At one point, on one of my trips through the Japanese forests, I took a photo of a beautiful waterfall completely surrounded by green moss. That was the first time ever to use a filter. One of the uses of certain type of camera lens filters is to attenuate the light intensity depending on the type of photo you want to take.

Photographing waterfalls or rivers is the best example, especially when, during the day, you want to  get an image in which the water stream appears slightly blurred. Most of the time, the light is too intense to tweak it just by using your camera and that’s why yo u need to use filters.

Beautiful waterfall between rocks covered by moss, Omoshiroyama Japan

That image came out very well. It has been used several times, in various places. Its most interesting use was as support material for a photography course teaching waterfalls photography.

For a while, I used filters a lot, becoming quite an expert. After a few years, I suddenly decided to give up on filters and try to make all the settings only in the camera, to get the pictures I wanted.

This kind of exercise is extremely useful for those who want to improve their technique. It helps a lot to learn to use any other existing element when photographing, which otherwise would have been overlooked using just auxiliary components.

So, I started taking pictures with water streams that appear slightly blurred, in continuous flow, without using any filter. And I found out that it’s pretty hard to do such a thing, sometimes even being impossible to dim intense  light just by camera settings. But I learned a lot by doing detective work on analyzing the lighting of places. I learned how important it is to go to the same place at different times of the day and how these moments are interlinked with lighting properties.

I learned how to create and use shadows at the place you are at a given time. For this you can use all sorts of ideas, sometimes surprising, such as perspectives and shooting angles. All this is extremely important information resulted basically from very careful exploration of the place you want to photograph at a certain moment.

And the way I chose to rediscover certain principles of photography was one based on experimentation, trial and error. This kind of approach is the best “teacher”. And personal methods of exploration that I then discovered became fundamental to a lot of photographic projects, further developed in completely different directions. Perhaps, the best example is my collection of images from the “Tour de France” and other famous cycling competitions. There you need to use only the camera and act quickly, and to be successful, it’s fundamental to have a careful and in advance preparation and exploration of the places.

I created this exploration methodology in the Ramet Gorges along the Geoagiu River in Transylvania, Romania. It was a time when I went regularly there just for that.

Beautiful autumn forest with a river in Ramet Gorge, Transylvania, Romania.

The image is one of many resulting images. The place is, or was at that time, extremely wild. It’s a kind of tunnel you can go through like “Robin Hood” from the civilized world … of the city of Aiud in the untouched world of the traditional villages of the Motilor’s Land. This natural tunnel was formed by the forest full of shadows and lights alongside the banks of the Geoagiu River.

For a period, this “tunnel” was my experimental photographic studio …