Thank you for joining us in our 19th edition of PT Explorers! Roie, it is a pleasure to have you here. Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Thank you for having me, it’s an honour to be featured here alongside such inspiring photography colleagues. My photography is focused mainly around wildlife and nature, as I’m fascinated by animal behaviour, especially in extreme conditions. As I was traveling more and more I started to realize how rapidly our world is changing and that became really an alarming wake-up call for me. So I was humbled to become a global Greenpeace Ambassador and a lot of my projects are also environmentally oriented.
You truly have a spectacular set of photographs. Tell us, how did your photography journey begin?
Thank you so much. My photography started when I was 22 years old; that’s when I got my first camera. I became obsessed with photography as I’m sure many are in our field. I started reading endlessly (YouTube didn’t exist back then) and exploring, experimenting and simply having fun. As time went by, I started doing some commercial work and didn’t quite enjoy it as it wasn’t in my passion; I wanted to go outside and experience adrenalin rush adventures. So I felt like I needed to get out of photography and went into finance and insurance, although I really didn’t like doing that; it was a step back that I had to do in order to regain my passion and find my own path in the world. Since office work was boring for me, I found myself going out to photograph wildlife (mostly birds) at 4am, arriving at the office and changing to a suit at 9am and between meetings I’d edit photos. I knew I loved photography, I could talk about it for hours and I’d liked to do a career out of it, so in 2007 I founded a photography school and felt I found my destination. So far over 24,000 graduates have learned photography in it, and I was super thrilled that so many individuals found passion in photography like I have. Later on, I opened a photography magazine and a photo-travel company (800 travellers annually) and other projects as well. So you could say photography is really a big part of my life. My own photography was mostly about passion, until 2012 when I started to do more with it professionally. Writing articles for magazines, TV projects and of course a lot of public speaking became some of my favourite things.