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An Old Portable Camera
I didn’t stage this. The camera was already set up for a workshop in the park, a portable wooden box on a tripod, complete with focusing cloth and a ground glass screen. What drew me wasn’t the device itself—it was the reaction it triggered. The boy shielding his eyes, squinting into the past through a lens designed long before smartphones flattened photography into a gesture. The composition is dense in its centre, almost chaotic with overlapping limbs and sneakers. But the tripod anchors it. The machine, primitive and precise, holds its ground in a circle of discovery. I kept the perspective low and frontal to emphasise its presence as a…
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Italy, Street-Photography and The Law – A Real Case
Last July, members of the Polizia municipale of Rome seized the camera of a British-Brazilian street-photographer, Simon Griffee, while he was documenting the way they dealt with an immigrant. As Simon’s lawyer I’ve filed an appeal and a week ago the Court of Rome revoked the seizure. The battle is not over, yet, but hopefully Simon’s camera will be back on his hands pretty soon. As soon as possible I will release a thorough analysis of the case matched with what the law says, in theory.
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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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The Street Photographer Rights In Italy. The Leaflet
Here is an easy-to-carry A4 leaflet to be used in case you are confronted by a law enforcement agent of officer that question your Street Photography activity. Legal issues apart, please remember to always be polite and to help the officer not to look goofy or ignorant (as he actually would) in front of the public. Q. Does taking people’s photography in public spaces infringes sec. 615 bis of the criminal code? A. NO. Under the Corte di cassazione ruling n. 47165/2010 outdoor there is no reasonable privacy expectation, as there is no reasonable privacy expectation in case of tacit – while non equivocal – withdrawal of this right, as…
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Who Needs A Wedding Photographer Anymore?
I took this picture at a friend’s wedding. Though there was an “official” photographer, almost all of the attendees did their own “service”. They spent the majority of their time (and of their mobiles’ batteries) by obstructing the professionals on duty to get mostly irrelevant and low quality pictures. This is the main reason I chose not do weddings and – in general – ceremonies.
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60×40 Borderless Printing with a HP Z3200ps 24
Printing a 60by40cm image on a A1 roll (61cm wide) should be a pretty straightforward task: well, not on a printer like the HP Z3200. To cut the story, here are the settings: set your image landscape, and size it 60 by 40 cm, set your CANVAS size to 61,8 by 41 cm with a white background (highlighted in red, in the picture) so that the final image size is, indeed, 61,8 by 41, In the Print Settings menu select the Paper Size option and set a custom page size of 61 by 40,5, Again, in the Print Settings menu select the Margins/Layout menu and check the Borderless radio button,…
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Noon on the Beach
this image hinges on simplicity and distortion. The sun was directly overhead, leaving the shadow of the pole as a near-perfect sundial, slicing the centre of the frame from bottom to vanishing point. That shadow was the whole reason to shoot: absolute verticality rendered into graphic contrast on a near-featureless plane. The lens dictates the structure. At 16mm, lines bow. The horizon curves. Perspective exaggerates. I leaned into it—there’s no attempt to correct distortion in post. The intention was not to imitate a rectilinear frame, but to emphasise space as abstraction. The beach becomes a sphere, the sky a ceiling, and the tiny trace of buildings at the perimeter only…
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Damned Autofocus
I like this photo very much. The two travelers, mutually unbeknownst, stroke a pose like if they were on duty fashion models. Unfortunately, the Fujifulm X-E1 autofocus didn’t work fast enough and, as I’ve already told, zone-focusing is a pain in the neck without a properly marked focus-ring. Long live to Hasselblad, Zeiss, Leica and Nikon…
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Brain vs Camera
The picture on the left is what the camera saw. The picture on the right is what I had in mind while shooting. Thanks to Photoshop I’ve been able to bend the “objectivity” of the camera along the line of my creativity.
