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Knowledge in the Atelier (or: The First Shot of 2026)
This is my first attempt at taking a photo in 2026. I took it late one afternoon in my hometown, where I’m staying for a few days. My aim was to continue experimenting with the Nikon Z5 and various manual lenses. This time, I used the Nikkor 35 AF-D F2 — an old lens that is still very capable. Technically, the AF-D has autofocus. However, since I am using a ‘dumb’ adapter, I can only use the lens manually.
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Kissaten – One Shot Story
When in Japan, Kissaten have soon became my favourite place to rest for a while or for a longer time, waiting for the rain to stop. Unlike Starbucks and other Western or Western-style chains, Kissaten offers a relaxing environment characterised by emptiness rather than crowded spaces. Of course, it’s possible to find all the places occupied by customers, as in a ‘regular’ coffee shop. However, in my experience, this rarely happens, especially in parts of town not plagued by hordes of aimless tourists.
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The Rise And Fall of Pizzeria Liceo – One Shot Story
For decades, it was established in 1963, not only the students of the Liceo Classico on the other side of Via Venezia, but almost all the inhabitants of my hometown, paid a visit to Pizzeria Liceo (aptly named after the aforementioned school). Truant students often chose it to spend a few hours waiting to come back home, cheating their parents about their daily chores. New romances began and couples broke up. Lonely young men — and adults, too — would stop by and mumble to themselves about their bad luck in love, family or work. On the way home after a tiring day at work, it wasn’t uncommon to stop by and…
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One Shot Story – Soulless Places
Official brand stores are a powerful way to assert a company’s presence. They are a bold statement of strength and confidence. They send a message to the customers and to those who aren’t yet: look! whenever you go we’re there for you(r wallett). Admittedly, when travelling abroad it is sometimes reassuring to find a ‘familiar’ place – a cafeteria, a fast food, an electronic gadget shop – where everything works ‘as it should’. On the other hand, though, this strength has a serious downfall. Where was this picture taken? Of course, you may guess the location from a few clues (for instance, it was likely taken in a small Italian…
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二千円
The 2,000 yen note is something of a rarity even for the Japanese. As Japan is mainly a cash-based society (at least for everyday life), I made sure to carry enough money on my recent trip to the Kyushu region.The bank gave me a wad of brand new ¥2,000 notes, which were so unusual that they attracted the attention of many people I exchanged them with. The photo was taken with a КИЕВ 60 TTL and a волна 80/2.8, the film was a Ferrania P30.
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Coffee at Caffè Nero
On the technical side, this photo was a test of the X-T5 capability to handle scenes with both strong highlights and shadows without increasing the standard dynamic range. As per the quality, despite the similarity of the name, definitely no, it has nothing ado with the ‘Nero’ one can taste in Trieste which —unbeknownst to many — is the Italian capital of coffee.
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A Cornhole Board – Independence Day Edition
I took this photograph in Boston on July 4th, and for me, it captures a small but telling fragment of the day’s celebrations. No fireworks, no parade—just a simple cornhole board dressed in the American flag, surrounded by scattered red and blue beanbags on a sunlit brick pavement. It’s an image that speaks to the quieter, more tactile traditions that sit alongside the grand spectacle. Compositionally, I let the board occupy the upper right of the frame, its diagonal placement adding a sense of movement and inviting the viewer’s eye from the legs toward the target hole. The wooden box in the foreground balances the frame and anchors the bottom…
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Floating
This image was born out of a fascination with stillness in the midst of implied movement. The mannequin — suspended, curled, caught in an almost foetal position — seems to drift within a capsule that looks as though it could be orbiting somewhere far beyond Earth. The large, circular light behind it could be a porthole, a hatch, or simply a stage light; its blinding white obscures what might be beyond, giving the scene a surreal, detached quality. Technically, the biggest challenge was exposure. The extreme contrast between the brilliant backlight and the darker figure risked losing detail on both ends. I chose to protect the highlights, letting the shadows…
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Cleaning the Tabernacle
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Tsutaya Bookstore@Ginza
