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Hands of a Steward
Shooting up and close in confined space. A skill every street-photographer should hone. This photograph, Hands of a Steward, strips air travel of its grand narratives—no sweeping cabin views, no glamour of jet engines—reducing it instead to the essential human act of service. The subject is cropped tightly, showing only the steward’s forearms and hands as they prepare to serve water. The details tell the story: the gold buttons on the navy blazer, the insignia on the chest, the precise, slightly formal watch peeking from under the cuff. CompositionThe frame works in the language of precision. By excluding the steward’s face and body, the photograph directs our full attention to…
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Evolution in Red
The frame unfolds on a Milanese street, a busy scene of people moving in different directions, yet bound by an unplanned visual thread — the colour red. On the far left, a stroller stands out, its fabric vivid against the muted tones of the pavement and stone façades. On the far right, a man in a red jacket, phone pressed to his ear, anchors the other end of the composition. Between them lies the space in which meaning is manufactured by the viewer: a perceived transition from childhood to adulthood, implied but never intended by reality itself. The technical construction supports this interplay. The image uses depth rather than focus…
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Beer or Spritz?
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Fast Drivers in Via del Tritone
Via del Tritone at night has a way of compressing time. Standing at the curb, I could feel the pulse of the city—headlights cutting through the darkness, scooters weaving between lanes, the chatter of pedestrians briefly audible before being swallowed by the traffic. I set out to capture that restless energy, the kind that makes you feel Rome isn’t an ancient city at all, but something entirely modern, alive and impatient. The shot hinges on motion blur. A slower shutter allowed the black car in the foreground to smear into streaks of light and shadow, while the scooters retained just enough form to remain identifiable. This contrast between sharp architectural…
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A Priest Walking Through the Graffiti Streets
I took this photograph on a narrow cobbled street, where the encounter was fleeting. The priest moved with determination, his robes flowing around him, his beard caught in mid-sway. The background of tagged walls and worn stone contrasted sharply with his presence, layering a sense of tension between the sacred and the profane, tradition and modern neglect. Compositionally, the image relies on that juxtaposition. I framed him walking into the picture, leaving space in front to suggest motion. The graffiti and rough textures anchor the scene in the urban present, while his attire evokes a continuity that feels almost timeless. That clash is where the strength of the image lies:…
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Will The iPhone Kill Traditional Cameras? Not Very
This isn’t a critique of smartphones in general—it’s a direct response to the overconfident marketing myth that an iPhone can replace a dedicated camera in every scenario. I took this photo to illustrate the limitations, and it delivered. Overprocessed, hyper-smooth, plasticky where it should have texture, and clinically shallow in all the wrong ways. Technically, the iPhone did what it was programmed to do: expose for the highlights, boost saturation, fake depth of field with computational blur, and call it “smart.” The result is a scene that looks like a rendering rather than a photograph. The contrast between the dead leaves and the healthy ones is crushed into flatness. No…
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Servicing a Beretta 98FS
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Comarketing
Two adjacent shop windows that seem, unintentionally, to speak to each other. On the left, rare books and old prints rest under soft light, their pages worn and yellowed. On the right, a brightly lit glass case displays modern eyewear, polished and reflective, marketed with sleek precision. A drainpipe slices the frame in two, acting as a border between past and present, knowledge and fashion, permanence and trend. Technically, the image holds together through contrast. The exposure balances the dim warmth of the books with the cooler, artificial light of the glasses’ display. Reflections in the glass add layers, hinting at street life beyond the frame. The sharpness allows textures…
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What’s the Time?
