One landscape photographer’s move from shooting the scene to building the tools for it
© Filterfotograf
Riko Best did not set out to become a hardware manufacturer. For more than thirty years the German landscape photographer has worked behind the lens, teaching workshops and testing gear in the field. Somewhere along the way, after trying nearly every filter system he could get his hands on, he ran out of patience. None of them worked the way he thought a filter system should. So he designed his own.
“The idea essentially came from my own needs as a photographer,” he says. Nothing on the market fully convinced him, and the suggestions he had brought to established manufacturers over the years had mostly gone nowhere. Eventually he stopped waiting. “I reached the point where I decided to do it myself,” he says.
What frustrated him most was never the engineering. It was the workflow. In his workshops he kept seeing the same thing happen, especially with photographers newer to landscape work. They would set a polarising filter to cut reflections on water, then rotate the rectangular holder to line up a graduated filter, and on many systems that movement quietly shifted the polariser they had just adjusted. Add a strong neutral-density filter and the viewfinder goes so dark the photographer can no longer tell it has moved.
Removing that dependency became the core of his design. He built a system in which the round filter and the rectangular holder adjust independently, so one never disturbs the other, and the polariser can be used on its own without the full rectangular setup. It also settled a frustration he had carried for years. “As a photographer, I don’t want to choose between two different systems,” he says. He wanted a single kit that handled both round and rectangular filters, rather than deciding every morning which one to leave at home.
Getting there took a lot of trial and error. A background in 3D design let him print prototypes at home and hold them within hours, which sharpened his thinking fast. “Something that looks good in a sketch or on a computer screen doesn’t necessarily work well in practice,” he says. He learned that with his very first design, which felt convincing in his head and turned out wrong the moment he held it. The finished parts are precision machined rather than printed, the real jump from a working prototype to something that can be built consistently.
One principle he refused to bend on was openness. Plenty of manufacturers build closed systems that keep customers locked in, and he went the other way. Buying his system should never force a photographer to throw out the filters they already own and start over. Someone who owns good rectangular filters and is simply unhappy with their holder can switch and keep what they have. “The customer shouldn’t have to adapt to the product. The product should integrate as sensibly as possible into the photographer’s existing equipment,” he says.
The same independence shapes how he talks about his work. Rather than lean on paid promotion, he has stuck to independent testers and the trust he built over years of blunt, unsponsored reviews. “A good review needs to discuss both positive and negative aspects and then leave the final decision to the viewer,” he says. He holds his own gear to the same standard, inviting anyone who wants to test it to do so on their own terms.
And he is not finished. A lightweight travel tripod is ready to launch, a free app for landscape photographers is on the way, and prototypes of a rugged outdoor watch are already in production. Every one of them starts from the same question. “What actually makes sense for photographers, and what real problem can I solve?“.
About the author. Riko Best is a German landscape photographer with more than thirty years of experience and the founder of Filterfotograf, where he develops photography equipment and publishes his own books. He shares his work with a community of over 100,000 YouTube subscribers. His hybrid filter system, the LC Pro 100, combines round and 100mm rectangular filters in a single setup and has been independently reviewed by a specialist photography magazine with a five-star, “Very Good” rating, alongside more than 1,000 five-star customer reviews in its first year. It is available directly at https://www.filterfotograf.de/pages/riko-best