Photographed inside the Tsutaya Bookstore in Ginza, Tokyo, this image celebrates the bookstore as a curated stage, where books are not simply stored but presented as artefacts. The frame is dense yet controlled, offering layer upon layer of shelves, display tables, and oversized art books. The eye is immediately drawn to the centre, where a large black-and-white wildlife photograph dominates—its scale and high contrast making it the de facto anchor of the composition. CompositionThe photographer has worked with a classic layered approach. Foreground tables angle toward the viewer, drawing them deeper into the mid-ground where the hero book sits open, and then further into the background shelves which fill the…
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Dai Shodo@Kyoto
Kyoto ‘s Teramachi-dori is full of suprises. Amidst shops of the most different kind and attire, booklovers can find this small gem. This is Dai-Shodo, a quiet print shop tucked into a narrow Kyoto street. I stepped inside on a grey afternoon with no particular plan. The light was soft, filtered through old windows and the hushed presence of paper. Everything in the shop seemed to lean inwards—frames, shelves, stairs—as if holding its breath in reverence. What struck me most wasn’t the prints themselves, but how they were displayed. Ukiyo-e woodblocks and vintage ephemera layered on every surface, propped rather than hung, as if caught mid-conversation. The stairway invited you up…
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Deadly Bored
Once again, the meaning of this picture is counter intuitive and “made up” by the composition. The scene is seen from the perspective of the mannequin: at the end of a hard day spent sitting on the street-front, it (or he?) looks deadly bored and tries to kill the time before the shop closes by casually looking at the next passerby. The directional effect (from the mannequin to the passerby) is achieved by the diagonal connecting the tip of the hat, the feet of the mannequin and the cast of the shadow. Taken as a whole, these elements drive the eye from the mannequin to the persons and not vice-versa.
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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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Beer or Spritz?
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Fast Food Loneliness in Nagoya…
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Harley-Davidson: Chrome And Presence
I shot this in a garage, mid-morning, using natural light filtered through a high side window. The intention was not documentation but compression—pulling a Harley-Davidson’s surface tension into a single diagonal, letting the chrome dominate the field without drowning in reflection. I placed the lens close, short telephoto range, aperture wide enough to throw the background car into softness without losing the suggestion of shape. The Porsche headlights were a deliberate inclusion. They echo the round mirrors and instrument cluster. Mechanically different machines, visually rhymed. The tank occupies the lower third, its curve breaking the flow of lines from lever to throttle. Shadow and reflection cross it diagonally, giving volume…
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StreetPizza@Ueno Park
I took this photograph during a humid summer afternoon in Ueno Park, Tokyo, a few metres away from the art museums and temples that draw both locals and tourists. Amid the buzz of the park’s cultural gravity, I was drawn instead to this fleeting vignette of street food preparation—quiet, unassuming, yet visually dense. What first caught my eye was the can of tomato pulp, “A Pummarola ‘Ncopp,” planted squarely in the middle of the frame like an improvised totem. Its bold Neapolitan red, combined with the colloquial script and graphic of tomatoes, adds a deliberate contrast to the surrounding functional, almost makeshift textures. Everything else in the composition plays a…
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Shrinking Knowledge Into A Small Brain
The composition presented itself almost too perfectly: two heavy book presses clamped around vintage volumes, framed by old clocks, writing tools, and artefacts of once-essential objects. It was in a display window of Itoya Ginza—a stationery temple in Tokyo—and the irony wasn’t subtle. Books literally compressed, as time ticks above them. Nothing staged, everything intentional. I shot this straight on to preserve the museum-like symmetry. The verticals are deliberate: spines, handles, clock faces, and the clean architectural grid outside. The lighting inside was soft but layered—enough to pull texture out of the pressed leather bindings and chrome bolts. ISO pushed slightly to handle shadows beneath the glass shelf, but noise…
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Pizza Maker@Ueno’s Park
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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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The Aperitif
This image was taken quickly, just as I passed the window. What struck me wasn’t the act of drinking — which is unremarkable in itself — but the multiple surfaces at play. A woman in profile, lifting her glass; a man absorbed in his phone; reflections of pedestrians I didn’t see until after the shutter clicked. And then the writing — bold, cartoonish, childish even — floating across the image like subtitles with no film. I shot through the glass deliberately, without trying to erase myself or the distractions. The transparency becomes part of the narrative. The drawing on the window, playful and crude, contrasts with the subdued tones inside:…
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Claws of Fire
