Formative Years (2005–2016)

I am a self-taught photographer and when I started out back in the early 2000s, I turned to books as my main learning resource. Among the many beginner’s guides I have read, John Shaw’s Nature Photography Field Guide stands out as having had the most influence on me. It had been my companion during my first outings with slide film, and it stayed by my side long after I made the switch to digital. You could say that the Nature Photography Field Guide was sort of my bible.

Not only did I learn a lot by reading that book over and over again – about cameras and lenses, proper exposure, composition, etc. -, but it also played a major role in shaping my idea and understanding of nature photography in general. In hindsight, it is not surprising then to notice that for a long time did I pursue a journalistic approach to taking images. I wanted to capture true-to-the-eye representations of the beauty of nature.

Through the years, though, I realized that one could achieve so much more with landscape photography than just state the obvious. On a growing number of occasions, I managed to photograph scenes in a way that set them apart from the rest – by finding a special composition, for example, or by concentrating on certain aspects of a landscape, or simply by shooting during an extraordinary display of light. I did not know it then, but those images were to become the first stepping stones of my journey towards a more meaningful and, ultimately, a more personal kind of landscape photography.