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Garbage As Usual – Pantheon’s Nearby
Rome has an unrivalled way of holding beauty and decay in the same frame, and this street is no exception. The cobblestones, slick from a recent rain, mirror the ochre façades and Renaissance windows in a way that almost disguises the litter piled quietly along the curb. Almost. A man in a crisp shirt walks down the centre, back straight, seemingly immune to the refuse that flanks his path. It’s not that he doesn’t see it—it’s that he’s learned to live with it, as many Romans have. On the right, another figure leans against a doorway, absorbed in his phone, framed by stacked crates and plastic bags. Life continues unbothered.…
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The Boat That Never Left
Docked, stripped, tagged, rusted. I shot close with a fisheye to exaggerate the curvature of the hull and drag the viewer across its surface. The distortion isn’t incidental—it’s structural. The lines bend to reveal scale and tension. This is graffiti over steel, corrosion under paint, void behind broken glass. I exposed for the midtones to hold the whites in the spray and the texture in the oxidised seams. f/8 for consistent edge-to-edge sharpness, ISO 200, 1/125s. Light was flat—overcast sky softening shadows without dulling the forms. The left-to-right arc carries the frame. No central subject. Instead, accumulation. Tags, vents, cables, fractures. The dolphin up top is barely visible but critical—vestigial optimism…
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The Score Keeper
There’s a subtle choreography here — one man aiming downrange, the other poised with a device held high, recording or perhaps timing. The scene is unmistakably a shooting range, but the moment is more about the roles that orbit the act itself. This isn’t just about the shooter; it’s about the infrastructure of precision, measurement, and discipline that frames the sport. Compositionally, the photograph works well with its layered focus. The viewer’s eye moves naturally from the strong diagonal of the man in white, up his raised arm, and then across to the figure in dark clothing aiming towards the target screen. The two red handprints on the barrier form…
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When Heroes Come to Town
The armour clanked softly as he turned. Foam, paint, Velcro, and pride. I took this shot at a cosplay convention. The kind where universes blur together in the corridors and everyone is someone else for a while. He was dressed as Optimus Prime—or something close enough to carry the weight. She stood opposite, painted purple, gold-clad glove raised in mock judgment. Thanos, reimagined with a wink. I shot from behind. It felt right. Not to reveal, but to witness. There’s a kind of reverence in seeing a costume from this angle: the care in the stitching, the scuffs from wear, the illusion holding just enough to be believable—but only to…
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(Not so) Intelligent Design
A white hand dryer, sleek and sterile, is mounted firmly on a tiled wall. Below it dangles a single electric cable, ending uselessly in an unplugged RJ connector. There is no socket in sight. No conduit, no power. Just absence. The image is clean, quiet—and absurd. The title, Intelligent Design, delivers a sharp, dry irony. It borrows from the vocabulary of creationist theology to highlight a mundane failure of basic planning. What was meant to be functional is, quite literally, disconnected. In this unassuming scene, the promise of utility is contradicted by execution. The dryer, meant to dry hands, is impotent. The infrastructure, meant to enable function, is missing. Photographically, the…
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The Solitude of Power
In this staged tableau, a single white king stands isolated at the centre of a chessboard, surrounded by a dense perimeter of pawns, bishops, rooks, and knights—black and white alike. The visual symmetry is precise, the tension deliberate. It is a composition that speaks of power, but also of its limits. The king is both the most important and the weakest piece on the board. Its capture ends the game, yet it is immobile without protection. The title, The King’s Solitude, plays on this paradox: the sovereign stands alone, sovereign yet vulnerable, elevated yet exposed. In the context of international relations, this image evokes the precarious nature of leadership on the…
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Menu Meditation
There’s a particular silence in cafés just before ordering. That moment when the cold air from outside still clings to your coat, and all attention narrows to laminated options and the quiet negotiations of hunger. This was taken on a grey afternoon in Brussels. A couple sits across from each other, each reading their own menu as if studying for an exam. No phones. No talking. Just decisions to be made: sweet or savoury, warm or cold, this or that. It’s a familiar ritual, yet rarely observed this closely. What drew me in wasn’t the scene’s drama—there was none—but its quietness. The soft concentration on their faces, the gentle lean…
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Renovating Milan
