Fine Art Nature & Landscape Photographer based in Rochester, New York

Photographing the extraordinary at home and around the world
 

My relationship with photography began long before I understood the role it would eventually play in my life.

I grew up in now war torn Donetsk Ukraine where my grandfather first introduced me to a camera and taught me how to work in a darkroom. I can still remember standing in that darkened room, watching what appeared to be a blank sheet of paper slowly reveal an image. First a shadow, then a shape, then an entire moment emerging from nothing. As a child, it felt almost impossible and it felt like magic. In many ways, it still does.

As a teenager, I joined a junior photography club and began traveling to different cities for competitions. We would walk unfamiliar streets with our cameras, searching for photographs—shapes, shadows, reflections and moments that other people might simply walk past. I won several awards, but what stayed with me was something more important: photography had taught me to see differently.

Years later, that ability to find beauty became far more personal.

After completing treatment for my second cancer, photography became my outlet. I would grab my camera and head outside. Sometimes there was no destination and no particular photograph in mind. I simply needed to go, explore and see.

During that period, I began to understand that a photograph could carry much more than a beautiful scene. I watched people become emotional—sometimes tearful—while looking at my images because they could somehow feel part of the journey. That affected me profoundly.

Photography also became a passport to experiences I never could have imagined as a child standing beside my grandfather in the darkroom. Through organizations including Athletes for Cancer and First Descents, my camera traveled with me to extraordinary places such as Hawaii, Bali, Tanzania and Costa Rica. Each place offered something completely different, yet I kept discovering the same thing: beauty doesn't necessarily announce itself. You have to be willing to look for it.

That philosophy continues to shape my work today. My photography continues to take me around the world, but some of my favorite images are created close to home. Whether I'm photographing a distant landscape, the shoreline of Lake Ontario, the Finger Lakes, or an unexpected moment of light in Western New York, I'm drawn to the same thing: places and moments that make me stop and look a little longer.

There is also something difficult to explain that happens when I am in the middle of shot and I know it is happening—the light, the composition, the moment all coming together. Everything else seems to disappear and it's almost hard to catch a breath. In those moments, I feel most connected to something greater than myself, and perhaps closest to the divine.

I've followed several different career paths throughout my life, but somehow they have always led me back to photography. Whether I'm standing in front of an extraordinary landscape halfway around the world or watching light fall across a familiar place close to home, I'm still doing what I learned to do all those years ago—looking for the unexpected shapes, shadows, light and moments that make us stop and feel something.

My work has been presented in multiple exhibitions and can be found in commercial spaces and private residences. Most recently, my photography was selected as the exclusive artwork for the new Webster branch of Finger Lakes Federal Credit Union and will appear in TV commercials as well.

But recognition has never been the reason I photograph.

For me, photography is about connection—to a place, to a moment, and sometimes to a part of ourselves we didn't expect to find there.

There is beauty everywhere. Sometimes we simply need to learn how to see it.