I must admit that is not a photograph, it is a snapshot. But still I like it. It is funny, it is kind. It brings smile to your face. What more can I ask for? There is a little story behind it, there is not much to tell, but at least it explains weird wigs and girls excitement. That was summer of 2003 and I found myself in Minneapolis, Minnesota at Twin Cities Open Dancesport Championship. The tradition of such competitions is to mix actual dancesport rounds with little shows presented by dance studios. The movie “Chicago” based on the Broadway show with the same name was a hit that year. Every dance studio on every dancesport competition I was that year felt obligated to do its own interpretation of “Come on babe - Why don’t we paint the town? - And all that Jazz!” These girls were about to enter the dance floor when I slipped in front them drawing their attention with my camera and big bracket flash. Photographer! Say “Cheese!” - somebody said. The girls happily obliged and put on a huge smile, I snapped my picture and the next moment they poured out on the dance floor. “And all that Ja-a-azz!”

A couple years I was driving from Mount Rainier to Palouse in Eastern Washington. I was looking forward to see for the first time Palouse region which suppose to be looking like my beloved Tuscany in Italy. I wanted to get there by sunset and I was focused on the road and did not pay much attention to surroundings. Till I saw this windmill on a top of the ridge somewhere after Yakima. A flock of perfect puffy clouds was streaming across aquamarine blue sky, endless yellow wheat fields rolled through the hills up to horizon and this windmill - it was like an exclamation point to all this wonder. I stopped my car, got out, tried several compositions and hurried again towards Palouse. What a pity! I found nothing even comparable to this place in Palouse. At least at that day. Now, two years later I discovered these pictures again. I made panorama from seven vertical frames and posted it to my website. And I found myself returning to this photograph again and again. There is something magical in it for me. Even though I am very critical to my photographic creations I must say - I like this photograph. I am proud of it.

Bosque del Apache is national wildlife refuge just one and half hours south on I-25 from Albuquerque in New Mexico. Here, in lakes and marshes along Rio Grande River is a place where tens of thousands of migratory birds including sandhill cranes, Arctic geese, and many kinds of ducks gather each fall and stay through the winter.

The most spectacular thing to watch in Bosque del Apache is the morning flyout. It occurs at sunrise when the first rays of ascending sun hit the Rio Grande valley. Exactly at this moment every morning thousands of geese wake up and take off simultaneously in one thunderous explosion of thousands of wings. It sounds like a jet fighter taking off. It is an awesome sight: the pond empties in only a few seconds, and multiple layers of geese fly low overhead at different altitudes and slightly different headings, frantically calling and honking to keep family groups together.

Bosque del Apache is prime spot for congregation of bird photographers as well. They flock here in dozens and line up every morning along the pond waiting for the flyout. With expensive cameras and huge telephoto lenses. It is a photographic subculture. Everybody seems to know everybody. They come to Bosque del Apache year after year. Oh, and if you have lens less than 400mm you are, well, not really cool.

I was there too. Following the crowd I mounted the biggest telephoto lens I have on my camera and set it up on a tripod. Made several frames waiting for the flyout. And then it came to me - the main subject is not the birds, it is the photographers. Their grotesque silhouettes and silhouettes of their tripods against the bright hues of sunrise sky created a perfect picture. I quickly changed telephoto to wide angle lens on my camera and literally started to crawl on the ground looking for the right composition. I found it with one of the photographers using his handheld medium format camera surrounded with his other two cameras on tripods. And at this moment the flyout happened. It lasted only few seconds but I’ve got my picture: a silhouette of photographer against the mass of ascending birds in the morning sky.

One gloomy October afternoon I found myself on a Staten Island ferry going back to Manhattan. It was about to rain, low heavy clouds cloaked New York leaving no hope for sun, oozing sense of despair into a humid cold air. And then I saw a torch glowing with warm orange light. It was Statue of Liberty. I found a clear spot in scratched ferry window and made several frames. Unconsciously I selected a composition which wasn’t aimed to show Statue of Liberty but rather its glowing torch tiny from the distance. It boldly but helplessly tried to illuminate approaching darkness of night. There is always a hope.

Once I had a chance to participate in online conversation with well-known Russian photographer Sergey Maximishin. The subject was on photographic composition. In short, Sergey’s point was that a good composition should have several visual attractors connected together in a closed loop forming some sort of polygon. Viewer’s attention moves from one visual attractor to another, but he is never forced away, outside the frame of the photograph. Moving in a closed loop visual perception works like a corkscrew following the spiral in deeper understanding and appreciation of the photograph.

In my photograph from Oia in Santorini I believe I constructed such a loop, a polygon: windmill, blue arch with a cross, following a rope from a bell you get to a blue vase, then cloth line with colorful red spreads swaying in a wind leads you to lower left corner from where your visual attention jumps back to the windmill. I think an integral part of this polygon is the rope from the bell to the blue vase. Otherwise horizontal lines formed by a structure of the building would have overpowered the composition.

