# Robert Rankin (photographer)

Robert Rankin (born 1 April 1951) is an Australian wilderness photographer, writer, scientist and publisher. Since 1980, he has published his Australian wilderness landscape photography in a variety of products and media. He has assisted the conservation of the natural landscape through the use of the photographic image.

## Publishing career

Joining the University of Queensland Bushwalking Club (UQBWC) in 1970 was instrumental to Robert Rankin developing a knowledge of the mountainous regions of South East Queensland and in particular the Scenic Rim. He edited the club's magazine (Heybob) for 1976 as well as the Brisbane Rock Climbers magazine (RURP) whilst completing a Bachelor of Science (BSc) in physics and a Master of Science (MSc) in environmental physics, concentrating on computer modelling of river pollutants and presenting a paper on the subject to the Australian Institute of Physics. While he undertook this work, he was employed from 1972 to 1976 as a tutor in the Physics Department at the University of Queensland. He also conducted many photographic trips for the clubs and organized instructional navigation courses. In the early 1990s, he lectured on wilderness photography at the annual climbing festival, Escalade, held in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. In 1998, he was a committee member overseeing the production of the Brisbane Bushwalkers (BBW) First 50 Years book. In 1973, he wrote two articles, Safari to the Unknown and The Last Wilderness for Magazine Walkabout Magazine.
In 1975, he climbed The Minarets (3040m) and Dixon Peak (3004m) in the New Zealand Alps. In 1975 he also received a federal government grant through the Australia Council to film a documentary about Hinchinbrook Island in north Queensland. With a group of six, he climbed and filmed the ascent, over three days, of the South East Ridge of the Thumb. The film, Climb to the Clouds (1975), was subsequently sold to a Queensland television company. After the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) passed on Rankin's proposal to film an ascent of the East Face of Crookneck in the Glasshouse Mountains north of Brisbane, because of the difficult challenges involved in filming on a vertical cliff, Rankin made the decision to finance and produce the film himself. The subsequent film, To Walk the Vertical (1976) was sold back to the ABC.
In 1977, the Wales (now Westpac) Bank commissioned Rankin to produce a film Walk with Safety depicting safe bushwalking and camping practices. A short film, shot in August 1977, was titled Ice is Nice. It presented a glimpse of life in mid-winter in the extreme environment of Mount Kosciuszko, high in the Snowy Mountains. The film's historic footage from 1977 was later incorporated into a more recent production.
In Queensland in the 1970s, Rankin was one of several film producers in this era of outdoor adventure-oriented 16mm film making. The Mystique of Hinchinbrook again looked at Hinchinbrook Island in more recent times. Jewels of the South West described a 6-day solo trip by Rankin into south-west Tasmania to film the glacial lakes of the Western Arthur Range and lament the flooding of the largest lake in the region, Lake Pedder, for power generation. Other films included The Mystique of Hinchinbrook, Jewels of the South West, Secrets of the Scenic Rim (alternative name Four Seasons on the Rim), Federation Peak, South East Queensland, Climbing Barney and TASMANIA - An Alluring Landscape.
For several years during the 2000s, Qantas Airways presented Rankin's short films on all of its international flights. They stated that his collection of landscapes was the most comprehensive they had seen.
After four years as producer/director of television education programs with the ABC and with publishing ideas of his own, Rankin left the ABC in 1981 to take up the offer of a scholarship to undertake a Doctor of Philosophy degree with Griffith University, Brisbane, to investigate ways of improving the design of visual graphics in science communication. The PhD was awarded in 1986.
In 1980, Rankin released a locally printed calendar entitled Queensland's Scenic Rim Wilderness Calendar 1981. Rankin then turned his attention to the book publishing industry. From the start of this venture, Rankin took on the roles of author, photographer, book designer and publisher, delegating the wholesaling and distribution work to his staff. Inspired by the black and white photographs of the early 20th century American wilderness photographer, Ansell Adams, Rankin would insist that his own full colour images, wherever possible, would have that ethereal and majestic quality characteristic of Adams' work.
Rankin's first two major books published were the paperback Australian Wilderness Skills (1983) and the casebound On the Edge of Wilderness (1983), both printed in Brisbane and both commercially successful. On the Edge of Wilderness showcased the wilderness regions surrounding the city of Brisbane in south-east Queensland. At the time, its publication was very welcome, there being a lack of information on the wild regions around the capital of Queensland.
