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Sea Anemones Shot With A Cheap Kit
A modest waterproof case. A curious eye. A tide pool teeming with colour and texture. This photograph captures more than just two sea anemones nestled in their rocky enclave. It captures the enduring truth that photography is not always about the gear — but about the gaze. No high-end housing, no bespoke optics — just patience, instinct, and the will to submerge the lens where it rarely dares to go. The shallow water refracts the light into a painterly softness. Reflections and shadows dance on the submerged stones. The vivid, almost surreal red of the anemones emerges against a muted background, revealing an alien world within reach of a…
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Pentax k-5 And The Aquapack 458
Like the other two previous pictures, this one too has been taken by a Pentax K-5 housed into an Aquapack 458. This underwater housing, at least for APS-C dSLR, is a cheaper alternative to the more expensive, though bigger and better engineered, Ewa Marine. It fairly easy accommodates the camera and the DA* 16-50, but using this lens that has a 77mm filter thread forces the use a focal lenght of at least than 40-45 mm, otherwise the border of the external cap fills-in the picture. A DA* 16-50 at 16mm (I repeat: with a 77mm filter thread) is the bigger lens that can be accommodated into the housing, but…
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Under The Rocks
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On The Rocks
The sea’s edge is a place where chaos and order coexist — a shifting dialogue between water, light, and whatever lies beneath. In On the Rocks, my attention was drawn to the intricate textures created as the tide caresses clusters of dark, glistening molluscs anchored firmly against the current. At first glance, the subject might seem unremarkable, but in moments like these, photography teaches us to see beyond the obvious. Here, the composition works by bringing the viewer down to the water’s level. The low angle compresses perspective, creating an almost abstract layering of sharp foreground detail and softly diffused background. The bokeh of golden reflections in the upper part…
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Bent
Shot with a Nikon F3 and a 16mm fisheye, this isn’t your typical curved-sky, skateboard-in-midair kind of photo. Instead of pushing the distortion to the front of the image, I let it sneak in at the edges—just enough to bend the rules. The subject is ordinary: a coastal bridge, a pedestrian path, the usual lampposts lining a curve. But the lens pulls the whole scene inward, gives it weight and sweep, turns a flat space into something that stretches, leans, folds in on itself. I like using fisheye glass this way—not as a gimmick, not for laughs, but to see how geometry shifts when you force perspective without centring it.…
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A Dragon Trainer?
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Falling Tree
Again, an impossible perspective…
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For Sale
Long gone is the time when people loved to live in the countryside
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Noon on the Beach
Another experiment with the Nikkor 16mm F/3,5 Fish-Eye. Using this lens in a less conventional way is really challenging for the composition. Keep trying.
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Ninja-Turtles?
I couldn’t help but smile when I saw this line of turtles perched neatly along the log, each one angled just so to catch the warmth of the midday sun. It’s a scene that strips away the pop culture fantasy of katana-wielding reptiles and replaces it with something far more universal — the quiet pleasure of simply doing nothing. From a compositional standpoint, I did well to let the log form a natural leading line, drawing the viewer’s eye from the cluster on the left to the stragglers on the right. The surrounding foliage frames the scene nicely, adding depth and a touch of chaos to balance the orderly arrangement…
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Horizon Bending, Again
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The Misplaced Buoy
This time I’ve enabled the lens correction feature so that the Nikkor 16mm F/3,5 Fish-Eye horizon doesn’t looked curved.
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Footprint
Still… wideing.
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Do Not Disturb the News Reader
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Italy, Landscape Photography and the Law – Part Two
In a previous post I addressed some of the legal issues involved in Landscape Photography where copyright was willfully not mentioned: since copyright is an outcome of human creativity who might ever think of imposing it over a landscape? Well, as much as it sounds crazy, somebody did it: on 2o11 the Town of San Quirico d’Orcia, in Tuscany, passed a local regulation that copyrights landscape images and artistic, cultural, environmental and architectural “stuff”, making mandatory pro shooter to ask for an authorization before starting their sessions. This local regulation is simply illegal, because “copyright” implies an act of creativity, while the landscape in itself doesn’t (unless you believe in…
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Blowin in the Wind
Hopefully, he shouldn’t fall on the ground…
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Italy, Landscape Photography and the Law
Welcome back to the “Law, Order and Photography in Italy” series. The second episode (the first being about Street-Photography) deals with Landscape Photography and, again, provides practical advise for the photographer who travels through Italy shooting its nature. Summary Landscape Photography, at first sight, looks like a piece of cake. No need to hip shoot, no fear of being confronted by an illiterate policeman or angry passerby, no model-release to carry… just you, your camera and your subject: the Nature. But things, as often in Italy, aren’t that simple since rules and regulations extend (literally) up to the top of the mountains. To put it short, there are a few…
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Let’s get the party started…
Fishing boats have a way of announcing themselves well before they reach the harbour wall. The sound of the engine carries over the water, but it’s the birds that really give them away — a moving cloud of wings and calls, circling, swooping, waiting for the scraps that will inevitably be thrown overboard. This shot catches the “Nuova Zita” in that precise moment of return, driving straight toward me, bow cutting through the water, foam rising in a perfect V. I chose a dead-centre composition, a choice some might consider too rigid, but here it felt essential. The boat’s symmetry — red trim framing the white hull, the vertical mast…
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Through the Fog
The scene presented itself with no warning — one of those rare occasions where nature performs and the only real challenge is not missing the moment. I was walking through the hills when the mist thickened just enough to conceal and reveal in equal measure. What compelled me to stop wasn’t the tree, nor the fog, but the tension introduced by the artificial red plastic line cutting across the landscape — mundane, even ugly, yet unavoidably dominant in the composition. Framing this shot required restraint. Too wide, and the mood would dissipate. Too tight, and the context would vanish. The key lay in placing the tree just off-centre, allowing the…
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Welcome in the Twilight Zone
I wasn’t sure whether I was just coming down or entering into the Twilight Zone…
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The Hasselblad Way
As the readers of this blog know, I seldom talk about gear because since the very first post on this blog I made a point of stay focused on (shooting) pictures instead of musing about pointless technicalities such as Camera A vs Camera B ISO performance, Lens X vs Lens Y sharpness, APS-C vs Full Frame and so on, but today I do an exception because of an old Hasselbld 500 C/M that I have been given to try (and that probably will buy.) There is only one way to shoot with a Hasselblad: following its rule. The film has to be loaded in a certain way, the magazine locked…
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Landed
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The Seagull’s Rest
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An urgent phone call?
Using a tele (200 mm) allowed me to take the picture but the long focal didn’t separate the planes as a 50 mm would. Truth is that – in these condition – I would hardly have been close enough to obtain the visual effect I was looking for, but the alternative was not to take the shot at all.
