytellers these days. He typically shoots with one camera and one 35mm prime lens (at least when it comes to stills) but he is always happy to take the newest piece of pro video gear to the top of the Everest when possible.
Interestingly as you can see in the video above Ozturk is also a self-thought painter who takes a large canvas with him and paints on mountain picks on different expeditions that he goes on.
Renan works as a commercial and documentary filmmaker, an expedition climber for The North Face, and a photojournalist for Sony and National Geographic and he directed and shot commercial work for major international brands such as Apple, Google, DJI, and Nike.
You can find more of his work on his website.
As always, you can watch more videos of interesting photographers on our photographer section here on LensVid.
Iddo Genuth 
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