The larger casebound Classic Wild Walks of Australia (1989), also printed in Brisbane, performed even better, becoming an Australian classic and selling 20,000 copies over four editions. Later Rankin re-worked the content of this book into a software version available on CD-ROM. The software received many reviews with the Sydney Morning Herald labelling it the best of its kind in Australia and a truly impressive resource. They called Wild Walks the most beautiful and moving software title they had ever seen, not just good by Australian standards but by any standard. His next book, Wilderness Light (1993), was written to explain how Rankin went about producing a quality image, with an emphasis on the artistic aspects rather than the technical and explaining why lighting and composition are of such importance. Rankin knew there were spectacular Australian landscapes that were relatively unknown to the general public, places such as Hinchinbrook Island, Federation Peak, the Western Arthur Range, the Scenic Rim and many more. Displaying images of these wild places to the general public through stationery products such as calendars, diaries and cards would help ensure that the broader population would already be informed of what might be lost should the regions be subsequently threatened by development or by nature through, for example, climate change.
In the early 1970s, Lake Pedder in Tasmania was flooded for hydro-electric power generation with very few medium or large format images of the original pristine lake ever having been taken. It was realized then that it was essential to photographically document such places. Rankin had flown over and photographed Lake Pedder in early 1972, landing on the beach just months before the enlarged lake began to fill. He was there again in January 1973 and the original lake was fast disappearing under the flood waters of the Serpentine Dam. He has one good aerial photograph amongst a small collection of the lake taken on the 1972 trip.
So began the growing range of Australia's Wilderness products, all based on Rankin's photographs, videos, music and prose. Rankin Publishers was founded in 1980 and from that year to 2014, he wrote, produced and published a large range of Australian Wilderness pictorial calendars, with a total of more than 150 different titles over the 34 years and selling up to 100,000 calendars, diaries and boxed cards over the Christmas period each year alone. There were also books (13 titles), prints (12 titles), music CDs (4 titles), short films (13 titles), DVDs (10 titles) and software (3 titles). In 1990, he signed with Music Sense to sell his music CDs throughout Australia.
Rankin has owned and managed Rankin Publishers since its formation in 1980. Rankin Publishers began in the garage of his home at Toowong in inner Brisbane before moving eventually to a much larger warehouse in the industrial suburb of Sumner Park.
In 2009, Rankin travelled to the Himalayas and Everest Base Camp (5364m), reaching the summit of Kala Patthar (5644m). He climbed the Gran Paradiso (4061m) in Italy in 2011 and Mont Blanc (4809m) in France in 2012 at the age of 61. He has also hiked in Yosemite National Park in the USA and the Dolomites in Italy.
In 2002, Rankin produced the coffee-tabled-sized casebound book Beyond the Horizon describing some of his adventures in the most rugged of Australia's mountains. Beginning in 2012, Rankin produced a series of three casebound books entitled Australia which comprised a collection of what he considered to be some of his best photographs. He also wrote and published two science book titles, Einstein's Relativity and Quantum Reality, utilizing ideas from his previous studies in science communication, before embarking on a project, commencing in 2016, to produce a series of guidebooks to the best hiking areas in Australia. As of 2024, three titles have been written and published in this hiking series (Secrets of the Scenic Rim, Tasmania - Wilderness Walks and High Peaks of the Australian Alps).

## Photography

Rankin made using quality images the pre-eminent requirement for his publications. He has walked for over a week at a time, mostly solo, to reach the remotest regions of the continent where he photographed scenes of Australia that few had seen, in the hope that, displaying these pictures would get more people involved in improving the environmental protection of the region. He carried a backpack weighing up to 25 kg, made up of food and water, tent, sleeping bag, camera equipment and sturdy tripod.
The majority of Rankin's images are on film, using a Komamura Horseman VH-R medium format camera and positive 120 size roll film (either Fuji Velvia or Kodak Ektachrome) with a frame size of 6x9cm and a film speed of ISO 50. The slow film speed meant a fine grain image was achieved but the resulting long exposure time almost always required a tripod to steady the camera. When scanned using a high quality film scanner, the resulting digital file compares in quality with the best digital equivalent.

## Personal life

Rankin lives in Brisbane, Australia with his partner Carmel Keating and their son.