We were lucky to catch up with Jon Fischer recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jon, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you wish you had started sooner?

My photography journey started out of a desire to be outdoors more. I grew up exploring the outdoors of East Texas where my parents had a lake home, fishing, boating, walking the woods around the home most weekends and summers. Then, shortly after my High School graduation I was diagnosed with Malignant Melanoma, a very aggressive type of skin cancer, at less than 20 years of age. While I was extremely lucky that the cancer was caught before it spread, I still became extremely fearful of spending time in the sun. For the better part of the next 8-10 years, I pursued mostly indoor activities throughout my time in College and into the early years of my career as a software engineer. However as time progressed, I longed to be outdoors, and once again exploring nature. I first borrowed an entry level DSLR from a coworker at the time in early 2012, and shortly after that purchased my first DSLR of my own. Since then, my photography has reconnected me with the outdoors that I so loved as a child. My pursuit of landscape photography has inspired me to spend time in the landscape when it is at it’s most beautiful, be that in the early morning hours when the light first hits the upper peaks of the Teton Mountains, or the deep blue hour tones of late twilight on the Oregon coast, or in the soft overcast of an early spring rain shower in the Smoky Mountains. Looking back on where I am now, the places I’ve explored, I do wish I had started earlier, making more use of my more youthful legs and energy of my 20s to explore even further and more deeply into the less often visited wild landscapes of our world instead of being so worried about further sun exposure that had me locked up indoors for too long. But I am thankful that I did find photography when I did, and that it has sent me to so many places that I may never have visited otherwise.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a part time landscape and nature photographer based in North Dallas, Texas. As I touched on in the prior question, I got my start in 2012 as a way to reconnect with nature. Since then I have explored many areas of the country and beyond. If my work does anything for those viewing it, I hope it is to inspire others to do the same as I have, and get into the outdoors and connect with nature themselves on a deeper level. In this age of social media, where so many of our natural areas are becoming overrun with individuals just looking to check off a location ‘for the gram’ while not noticing the impact they and others are having on the landscape. I hope that my work makes at least a few people take pause and realize that they may have visited a location, but not really experienced it, or better yet, want to slow down and really appreciate the next natural location they visit, and take better care of those locations when they are there. To do this, to have some small positive impact on even a few people and their relationship with the natural world is probably the most important thing I can think that my work could do, beyond any other compensation or award.

For those who have also come to love the natural world and want to bring some of that natural beauty back into their home, I do offer high quality art prints of a large number of my images on a variety of media including metal and face mounted acrylic. Most of my print sales are fully custom offerings where I work with the customer to find the correct image, size and style that both shows off the image they have selected, but also fits their home or office. I also put out a yearly calendar with a variety of my most recent work each year, a very budget friendly way to bring a wide selection of landscape images home in a useful package. The calendar has been a yearly project of mine since 2016, and I am already starting to put together a short list of new work for the 2025 edition.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

Simply appreciate, and reward the time and effort that creatives have put into learning their craft, and paying them a fair amount for the output. Every creative I know, from photographers, to musicians, artists, writers, every area, even before the recent and rapid growth of AI has countless stories of how their work was under valued by others outside the creative space. Most simply don’t understand the countless unpaid hours of preparation, practice, planning, prior experience, that goes into the output the creative is currently producing. Regardless of if they are an individual artist or part of a group such as an orchestra, most people don’t realize that it is not a 9-5 job where the final output is solely the sum of what is done for that specific job. Few creatives do what they do for the money, but that does not mean that we should not put a fair value their work that allows them to provide for themselves, their families, and allows them to continue their passion.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I know this has been a fairly constant theme in may of my answers thus far, but simply being surrounded by the natural world in it’s most beautiful moments and witnessing those moments myself. Trying to capture those moments is a far distant second place in the list. While I find it incredibly rewarding to come home and see that I’ve managed to capture some small moment of time that I experienced in a way that will allow someone else to experience it as well, photography provides me the motivation to get up at extremely early hours of the morning, hike miles in uncomfortable conditions, and wait for the perfect moment among countless biting insects just to witness the moment with my own eyes is something that I thank my photography journey for with every step along the way. All of my favorite images, even years after I have taken them, I can recall countless other details about that moment that made it special in ways that go far beyond the image itself.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jonpfischer.com/
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/jfischerphotography
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JonPFischerPhotography/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonfischer/