Snow is a common topic when it comes to winter landscape photography, but nature offers much more than that in terms of interesting subjects during the season. Extremely low temperatures, well below freezing, combined with wind gushes specific to high-altitude mountain passes, make for an extraordinary landscape scenery at the edge of the Carpathian forests.

I found these exact conditions this winter in the Ciucas Massif, one of the many mountain ranges of the Romanian Carpathians. The frozen landscape around me made me stop in my tracks even before reaching the high-altitude plateau. The entire forest was covered in a thick frost, with all the trees at the edge of the forest having this complete coverage all over their trunk and branches due to strong winds during nighttime.

The irregular, almost chaotic shape of all those intertwining branches of this particular tree, free of any leaves, gave a 'Medusa' look that fascinated me on the spot. I paid special attention to the framing of the trunk itself, bending from left to centre and then back to the left side of the image, giving both dynamism and depth.

I was also very careful in the way I positioned myself beneath the tree so that the branches would form a texture-like weave from the centre to the edges of the frame, emphasizing the instrumentality of this secular Carpathian tree.

The extremely harsh cold of that day is a feeling that I really wanted to emphasize, to make the viewer almost cringe when looking at this image, so the white balance was carefully selected in order to better portray the freezing cold I felt in those few hours at the base of the mountain.