Without Glasses @ via del Corso

I made this photograph in Rome on a wet afternoon, deliberately throwing the focus to the foreground while the main figures walked straight into softness. It’s not a mistake. It’s an exercise in perceptual ambiguity—what the world looks like when memory is sharper than vision, when emotion fills in the blanks that optics don’t.

The Fujifilm X100s, with its fixed 23mm f/2 lens, let me shoot discreetly. I prefocused on the pavement, framed instinctively, and let the rest blur into suggestion. The couple—arms linked, shopping bags swinging, half-sheltered under an umbrella—aren’t anonymous; they’re imagined. Their presence is read through posture, not detail.

Technically, it’s anti-precision. Depth of field was shallow, aperture wide open. Shutter fast enough to freeze the movement of feet, slow enough to preserve the smear of rain on stone. The composition hinges on geometry: the tactile paving slicing diagonally through the wet ground, drawing your eye away from the figures, then right back to them.

This frame is as much about absence as it is presence. It doesn’t ask to be decoded. It just wants to sit somewhere between memory and mistake, like a face you almost recognise but can’t quite place.