Peter Lik is a self-taught landscape photographer, who was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1959. He is a first generation Australian whose parents immigrated from the Czech Republic after World War II. At age 8 Peter received a Kodak Brownie box camera, with which he captured his very first image of a spider web in the backyard. During the following years Peter would bring a camera everywhere he went and on all of his family vacations. He took pictures of the Australian countryside and the ocean.
Deciding not to pursue college he landed a job with the department of tourism in Queensland, Australia. During that time he regularly traveled through the Outback, continuing to photograph nature. In 1977 he shot his very first transparency image of two driftwood trees in the Victorian countryside. In 1984 he made his first trip to the United States. During his travels to Alaska, Peter learned about large format photography and was introduced to panoramic cameras.