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A Fujifilm X-E1 Annoyance
The X-E1 is a good camera, though has some annoyances that make it less handy for Street Photography. Contrary to Leica, (some) Zeiss or (some) Nikon lenses, zone-focusing is not set on the lens barrel. You must do it either through the viewfinder or the LCD, and this makes problematic the switch from one technique to another. Same is true for aperture settings. Operating the camera one-handed, happened twice to me, led to a change of the image quality settings from RAW to Jpg. Unfortunately I wasn’t aware while shooting and I’ve wasted half a day in Barcelona getting inferior quality pictures.
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Street-Photographer’s eye side effect
Seeing the world through the Street-Photographer’s eye makes you more aware of your surroundings both at a conscious and unconscious, Zen-like, level. A side-effect of this state is that you can exploit-it for personal safety when traveling in risky places, like big stations where pickpockets are doing their tricks.
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Hanging Towels
This is what happens when coupling a summicron 50 (third gen) with a Fujifilm X-1.
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Tour Saint-Jacques, Standby
Paris, the city of light, reflects off the polished chrome helmets of the sapeurs-pompiers. The firemen stand poised, immobile but ready. Their posture does not betray fatigue, nor doubt—it’s the stance of trained patience, of focused anticipation. This image captures a moment between action and calm. The fire hoses lie coiled with potential energy, valves shut, mechanisms still untouched. Behind them, the urban rhythm carries on: buses glide, pedestrians move, the sirens wait. The presence of the firefighters, framed by the bustle of Haussmannian façades and traffic, signals that something mighthave happened—or almost did. The mirrored helmets become metaphors themselves. They do not just shield: they reflect the world around them. Their function is…
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Is This Photo Illegal?
Yes, if it were taken in Hungary. Against the European Convention of Human Rights, Hungary passed a law that by next March 15 will require any photographer shooting in public space to obtain a signed “model release form”. This provision will be bashed by either the EU Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights (for the very same reasons I explained here), but it will take time and – first of all – a photographer that sacrifices himself on the altar of freedom.
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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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Just a soccer field… Part 2
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The Google Experiment
The usual note: I don’t write about gear. But this time I want to do an experiment inspired by the consequences of having the post about Street Photography and Italian Law bounced by Adam Marelli and Luminous-Landscape. Since these two websites channeled my post around the world, the access to (other parts too of) my blog – mostly unknown, previously – steady increased. I’m far from saying that I’ve reached an “audience”, nevertheless this blog is gaining its space among the zillions of pictures that live on the Internet. And it is “quality” space, meaning that visitors (you’re always welcome, folks!) find something of interest by looking at my pictures…
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Good Idea
… bad execution. The shot would have been acceptable if the head of the fisherman had the sky as a background instead of the bow.
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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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So Long, Eos-M
A couple of days ago, while wandering around a street-market, I spotted a small “exhibit” of old Nikon and Hasselblad lenses. I thought it would have been nice to get the two “classic” lenses for the System V, so I traded my Eos-M (and lenses) for a Carl Zeiss lenses: a Distagon 50 and a Sonnar 150. The seller was eager to strike the deal, but I’m not sure who actually got the best bargain…
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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…
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Multiple Meaning
We do see, in a picture, what we want to see. While the vast majority would focus on the dynamics between the shooter with the hoodie and the man with spectacles, those familiar with the inner circle of photography in Pescara will immediately spot, behind the man, Mrs. Franca Cauti, the Big Boss at Ohmasa Foto Video…
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A HDR Experiment
This is my first – and possibly, last – attempt of using HDR to post-process my pictures. Unless I’m able to get a more creative outcome, there is no reason to have pictures that look deadly similar to those of the other users of Nik Software Collection (as I am:))
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VueScan and the missed Bits-per-pixel
Ed Hamrick’s VueScan is a great software that supports almost every scanner available, including out-of-production film scanner. Sometimes its interface behave in non documented way as in the case of the Bits-per-pixel option in the Input tab that disappears once the Infrared Clean option is enabled in the Filter tab. I wasn’t able to figure out the relationship between the two settings until Ed Hamrick himself kindly answered (lightfast, I would say) to my question. Kudos to him for that, but it would be nice to have this Infrared clean-Bits per pixel issue mentioned in the user guide :)
