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Beach Party
Shot just after dawn, this image came together in seconds but tells a layered story of rivalry and instinct. The beach, in its usual emptiness, became a stage for the coarsely choreographed interaction between gulls and crows. I didn’t plan for a composition — I reacted to it. And yet, the result balances tension, motion, and rhythm better than many calculated frames. Technically, I leaned into softness rather than clarity. The overcast light pushed the colours into a muted palette, verging on monochrome. I let the flatness be, resisting contrast boosts in post, allowing the wet sand to mirror just enough detail without pulling the eye from the birds. Their…
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Dark Omen
I photographed this scene in late winter, when the bare trees carried no leaves and the sky pressed low with heavy clouds. The flock of birds, startled into flight, scattered across the frame in uneven patterns. Their silhouettes against the pale backdrop gave the scene a sense of unease, as though the moment was charged with something more than simple movement. Compositionally, I placed the trees as anchors, their skeletal branches reaching upward and outward, filling much of the lower frame. They serve as both structure and stage, while the birds provide rhythm and unpredictability. The flock is not evenly distributed—clusters form and break apart, guiding the eye from one…
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The Gate to the Appeal
Inside the Court of Appeals, a lobby serves more as a transition than a destination. The architecture is stripped of ornament—pure function, no decorative intent—yet the repeated octagonal frames create an unintended visual rhythm. Each opening leads to another, and then another, until the corridor seems to extend beyond its physical limits. What drew me to the scene was the quiet precision of these shapes. They’re not dramatic, but they impose order. The light at the far end, brighter and slightly softer than the interior illumination, acts as a vanishing point that pulls the viewer forward. It lends the space a faint sense of expectation, as though something awaits at…
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Feuer
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Moon, hand-held
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Zombies
It was one of those winter mornings where the fog doesn’t just obscure — it swallows. Standing on the shoreline with the Nikon D610 and my trusty Nikkor 105mm f/2.5, I could barely see ten metres ahead. Figures emerged slowly from the haze, walking towards me in silence, their features lost in the grey void. The effect was unsettling enough that, reviewing the shots later, I couldn’t help but think of a scene from a low-budget horror film — the title wrote itself. Technically, this photograph is a study in embracing limitation. Autofocus in such conditions is almost pointless, and it wasn’t a problem since the lens is full-manual; I…
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Easy To Shoot?
This picture might look “ordinary” but for the fact that I shot it with a rangefinder film camera (guess which?) during the scene change between to acts of a theatre play. Scene assistants were placing the furnitures, actors were trying to focus on their parts, there was no time (and place) to design a proper composition and set the camera. No autofocus, no real-time exposure and white-balance setting. Maybe I have been lucky capturing the match flame close to the cigar, maybe it was because of “muscle memory”, but I did it nonetheless. Problem is that I could not be sure if I succeeded until, one week later, I saw…
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Servicing a Beretta 98FS
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A view of the Bologna’s Station
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Portrait of a Professional Pugilist. Davide De Lellis
He had the kind of face that told its own story long before a shutter ever clicked — a mix of focus, fatigue, and that guarded reserve I’ve often seen in fighters before a bout. Photographing a professional pugilist isn’t about glorifying the violence of the sport, but about catching that fleeting moment where discipline, experience, and vulnerability intersect. I chose a tight composition, keeping the frame uncluttered so the viewer’s attention rested on the expression and posture. Every crease in the skin, every glint of sweat, mattered; these details carried more weight than any background could. Depth of field was shallow enough to isolate him from distraction, but not…
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The First Picture of the Year
The year opens with a frame caught mid-step — a street scene suspended between the casual and the cinematic. The woman in the leopard-print coat commands the foreground, her figure sharply rendered against the soft haze of the street beyond. Her presence is decisive, yet she faces away, offering no expression, only movement. The background melts into a gentle blur, two figures walking arm in arm becoming silhouettes of intimacy. The shallow depth of field works well here: the compression between crisp foreground and ghosted distance draws the viewer through the frame, making the eye travel naturally from the coat’s texture to the vanishing point of the street. Technically, the…
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Lockpicking Tools
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Superpila still rides…
