What to expect

This two-week Romania Photo Tour is a slow, immersive journey into Transylvania, Wallachia, Maramures, and the Carpathian Mountains. It is designed for photographers who value authentic rural life, dramatic mountain landscapes, and rare cultural moments. The tour accepts a maximum of three photographers, ensuring flexibility, personal guidance, and the freedom to wait for the right light rather than the next checkpoint.

We explore the Carpathian Mountains, moving deep into regions where villages still follow the rhythm of seasons, hay is stacked by hand, and wooden gates guard family histories. Traveling by a capable off-road vehicle, we reach remote valleys, high pastures, forest tracks, and mountain roads inaccessible to standard tours. Sunrises break over rolling hills wrapped in mist, while evenings settle into layered blues and amber tones over shepherd huts and ridgelines.

The heart of the journey is Maramureș, one of Europe’s most visually and culturally intact rural regions. Here, we photograph wooden churches, traditional villages, elderly locals in everyday life, and pastoral scenes that feel suspended in time. The tour is carefully timed to coincide with All Saints’ Day (Luminățiile), a deeply moving religious tradition. After sunset, cemeteries become seas of candlelight as families honor their ancestors. It is a rare, intimate photographic moment where light, memory, and silence merge, demanding sensitivity, respect, and a documentary eye.

Another important chapter of the journey unfolds in Transylvania, where you can capture the Saxon architecture and the rolling hills. We explore several Transylvanian fortified churches, remarkable medieval structures built by Saxon communities to serve both spiritual and defensive roles. At sunrise and sunset, these churches offer powerful compositions where geometry meets landscape, and stone blends into rolling hills and cultivated fields.

Equally compelling is our encounter with Roma communities, particularly families who still practice the traditional craft of handmaking copper pots and cauldrons. In small yards and workshops, fire, hammer, and metal come together in a rhythmic choreography that is intensely visual. Photographing these moments offers you access to a unique way of living.

Days are shaped by weather, light, and local encounters rather than rigid schedules. There is time for strolling, returning to locations, and refining compositions. Guidance is available throughout, whether you are working with landscapes, environmental portraits, or storytelling sequences. It doesn't matter how experienced or inexperienced you are as a photographer. It doesn't matter if you have the latest, most expensive professional camera or just a good phone camera. It's important to enjoy photography.

This is not a sightseeing tour with cameras. It is a photographic expedition into rural Romania, where dirt roads replace highways, tradition unfolds before your eyes, and every frame carries depth, patience, and meaning.

The tour is focused on real moments, and nothing is staged or fake.