How I became a National Geographic photographer: Keith Ladzinski
The Colorado-raised adventurer, who went from skateboarder to computer programmer to extreme sports and natural history photographer, shares environmental message through stunning images of Antarctica
Going wild I was born in New York in 1976 but moved to Colorado when I was very young. My parents had met in high school in New Jersey – my Dad had grown up there but my Mum was originally from Glasgow, in Scotland.
They moved to Colorado because they wanted us to have different opportunities. They embraced the outdoors there – we did a lot of camping and fishing. The American state is a hub of rock climbing and that sport would go on to change my life in so many ways.
Photo op Skateboarding was my first love. I knew there was no career in it but I didn’t know what else I wanted to do. When my older brother, Scott, brought home a camera one summer and suggested we take photographs of one another skateboarding he incidentally gave me some direction.
Three or four months after that day I received a tax-return cheque for a couple of hundred dollars and with it I bought my first camera – a Pentax K1000 – from a pawnshop.
I had also started taking photographs and contributing to small skateboarding and tourism publications on the side, and I knew that what I really wanted to be was a professional photographer
Cracking the code After graduating from high school and taking a few years off, I ended up taking an entry-level position at (information-technology company) Hewlett-Packard. It was during the dotcom boom and I found myself writing HTML (a programming language).