Quick Facts
Biography
Elia Locardi (born July 13, 1980) is an American photography professional specialized in travel photography, landscape photography, aerial photography and videography. He is best known for his recreations of color images of renowned landscape and travel subjects from dozens of countries, which have been said to "portray the world in bold, vivid color, and bring landscapes and moments to life in ways that immerse the viewer". Locardiis also a well known photography blogger, educator, speaker and entrepreneur.
Education and career
Locardi graduated in media art and animation from the Art Institute of Ft Lauderdale in 2002. After a decade working in the media arts and animation industry, and travelling, Locardi launched a continued career as a location-independent digital nomad photographer , a complex occupation whose details he has profusely described. Locardi's pieces were voted ninth in USA Today 10Best's "Top Travel Photography Bloggers" in a Readers' Choice Poll (2014), chosen twice among the yearly top 10 travel photos (2014,2015) by the 500px photography community, and selected in 2016 among the "Top 50 Photographs From Around the World" on mymodernmet, as well as among the Top 25 photos of the year on Flickr.
His photographic themes have been natural landscapes, cityscapes, ancient architecture and world heritage sites. His work has been published in National Geographic, Digital Photo Magazine, Digital Camera Magazine, and Professional Photographer Magazine.
Achievements
Innovation
Locardi developed an original digital processing method he calls "Advanced Dynamic Blending". Using multiple exposures over a long time span (up to several hours), he is able to capture the full dynamic range of light in a scene. This process is a form of High-dynamic-range imaging, which merges multiple low- or standard-dynamic-range images into a single image to show details that cannot be captured by standard cameras.
Locardi has also developed singular expertise in mirrorless camera photography, as well as in the use of Adobe Camera Raw postprocessing software (ACR, part of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom) through which he is able to pull remarkably large amounts of dynamic range pictures from a single raw photo.
Aerial photography
Locardi was still photographer for the documentary film How I Became an Elephant (2012), and worked capturing aerial drone footage for a documentary film on Bhutan's annual Tour of the Dragon bicycle race (2015). Likewise, his drone pictures and footage have been favourably reviewed in specialized online and book sources.
Teaching
Together with his wife Naomi Locardi, in 2010 he founded a photography-oriented website Blame The Monkey, an American blog focusing on travel photography inspiration and education. The blog shares stories of the photographers' experiences being global nomads living on the road and the techniques used in the creation and post-processing of travel photography images. The blog also shares online educational resources in the form of photography tutorials. Blame The Monkey was voted "Best New Blog for Photographers" by Scott Kelby, in his roundup of 55 best of things in 2011.
As a notable photographer, Locardi has been an invited speaker at Photoplus Expo (NYC), Photokina (Germany 2014,2016,2018), InterBee (Tokyo), PNE (Beijing), Gulf Photo Plus, Out of Chicago Conference, South Carolina ASMP (Southeastern Film & Photo Conference), Dubai (Feb 2017), National Geographic Aveiro Festival (Portugal 2017), Memphis, TN , XPosure Sharjah (United Arab Emirates 2017&2018), and Chile (2018).
Alone or in association, Locardi has participated in the development of tutorials and other educational material on photography and postprocessing techniques as applied to travel, landscape, cityscape, desert nightscape, and astro-photography, among others. Resulting from a working alliance with Fstoppers, the tutorial series named"Photographing The World" has 4 complete multi-episode seasons, providing an in-depth account of Locardi's signature methods for landscape photography from beginning to end with an emphasis in post production software procedures.
In 2016 Locardi was chosen by Scott Kelby as one of five best photography workshop teachers.