About the Photographer and his Art
Rodrigo da Cunha was born in Beja, Portugal in 1978; since he was a young man he was interested in the arts and design, but as he says “I was never too good at design or painting”. This had indeed discouraged Rodrigo from pursuing a career in the arts, until he found Photography. When Rodrigo was 18 he bought his first Single Lens Reflex photo camera, and it was in that moment over 10 years ago that his passion for photography and nature started. Due to work and life constraints though, Rodrigo was never able to pursue his dream of becoming a professional photographer and as he today regrets he was forced to leave his passion behind to pursue an alternate career as a manager in the hospitality industry.
In the end of 2004 this industry career took a big turn as Rodrigo was offered a job in Ireland and he decided to move there and take other challenges.
Rodrigo has since then fallen in love with Ireland and the fantastic landscapes and seascapes of the emerald island, this prompted him to once again pick up his old film SLR camera and refuel his landscape photography passion. Late last year Rodrigo decided to pursue his dream and invested in new photographic equipment, this time he opted to shoot digitally and invested in a new Nikon camera system.
Though today he shoots mostly digital his original passion for traditional film photography is still very much alive and he keeps his Nikon F100 and Mamyia 645 close to hand when he goes out on the landscape sometimes shooting the same scenarios in the 3 different formats.
For his film photography Rodrigo uses mostly Fujifilm’s Velvia films or for Black & White photography he usually uses the highly regarded Ilford PanF 50 ISO films for the highest quality and fine grain.
While photographing in Digital he uses a 10 Mega pixel Nikon SLR camera packed with a full set of lenses ranging from 10mm to 300mm.
Although his main subjects revolve around landscape and nature photography, Rodrigo is recently opening to other areas of photography like macro, wildlife and fine art photography and he as plans to target areas like fashion, concept and portrait photography in the near future, something he had never done before but now he is very enthusiastic about and he is very eager to experiment with different lights and techniques to achieve a signature type of photography.
Although he says that he has still a very long road to follow to achieve his ultimate goal with his photography, Rodrigo has been getting very good reviews on all his recent work and has sold to clients around the world. His client basis includes people from the USA, the UK, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, India, Israel, and even as remote as Poland, Russia and Japan.
Rodrigo has had his worked published in several magazines, and in the national and local media over the years and this year he has also had one of his photographs short listed and displayed on RTE (TV Channel) Photo competition for the spring quarter.
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Rodrigo da Cunha