Maxim Kostin

When I was a child there were some cameras in my family, like FED (named after Felix E. Dzerzhinsky), some others, and when they presented me with a SMENA camera I was more frustrated than attracted by the process. I have never really mastered the Soviet red room technology, with the film and all that.

I was not photo-sick when a child, nor when I was a teenager. I had my studies, getting higher education, tormenting myself and my students as a postgraduate, tried my hand at various businesses, trying to find myself..

I did try a multitude of hobbies, most extreme ones and more sedate ones, until I started taking pictures. It was at that time that digital cameras entered our life for certain. It was the possibility of obtaining immediate results that bought me.

During one of my paraplane flight a black kite accompanied me. I had no camera with me so nobody believed in that kite. Next, when in Paris, I literally bumped in Belmondo, and again nobody believed me. Since then, my camera and my adventures are inseparable..

Photography turned out to be my most interesting acquiring, my most interesting find, gradually, as if by itself. My soap-box camera changed into single-lens camera, its case turned into the heaviest of rucksacks with all possible lenses, and my initial photo tours gave way to photo travels to various continents.