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Still Ruling The Empire
The statue in this image has its back turned to the camera, but it commands the frame entirely. Shot in Rome, with the dome of Santi Luca e Martina on the left and the Torre delle Milizie rising in the distance, this bronze figure—likely an emperor or general—stands as if still governing the landscape before him. I didn’t photograph the face on purpose. The power of this moment lies in presence, not identity. The shot is about line, volume, and the compression of history into layers. The trunk of the umbrella pine rises behind him like a sceptre made of wood and air, while the palatial facades blend architectural periods…
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Get Ready, Set, Go
I’ve always enjoyed the way a single moment in the street can hold multiple narratives at once. In this frame, taken in Piazza Venezia with the Vittoriano looming behind, the cyclist seems caught between pause and motion — a split-second where the decision to push forward hasn’t yet been made. The backlighting was a gamble. Shooting into the sun with the Fuji X-T3 and the XF 16-80 meant dealing with inevitable flare, lowered contrast, and the risk of losing detail in the shadows. But I wanted that shaft of light breaking through, almost theatrical in how it picks out the rider against the cobblestones. Exposure was a compromise: holding the…
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So Long, and Thank You for the Fish
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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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Stairway to Hell
This photograph emerged from a fascination with how architecture shifts once stripped of its context. What the lens captured here is, in essence, a flight of stairs. Yet under the harsh saturation of artificial red light and the obliteration of all surrounding detail into deep black, it becomes a surreal passage, one that feels less like a functional structure and more like an allegorical descent—or ascent, depending on how one reads it. The title, of course, plays on that ambiguity. From a compositional standpoint, the image relies heavily on abstraction. The staircase cuts diagonally across the frame, its curve creating a dynamic tension with the void beside it. Negative space…
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Sun Worshipers
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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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Gliding Away
I caught this shot as the gull moved past me, wings stretched in an elegant curve, pulling away from the frame almost as quickly as I brought the camera to my eye. Tracking birds in flight with the DA* 50-135 on the K-3 II is always a test of reflexes and technique, especially when the background is a shifting plane of textured water. The lens handled the contrast well, keeping the bird distinct enough from the muted greens and greys of the sea, though the fine detail in the wingtips fell just short of crisp — a reminder that a fractionally faster shutter speed might have been the better choice.…
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Waiting for the Fish
There’s a particular kind of pleasure in using the Pentax K-3 II paired with the DA* 50-135mm f/2.8—a combination that rewards patience much like the fisherman in this frame. The lens’s rendering and microcontrast gave me exactly what I wanted here: a clean separation between subject and background without the look feeling forced. The weather was brooding, the horizon hazy, and the colours naturally muted, so the camera’s sensor, with its well-known dynamic range, had plenty of tonal nuance to work with. The man in the red hoodie became my obvious focal point—a striking colour contrast against the cooler palette of sea and sky. His posture, hands clasped behind his…
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Should I Seat?
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Landing
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Bronine Volkit Camera Hub. Mixed feelings
The picture is self-eplaining. Patona batteries show odd parameters, while a Nikon original battery is more in line with the declared specs. This is by no way a reliable experiment, as the batteries’ state is not comparable. I will continue experimenting with different models because these results are pretty odd. However I can not blame Patona for the outcomes, for the bromine volkit itself might be defective and a fair comparison should be based upon batteries handled similarly.
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A Skateboarder
I took this shot with a long lens, standing just far enough back to flatten the scene and compress the zig-zag of the bike lane into a graphic, winding ribbon. What drew me to the moment was the contrast between the physical tension of the skateboarder’s posture and the rigid lines of the urban environment. He’s caught mid-shift — arms out, knees bent, entirely present in his balance. No theatricality, no posing. Just rhythm and gravity. The geometry of the path worked as an unintentional compositional gift. The white lines, curved rails, and signage almost funnel the viewer’s attention into the skater’s hunched figure. A classic leading-lines scenario, but more…
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After Heat, Structure
I made this photograph handheld, late afternoon. The car was still warm. Fire had done what fire does: reduced all function to form, all value to surface. What remained was metal, glass, ash—and light. I chose a shallow angle, head-on through the front windscreen, to confront the wreckage as directly as possible. The lens was at roughly 60mm, allowing a slight compression of space. I focused on the mid-depth—the charred dashboard—so the frame reads in layers: foreground (rust and blistered bonnet), middle (molten plastic and exposed seat frames), background (burned upholstery, collapsed interior geometry). Each plane tells a different part of the story. The light was flat, which helped. No…
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Black Cat
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Toxic Waste in Open Air
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Fixing the ship
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A ‘Trabocco’ on the Adriatic Sea
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Deserved Rest
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A Street-Skater on the Waterfront
I came across him by the harbour on a day when the wind carried the smell of salt and diesel from the moored fishing boats. He wasn’t performing for an audience—just skating alone, immersed in his own rhythm. His movements were sharp but fluid, somewhere between dance and martial art. I wanted to capture that moment when the body leans into balance, teetering on the edge of a fall but never crossing it. The setting presented an immediate visual contrast: the fluidity of his posture against the static, almost heavy backdrop of the docked ships. I framed him to the left, letting the background breathe, so that the masts, ropes,…
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Open Interior
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Splinter
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Drying Clothes
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The Last Journey Of An Hero of Italian Motoring
Behold, the Fiat 500. Not the modern one that’s all airbags and Bluetooth and makes you feel like a fashion blogger. No, this is the real thing. The original. The glorious, underpowered, unapologetically tinny Italian shoebox. And look at it now—strapped to the back of a truck like a pensioner wheeled out of the bingo hall for the last time. Rusted. Flat-tyred. Beaten. Magnificent. I spotted it being hauled away through a southern Italian town, and frankly, I nearly wept. This was once the car that got a nation moving. The people’s Ferrari. The automotive embodiment of an espresso shot. And now? A hunk of oxidised metal destined for the…
