Usually, people begin their photography journey by getting a camera in childhood, shooting a film camera and buying the first digital soap camera, etc. Everything happened to me spontaneously in Donetsk, Ukraine in the Spring of 2007. Decided to buy a digital camera. Over time, I began to shoot more and more… A few months later I realised that I needed a DSLR camera. I raised money and got my first DSLR in 2008. Until spring I had shot mostly at home before spring. When it warmed up it became possible to shoot outdoors. New opportunities for creativity opened up, and I began to realise what to do, why, and for whom. I was involved in the world of photography and very quickly it acquired a different meaning, I realised that it is important not to capture only the moment but to deliver vibes to spectators. You need to choose a scenario for what is happening, and understand what and why is happening in this photograph. Even if the spectator does not catch or does not understand. So a photography shot should live its own life.
At the beginning of my journey in photography, I chose a rather complex creative direction – Dark Art. Nevertheless, I tried the other directions – landscape, macro, portrait, etc. Dark art is an extended vision of the world, one of my main directions now. However, commercial shootings began to arrive completely unrelated to the opposite direction of creativity. This allowed me to realise myself as a professional photographer.
The world of professional photography opened up for me in 2010 when I decided to begin in the beauty industry. A team of specialists (stylists, hairdressers, make-up artists, designers, etc.) helped me with this. They did the tasks assigned to them. Studio beauty photography is a vast area for the photographer to work with light, and for the retoucher – in processing. In 2011, Irina Istratova (Big Bad Red), a professional retoucher and photo manipulator, took up post-production. This raised my photography to a new qualitative level. Beauty photography has become one of the main areas of our work with Irina. Photo manipulation was a new creative direction for me. This is a new art form, subject to the intersection of photographs and drawings. Photomanipulations allow realising the fantasy of a person.
Moving to Kyiv was a milestone in 2012. New team and new opportunities. After all, most photographers have to spend their time retouching photos. Accordingly, the quality of their capture of work is like that of a photographer. I committed to strictly delineating responsibilities: a photographer creates a photograph and a team of retouchers is always ready to do any kind of retouching. Shooting process organisation requires skills that I’ve acquired over many hundreds of shootings. That’s why my photography service is one of the best in the market. The desire for an ideal result is ensured by many years of experience in the field of photography and retouching, as well as cooperation with only the best stylists, hairdressers and makeup artists. The use of modern studio equipment makes it possible to implement complex projects. I struggle not to stop in my creative development by applying non-standard lighting schemes, and trying new retouching methods to apply this experience in my professional work.
In 2022 the war broke out in Ukraine and I had to move to the UK to continue what I had been doing for over 15 years.