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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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Pentax SMC-A 50/1,7 – Nikkor 50/1,4 – Summicron 50/2
The left slice is taken with a Pentax K-1 and SMC-A 50/1,7, the centre with a Nikon D750 and a Nikkor 50/1,4, the right with a Fujifilm X-T3 and a Summicron 50/2. All the cameras were at their base ISO (100 for the Pentax and Nikon, 160 with the Fujifilm), at F2 and aperture priority. The K-1 and the X-T3 photos were shot in manual focus. Only the K-1 has IBIS stabilization. The jpg is taken in Affinity by slicing each OOC RAW file without post-processing.
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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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Galaxy S21 Ultra 5g. The difference between Marketing and Reality in Image Quality
To put it short, this is what you get by purchasing a Galaxy S21 Ultra 5g using the standard camera app: access to all four lenses is limited to jpg, 108megapixel resolution is limited to one lens (the one Samsung calls ‘wide’ or ‘1x’), RAW format is only availble in ‘PRO’ mode, limited to ‘ultrawide’ (0,6x) and ‘wide’ (1x), with no access to 108megpixel resolution. Samsung advertises the Galaxy S21 Ultra 5g by spinning its 108 megapixel camera. However, it does not make clear that the 108 megapixel resolution is not available in “PRO” mode, the only that records in raw. By contrast, this super resolution is available in normal…
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A Fix for the Wikipedia Photos’ Copyright Scams?
As reported by Petapixel, a new form of copyright (better, ‘moral rights of author) scam hits photographer: the credit stealing on Wikipedia. In a nutshell, as everything on Wikipedia is editable, somebody started changing the photos’ ownership information from the original author to somebody else who, as Petapixel writes, get a series of ‘benefit’. As bad as it sounds, copyright protection on the Internet is a lost battle for an individual. Some services like Unsplash “turned the problem into an opportunity”. However it did not solve the issue in general terms. I’m seriously considering if just going back to a print-only sharing is a better way to handle pictures’ copyright,…
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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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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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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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Inside the Nazario Sauro
An important piece of history of the Italian Navy, at the anchor in the Port of Genova.
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Nagoya’s reportage featured in The Good Life
The Good Life‘s October issue features my photoreportage of Nagoya.
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Fuji X-T2 records audio at 16bit/48Khz
Neither the user manual, nor the Youtube ‘experts’ tell this open secret: the X-T2 samples audio at 16bit. Although the sample rate is 48khz (a standard in video production) 16bit may not be enough to record (a minimum) professional grade audio. This is not a big deal for the rest of the humans, but If you want to ‘go pro’ or need to unleash your Gear Addiction Syndrome be advised that to have 24bit/48Khz audio you must switch to the X-T3.
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The Answer is On the Wall
When I first saw this wall, I knew immediately that it had to be photographed. Not because it was particularly ornate or historically significant, but because of the simple red digits painted on its surface: 42. For anyone who’s read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, this number isn’t just a number—it’s the number, the answer to life, the universe, and everything. And yet, here it was, not in some cosmic landscape, but on a weathered patch of brick and peeling paint. From a compositional standpoint, I kept the frame tight, letting the number sit just off-centre enough to avoid perfect symmetry. The texture of the wall does as much…
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Meaning in Photography
In this picture, taken during the reportage I did for the Teatro Marrucino’s I Miserabili, an old and exhausted fighter rests while a young citoyen waves the French flag defying the fire of the royalists. The strength of the picture is in the dialectics created by the two protagonists, hinting at a “relay” between an old man that “gave all”, resting while a young man steps in.
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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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Counter-intuitive Focus
This photo I took during a reportage for a theatre hosting a concert of Uto Ughi shows a counter-intuitive use of focusing. Rather than go for the obvious option, the attention is shifted on the two musicians in the background capturing their concentration, with the leading violin blurred and conceptually, thus, ‘left behind’. The global effect is reinforced by a neat separation between the dark and light parts of the frame.
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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
The sea hadn’t quite calmed when I made this frame—the wind still cut the crests sharp, and the noise of the waves clashing against the pilings of the trabocco was thick, physical. I waited for a break in the light, not hoping for much, and then the rainbow broke into view—just briefly—and gave the scene a tension it was missing. Not the kitsch kind of rainbow, but the kind that appears in defiance of ruin. The trabocco—an ancient fishing machine precariously perched on stilts—has always struck me as the embodiment of resilience. I framed it slightly to the left to leave space for the arc, letting the rainbow anchor the…
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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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A Virtual Glance Dance
The essence of this photo is all in the glances of the protagonists. The man looks at the woman, the woman looks at the luxury car. The essence of this photo is all in the glances of the protagonists. The man looks at the woman, and the woman looks at the luxury car. It is this subtle game of glances that tells a story and turns the photography from a casual picture into something worth seeing. Once again, it is not relevant whether the people portrayed are actually involved in the “glance dance”, as what matters is the image to convey the meaning created by the overall result. This confirms…