Milan, November 2017. A construction site—not the kind that demands attention, but the quiet kind that hides behind fabric and scaffolding. I took this photo walking past it for the third or fourth time. What stopped me wasn’t the building itself, but its ghost. Behind the mesh screen, the silhouette of the old façade still lingered, like a memory bleeding through fabric. Chimneys, outlines, the suggestion of windows. The city behind the curtain. At the bottom, the standard construction notice: printed bureaucracy stapled to metal, a reminder that change is always sanctioned, scheduled, structured. But the rest of the image resists clarity. Straight lines waver, verticals drift. Even the fence…
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Intelligence Contest
A pane of glass separates two worlds. On one side, the hyper-stylised gaze of a model — digital, sculpted, aloof. His stare pierces outward from an ad inside a hair salon, promising precision, control, curated masculinity at €21. Behind the glossy veneer, real people go about their routines, dwarfed by the giant printed face that symbolises a synthetic ideal. On the other side, a cluster of balloons—soft, round, unformed—calls out with its own clumsy presence. Unintended perhaps, but visually evocative, the column of latex orbs resembles a puppet or caricature. In their simplicity, they reflect something the model cannot: humanity, imperfection, absurdity. The composition turns into theatre. A confrontation of…
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The Temple of Justice
From an elevated perspective, the grand staircase of the Italian Court of Cassation descends in perfect symmetry. Framed by neoclassical columns and lit by reverent lamplight, this space does not merely lead—it ascends, conceptually, toward the divine. The title, The Temple of Justice, is not metaphorical hyperbole, but a statement of function and form. This is not a courthouse. It is a sanctuary. Justice, as the image suggests, is not a secular procedure. It is a liturgy. It unfolds with rituals, vestments, invocation of higher powers, and the solemnity of faith. The robes, the benches, the altars of the law—these mimic the language of churches. And the Court of Cassation, the…
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Skull of Glass at the London Science Museum
Standing in front of this glass skull, I was struck by the tension between its physical transparency and the opacity of its meaning. Photographically, the object invites a very particular challenge — how to capture something that both reflects and refracts its surroundings while retaining a sense of sculptural form. I approached the composition head-on, embracing the symmetry of the human face while allowing the slight distortions of the glass to play across its features. The choice of a tight crop eliminates environmental distractions, forcing the viewer into a direct confrontation with the piece. The reflections — faintly revealing the space beyond — create subtle secondary layers, adding context without…
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Gigi Cifarelli Guitar Solo (feat. Michele Di Toro) – Live@Florian Espace Pescara
This the reportage I did on behalf of Rockol.it with a Canon 5d Mk III and the venerable Canon EF 70-200/2,8. These frames came from a night where the light was scarce but the music was abundant. I knew from the start that I would have to work with the available stage lighting, which meant pushing the ISO well beyond my comfort zone. The result is a grain structure that feels almost filmic — not something I tried to hide, but rather embraced, as it adds texture that suits the intimacy of live jazz. The composition developed naturally: Gigi Cifarelli to the right, fully immersed in his guitar, and the…
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Lost in Le Puglie
There are roads in Puglia that don’t go anywhere fast. This was one of them. Shot from behind the wheel, somewhere between nowhere and nowhere else, I caught this image of a slow-moving tractor framed by empty fields and a sky too wide to hold. The road is narrow, uneven, old—but it doesn’t complain. Like most things around here, it does its job without fuss. The light was gentle, just after afternoon, slipping into that moment where colour fades softly rather than drops off. The greens were still sharp, the sky leaning pale toward evening, and everything felt settled. No drama. No rush. What drew me in wasn’t the tractor…
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Ray-Ban in Milan
It’s not just about what sits on the roof—it’s about what it says without blinking. Shot in the heart of Milan, this image captures a building that has seen eras come and go, crowned by a brand that has spent decades convincing the world to look cool while blocking out the light. The lettering floats above the stone like graffiti gentrified by permanence. I framed the photo dead-on, as if to let the architecture and the logo negotiate their own contrast. The façade is neoclassical, orderly, almost too proud to wear an ad. But there it is—Ray-Ban—scribbled in neon above cornices and keystones, as defiant as it is inevitable. Black…
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Inside The Clocktower
I made this photograph standing in the cramped, dusty heart of the clocktower, where the public face of time is reversed, fragmented, and framed by machinery. From here, the bold Roman numerals of the clock are a shadow-play against frosted glass, mirrored in a way that strips them of their usual authority. The word TREBINO—the maker’s mark—appears backwards, as if time itself had been flipped. The challenge in this shot was balance—both in composition and exposure. The brightly lit clock face risked blowing out entirely against the dim, oil-stained gears and pulleys in the foreground. I underexposed slightly to retain detail in the shadows, allowing the face to glow without…
