About me
I’ve tried different styles of photography, but landscape is my true and only passion. Passion that takes me to the farthest corners of the Earth, makes me shiver and quiver under the rain while searching for the perfect shot, spend restless nights while editing images, read different photography books, and shoot again and again.
There are three essential ingredients of a successful landscape picture: composition, timing, and light. When it comes to the final shot, in my opinion, it is the light that truly makes the difference. And it’s the reason I roam the Earth in search of a perfect light. Because I firmly believe: The light always comes first, and everything else follows. The light is the essence of my photography, its mood, quality, and details. I use light as a poet uses words. If there is no perfect light to reflect my idea or my mood, there will be no photo. I just won’t release the shutter.
My philosophy
The purpose of my landscape photography is easy to identify: I want to show you what I’ve witnessed. I want to show you how fascinated I am with this wonderful and complex world that opens up to me from time to time. It opens up for a moment: the moment, which I must catch and preserve. I want my photos to serve as magical windows to the farthest and most fascinating corners of our planet. So anyone could experience it.
The most common question I’m asked is how close my photos are to the actual subject, to what really happened. People really believe that you can do anything with Photoshop. Absolutely everything. One can make a masterpiece out of a mediocre image.
Well, this is far from truth. Yes, Photoshop allows incredible editing, but it can’t create something that isn’t there. I use it myself, and there are good reasons for doing that. When using digital camera, the output in RAW format looks rather unpresentable, having very little to do with what actually happened during the photoshoot. This is because RAW format is designed to capture maximum data, and not to deliver a true image. Converting RAW file into the real image is sometimes called “developing” by analogy with the film development process used in the past. The main problem of this ”development” is that you can lose track, forget “what really happened” and find yourself in a completely different reality.
My Photoshop ethic is that I use it to remove anything I couldn’t remove while taking the picture. Like an empty Coca-Cola can lying in the middle of a wild forest. There are photographers, however, who will never do that because that tin can is the integral part of the picture and the evidence that someone got this far into the forest (and spoiled it). But I will remove it. I would remove it if I’d noticed it before taking the picture. I will remove it with Photoshop if I find it later during editing. Because in my opinion that tin can doesn’t belong there, it’s not a part of nature. This is how I saw that landscape, and this is how I want others to see it: a beauty, not a crime scene. That’s why I can change saturation, contrast or color balance. Not to make the picture look better or try to fool my audience. But to convey my feelings and emotions while I was taking that picture. My goal is for others to see the picture exactly the way I saw it and how I remember it.
So if you ask me how close my photos are to what really happened there, you will get a really simple answer: they are as close as I could make them using all my skills and available tools.
I invite you to witness what I have witnessed.
Almost Truthful Story told by the author
What can I tell you about myself? Do you want to read about me growing up, graduating, getting married and so on and so forth? Or do you want to read about some of it, and want me to omit the boring part? I do think, however, that you want to learn about it in chronological order.