This place is located in the Apuseni Mountains, part of the Carpathian Mountains in Romania. The place is very famous for its foggy morning but I find it very hard to compose and photograph the location due to the abundance of great photos taken in this place. My idea was pretty spontaneous when I came here. It came up the night before, when I was talking to a friend of mine about what we could explore the next morning. Even I'm usually the kind of person who pretty much plans the outdoor adventures, there are moments when I want to go out and explore nature and to be surprised.
I was surrounded by darkness, and I could barely see what it was in front of me. A foggy river was reaching to my knees, and the valleys were flooded by this imaginary “misty river”. I waited about an hour until the first ray of the sun, my hands were frozen, the photo lens also had some icing on it, and the display was steaming at my every breath. Only a few ravens were disturbing the tranquillity that surrounded me. When the sun came up, everything came to life: the misty river seemed to get more and more crowded, the birds began to sing, and I began to feel my hands. It was quite hard to create a composition because this special moment took just 1-2 minutes, so I decided to have a more intimate composition, to focus on a clump of trees and to show the transition between night and day instead of photographing the entire view.
I can say that my post-processing is very minimal, I spend very little time in front of my computer making changes to the original file. Most of the time I’m trying to capture special moments, combined with good exposure, it shortens my time spent on post-processing. Even though sometimes my post-processing is more complex, every time I’m trying to reflect nature as I saw it. Regarding this photo, the post-processing was quite minimal, and this is because the weather condition and the light contributed a lot to the moody atmosphere. The focus in Lightroom was to work on contrast, highlights, and blacks. Also, I did small changes to the white balance to reflect what I’ve seen in the field.
