Hello! I am Judith...

I would like to call myself an “ambitious amateur photographer”. My main focus is nature and landscape photography, but I also like to make detours to other genres.

Even as a child I used to take photos with a compact camera on every vacation, but for some reason I have only been taking photos intensively for about seven years

Everything I know about photography is self-educated. A few books here, some internet research there, inspiration from the works of other photographers and a lot, really a lot of trying things out has brought me to where I am today.

No, I can't remember the subject of my first shot. It was when I was about ten or twelve years old and I'm pretty sure it was during a vacation with my parents in Austria.

I use a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV camera with a lot of different lenses (Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM, Canon EF 16-35mm f/4L IS USM, Sigma 12-24mm f/4 DG HSM Art, Sigma 14mm f/1.8 DG HSM Art, Tamron 70-300mm 1:4-5.6 SP Di VC USM, Tamron SP 90mm 1:2.8 Di Macro 1:1 VC USD, Tamron SP 150-600mm F/5-6.3 Di VC USD G2). I have some ND- and GND-filters (Haida) and I use a tripod of course.

One and a half years ago I bought a drone (dji Mavic 2 pro) for completely new perspectives.

It would be great if at some point I could make a living from my photography

Lots of people praise my pictures, which of course always makes me very happy, but I have not yet received a particularly creative compliment that I would have remembered.

My pictures are inspired by nature. Special light and weather moods, spectacular landscapes, but also the beauty of the animal world are always an incentive for me to get up at the craziest times and drag the heavy equipment around.

atmospheric, colorful, natural

It makes me happy and very proud that the jury liked my pictures so much that I not only won the Architecture - Historic category, but also received a Platinum Award, six Gold Awards and six Silver Awards.

In competitions that I'm entering for the first time, I put together a mix of older images (which I think are my best) and brand new ones. I only took the winning picture last winter and it fit perfectly into this category. What I like about this picture is the special lighting atmosphere that was created by light precipitation and dense, mist-like clouds. Plus the perfect reflection (which is one of my favorite motifs anyway).

Winning an Award doesn't have a direct impact on my career at the moment, but it always encourages me to keep taking photos and taking part in competitions. Of course, it increases my awareness and my pictures are made available to a large audience, so that I also sell a picture every now and then.

There are no particular photographers who have inspired me. I look at pictures on the winner lists of competitions and pictures on the relevant photo platforms and let myself be inspired by these pictures without looking at the name of the photographer. Of course you come across well-known names from time to time and so I can say that I almost always like pictures of Ales Krivec and Bence Máté, for example.

That wasn't exactly advice, but I was in Tuscany several years ago and met a few photographers there who were a little more experienced than me. I always met these photographers at certain locations to take pictures. So we all took the same pictures. Seeing what these photographers did with the same footage that I had also helped me a lot when it came to post-processing.

Learn the basic rules so that you can break them later...

And always compare your own works with the works of others. Always analyze pictures that you like, why you like them and use the findings for your own pictures.

As already mentioned, I look at the galleries of competitions (at least those categories to which I can also contribute pictures) in order to keep myself up to date on post-processing types and locations. I also experiment a lot with new post-processing programs, presets (some of which I create myself or change predefined ones) etc.

Rico 'Adventures of Rico' X.

Tom Putt

Albert Dros

I'm not a very sociable person and therefore don't have too many friends, especially not that many who take photos and take part in competitions, so only one name comes to mind: Markus van Hauten.