I was inspired by the classics of the past century ever since I first saw the photo printing process in my gradfather’s darkroom.

I got my first camera FED which was an old Soviet-made replica of Leica II when I was in middle school and started taking photos of my classmates. Nothing serious at the time, but it helped me learn the basics of the manual exposure and working with the camera and light. Later at the university I got obsessed with the outdoors, spent a lot of time hiking and climbing all over Crimea in the late 90s / early 2000s, back when it was still part of Ukraine. It led me to explore larger formats and I got familiar with the medium format cameras and film which was a perfect format for landscapes, allowing me to capture a lot more details on a much larger frame.

Years later, when I moved to the United States and started working at Google I went on my first ever Southwest bound trip around Arizona and Utah, and believe it or not, the only camera I took on that trip was my Android phone. Needless to say, I promised myself I had to go back, and I had to bring a proper camera to capture the full majesty of what I saw.

Around that time a renowned large format wilderness photographer Rodney Lough Jr came visit Google and gave a talk that I got really inspired by. The recording is still on Youtube here. Fun fact: my future wife attended that same talk as well before we met each other. This is when I started exploring what is the largest possible camera I can use and carry around on my landscape photography trips. The search brought me back to the classics and the stuff I was fascinated by when I was a kid, and specially the world of a large-format film photography.

Rodney and I became good friends over the years, went on a numerous adventures and photography trips together. I learnt everything I know about landscape photography from him and needless to say he had a tremendous influence on me.

I work with 8x10 film as my go to format, occasionally 4x5 and medium format using my Arca Swiss technical camera and Phase One digital back.