On a personal note I don’t think that closed loop composition in a photograph works for me. I believe that we perceive pictures on a subconscious level in a split of second; the rest is just “an elaborate post-hoc rationalization” which we call consciousness. We think that we need time to understand the picture, go around it in a loop or a spiral when in fact we need time to rationalize our subconscious first impression of the picture. So, in my view my task as a photographer is produce photographs with “killer” compositions which are simple, powerful and bold. That kind of composition gives a “knockdown” to visual perception of a viewer. Later he may go in loops and spirals around my photograph but that is later, that is the next layer of visual perception. Ultimately a perfect photograph should be like a Newton’s apple which hits you in a head and which later could be slowly eaten satisfying your eyes with its round form and red and yellow color and your taste buds with its sweet zest. And hopefully that apple can open door for you to new ideas or powerful emotions.

In a course of several years I had a privilege to attend to numerous ballroom dance competitions. I have been asked by dancers and organizers of these competitions to make some pictures for them which I gladly did. I learned how to cope with low light and mixed lighting, how to compose photographs with right dancers’ postures and how to anticipate the perfect moment in their movements on a dance floor before pressing a shutter release. This time I let myself to experiment a little bit with slow sync flash and long shutter speeds. I like the results. The photographs became quasi-paintings. Instead being frozen in their movements with short shutter speed dancers in these photographs do actually move. There is a sense of movement and flow in these photographs. And I like it.

Every time I come to ballroom dance competitions and see dancers in makeup and beautiful dresses on the ballroom floor, the way they dance, move and present themselves I cannot help but think about dance as mating ritual. It is a play in which a woman can be a woman, femininity at its extreme - beautiful, gorgeous, stunning with perfectly done hair, heavy salacious makeup, bright dazzling dresses. And they can dance. What could be better? You can do things on the dance floor which are impossible to do in regular routine life. In essence dance is a sensual drama played in public. And it is beautiful. It is art.

San Francisco de Asis Mission Church in Ranchos de Taos has been photographed many, many times. The most famous photograph is by Ansel Adams showing the back of the church. It gives an impression, at least for me when I first saw it, that it positioned in a vast empty space like many Italian churches placed in front of big piazzas. In fact Ranchos de Taos church is very intimate: there is a very small plaza with crumbled pavement in front of the church. It is surrounded by small shops and houses. La Fiesta Saloon is claiming the other side of the plaza. Church is not alone, it does not sand out, it is part of the community. The place is quintessential New Mexico. With a touch of Italy.

When I first came to the plaza at daytime a small children’s choir was rehearsing inside the church. The sweet sound of their voices was spilling into the fresh winter air. The plaza was empty and I spent about two hours not only making photographs but just walking around and drinking Taos crisp cold air like chilly wine. I came back again after sunset. And again nobody was around, just me. The church was illuminated with floodlights and I caught a moment when luminosity of the church and the sky was the same and made almost the same composition several hours ago in daylight. Sweet memories…

In one of our travels to Tuscany in Italy we stayed for several days in a small village called Lucignano d’Asso. It is hardly a village, it is just a few medieval houses perched on a top of the hill. The whole place is owned by one woman, baroness. She met and greeted us when we arrived late night. The next morning we discovered how beautiful that place was. It was early April, out of tourist season and the village was virtually empty. We had it all to ourselves. We had plans to drive around the country, to Pienza and Bagno Vignoni but instead we stayed and simply soaked the beauty around us. Outside the house there was a patch all covered in flowers. I spent almost an hour crawling around and making pictures. This is a vertical panorama I made from 5 frames. I used 60mm macro lens and changed the focus for every subsequent frame to make the whole panorama tack sharp from bottom to top. There are two different perceptions of this panorama made as a large print: you can look at it from a distance and enjoy the colors and texture and it is totally different from up close when you immerse yourself into life-size colorful flowers.

Today I posted a few photographs I brought back from my recent trip to Greece. Most of them are photographs of stairs from Santorini. It became a surprise even for me when later I looked at the collection: I’m not sure where the theme of stairs came from. I guess it is the way these little villages in Santorini are built: perched on the high cliff above the sea, paths and stairs, dome shaped structures growing on each other. It feels natural as natural world: Santorini is one few places where you feel not aliened by perfect straight lines and forms of modern architecture.

I immediately turned to my bookshelf and found book of legendary Christopher Alexander “The Luminous Ground: The Nature of Order” and turned to the page which offered me an explanation:

Human beings have, in the past, recognized such places as numinous. They are places which carry the spirit. They are places which carry the soul. This language may or may not useful. But what I want to insist on, is only the one thing: some places, some things, are of such a nature that we feel more intensely related to them, we feel a relationship with them, a direct relationship between our self and that thing, that place. We feel it most strongly, and when we feel it we feel that we are connected with all things, with the universe.

I am fascinated with apes. They are like we are - humans and the same time they are not. Looking at them I always think what they think looking at me. That is thought to think about while picking from the nose…