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A Mesh
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An Essay on Composition
This photograph began with geometry, but it ended up being about contradiction. Sand, marble, sea—each a distinct texture, each performing under different rules. It’s not a landscape and it’s not abstract, but it borrows from both. The diagonal lines, the flattened depth, the conflict between order and erosion—all deliberate, but not staged. I rotated the frame on purpose. The eye expects a horizon, some gravitational anchor, but here that’s denied. The marble slabs—cold, precise, quarried and arranged—seem to float or fall, depending on how you orient yourself. The band of sand running diagonally across the frame interrupts their perfection with a tactile, natural disorder: dunes formed by wind, not by…
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A Lockheed C-130 Hercules
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Kite Surfer Under Duress
The wind was already rising when I reached the beach. Grey sky, hard light, the kind of day most people read from behind a window. But the kitesurfers were already out—lines taut, boards skipping through the chop. What always strikes me about this scene isn’t just the colour of the kites against a flat sky, or the sharp angles they carve into the wind—it’s the resolve. They know what they’re getting into. The cold. The salt in their eyes. The bruises. And they do it anyway. Because this is when it’s real. That’s what drew me to raise the camera. The same drive, maybe. You don’t wait for golden hour.…
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Busker and Covid-19
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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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Il barbiere di Siviglia – Don Bartolo mad at Rosina
A shot from the mise en scene of the Il Barbiere di Siviglia I did as a scene-photgrapher for the Teatro Marrucino
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Denegata Justitia
Sometimes a picture acquires a meaning that goes beyond the original intent of the photographer. In this case, taken from a reportage I did for Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables featured at Teatro Marrrucino, in Chieti, the photography becomes the archetype of the denegata Justitia. The defendant asks to speak, the justice stares elsewhere.
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Breaking the Fourth Wall
Shooting a play is challenging because you must be ready to seize ‘the moment’ and, at the very same time, think of unusual compositions to avoid the boring ‘frontal’ perspective. Shooting part of the reportage from the backstage of Hamlet, with Giorgio Pasotti and Mariangela D’Abbraccio directed by Francesco Tavassi I had the possibility to experiment the breaking of the fourth wall. This picture is one of the results.
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When Colour Helps Composition
This photo I took during a reportage of Miseria e nobiltà – a classic of the Neapolitan comedy by Eduardo Scarpetta – in the mise en scene of Lello Arena e Luciano Melchionna gives a lot of insights on how composition works. The triangle designed by the two actors on the sides and the taller actress in the centre is reinforced by the colours of the costumes: black in the centre, white in the sides. Finally, the purple background behind the black figure enhances the eye-driving effect toward the centre.
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On “timing the moment”
This photo I took during an assignment for a reportage on the theatre drama called “Le Signorine” with Giuliana De Sio and Isa Danieli is an excellent example of the “Timing the moment” concept. “Timing the moment” is a skill any event-based photographer should develop (or hone, if he’s gifted enough to have been born with the gift.) Especially in sport – but too in concerts and theatre’s show if you did not attend the rehearsal – you don’t know in advance what is going to happen. A unique mixture of intuition, reflex and decision (what the Japanese would call 決め – kime) allows capturing an unforeseen – and excellent…
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Hope after the Storm
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The Power of Underexposing
This portrait was built in the shadows. Underexposing by design meant letting darkness dominate the frame, allowing only the essentials — the face, the glint of an earring, the folds of the dress — to emerge. The result is a scene stripped of distraction, where every visible element has earned its place. The composition is weighted to the left, pulling the viewer into the subject’s gaze and leaving negative space to amplify the drama. The rich crimson of the gown benefits from the controlled exposure: under normal lighting, its details might have flattened into uniform red; here, the fabric’s texture and the embroidery’s sparkle gain depth from the way light…
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When Tilted Photos Work
Tilted photos are very challenging to take. It is easy to break the composition, lose an essential part of the scene, or take a bad picture. Furthermore, making sense out of a diagonal orientation with a ratio that is not square (Hasselblad people, I can hear you loud and clear!) adds layers of difficulties. As counterintuitive as it might look, this photo taken in a “normal” orientation would have lost all its visual impact.
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Good Plan, Poor Execution
The idea behind the composition is entirely correct. The mannequins and the girl form a triangle, as does the direction of the stares, conveying both a sense of symmetry and counterposing the liveness of a human being to the puppets’ lack of. A poor execution, though, led to the mannequins’ head cut, turning a visually appealing photography into a meaningless shot.
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Light as Meaning Shifter
The original idea behind this picture was to match the emptiness of the shop with the facelessness of the mannequin posing as a store clerk, to convey a general feeling of depersonalization. Unfortunately, the big lightblot represented by the poster close to the mannequin catches the observer’s attention and reduce the effectiveness of the composition. Instead of connecting the mannequin with the internal part of the store thus making sense of the whole picture, the eye just “sees” an ad poster.
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Photopanning in Rome
Photo panning is an art in itself and – when adequately practised – is able to deliver a stunning visual experience. In this picture (that has not been altered but for contrast and clarity) the overall experience reminds the Impressionism aesthetics.
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Keep Out!
This photo conveys a message of “rejection”: first, a security guard who blocks access to the jewellery and then a signal of a prohibition of access reinforces the concept, thanks to a composition that guides the eye to a diagonal that goes from the bottom to the top, from left to right. Obviously, there is nothing “true” about all this because the overall result is the result of the organization of the spaces and the management of the perspective that allow connecting semantically elements that, in reality, have no relationship between them. It would have been enough to shoot from a different angle – or not juxtapose the security guard…
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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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Italian National Skating Championship 2019
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Americana Skating – Italian National Championship 2019
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Wasted Shot Because iPhone 7 Poor Low-Light Handling
There’s a certain frustration in watching a scene unfold that you know deserves better than the tool in your hands can give it. This was one of those moments. The Adige was shrouded in mist, the bridge arches glowing faintly from warm streetlights, the water reflecting pinpricks of gold — a scene so atmospheric it almost photographed itself. Almost. The iPhone 7 Plus, for all its merit in good daylight, simply doesn’t hold up when the light falls away. The sensor struggles, the noise reduction turns painterly, and dynamic range collapses into a murky smear. What was meant to be a layered play of mist, water, and stone turned into…
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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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Italian Boxing Amateur Championship 2018. The Reportage