This frame came together almost by accident. I was rummaging through a heap of obsolete electronics, mostly as a curiosity, and found myself fixated by the material fatigue of an old battery unit—branded “Superpila”—held together by deteriorating fabric tape. Time had clearly done its job: oxidation, dust, flaked paint. Yet, paradoxically, the components still looked like they could spark into life. That tension—between decay and function—is what led me to raise the camera. The shot leans heavily on texture and chaos. Compositionally, it’s tight and cramped, bordering on claustrophobic, and that’s deliberate. I wanted the viewer to feel immersed, maybe even overwhelmed, as though peering into something that’s no longer…
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Davide Grotta – Live
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Marianna D’ama – Live
The stage is barely the size of a rug. The audience—two dozen at most—sits within arm’s reach. There is no spotlight to hide behind, no sound engineer to balance the mix, no roaring crowd to dissolve into. Just a voice, an instrument, and the intimacy of shared air. In this photograph, the singer leans into the microphone with the same intensity one might expect in front of thousands. Her eyes are half-closed, her body wrapped around the rhythm, maracas held like extensions of her heartbeat. The grain of the black and white frame amplifies the sense of proximity—every shadow a whisper, every highlight a breath. House concerts are unforgiving in…
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School of Mathematics@Sapienza University of Rome
I composed this shot knowing it would live or die by its symmetry. The rationality of the architecture demanded nothing less. Sapienza’s School of Mathematics sits like a theorem etched in stone—precise, functional, stripped of excess. Guido Castelnuovo’s name anchors the frame, a reminder that mathematics is not only numbers, but legacy. The format is tight, frontal, and unforgiving. Every vertical and horizontal line had to be clean. A small tilt would’ve betrayed the sense of order. I waited for the man to step into the doorway—not to animate the structure, but to punctuate it. His relaxed stance, paper in hand, slightly breaks the formalism of the façade. A human…
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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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Weight Training @ Rome’s Stadio Olimpico
I shot this in harsh midday light, the kind most photographers dread. But the mosaic didn’t care. Its story is laid in stone — or more precisely, tesserae — and midday is when shadows become honest. The ancient-modern figure caught mid-lift, exaggerated anatomy and all, stood out like a silhouette against cracked mortar, telling a tale of strength far older than gym culture. The composition was dictated by the subject’s posture — hunched, determined — anchoring the frame and leading the eye to the barbell below. I shot from slightly above, keeping the symmetry broken just enough to feel real. The top of the frame includes fragments of the inscription…
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Full Moon
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Strategy
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Right before the gig
This frame lives in anticipation. No players yet, but the instruments are already in dialogue — the hollow-body guitar leaning with purpose, the upright amp humming quietly to itself, the pedals strewn like notes before the solo begins. It’s a moment I’ve always found more evocative than the performance itself. The absence becomes expressive. Shot on monochrome, grain unapologetically included, this wasn’t meant to be clean or polished. I exposed to protect the highlights — the reflective lacquer of the grand piano and the shiny knobs on the amp. Shadows fall naturally, but I let them creep in unevenly, especially on the left, where the plastic chair feels like an…
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Under the Heat Of Rome…
She walks past the stone balustrade, her wide-brimmed hat casting a deep shadow across her face. The pleated skirt moves with the air, its animal print contrasting with the weathered marble at her side. In her hand, a napkin-wrapped snack suggests both haste and respite, a small act of survival beneath the relentless Roman sun. The choice of black and white eliminates distraction and fixes the viewer’s attention on form, texture, and gesture. The skirt’s flowing transparency, the sharp lines of the ribbed top, and the curved stripes of the hat create a rhythm that plays against the rigid geometry of the architecture. Compositionally, the subject is caught mid-step, a…
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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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Das Feuerwehr
Stark light and harsh shadow are unforgiving companions. I leaned into both for this frame, shooting handheld at night on cobblestone soaked in sodium glow. The word FEUERWEHR — fire brigade — is scrawled vertically in bold white across the pavement, its urgency subdued by silence and stone. I chose to skew the perspective intentionally, aligning the top-right vanishing point with the guardrail and letting the painted letters lead the eye back into the void. There’s no subject in the conventional sense — no figure, no action. Just trace elements of human systems and warnings against an absence. Technically, this is an image pulled from constraint. Low light meant pushing…
