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Portrait of a Law Professor (and Free Climber…)
Some portraits speak as much through their surroundings as through the subject’s face. This image—shot on T-Max 400—was conceived to be less about formality and more about quiet juxtapositions. The professor, sharply dressed in a waistcoat and tie, sits in an office that is anything but stiff: behind him, a large photograph of a free climber grips the rock face with raw, physical intensity. The contrast is the story. The academic’s world is one of precision, argument, and interpretation of law; the climber’s, one of risk, strength, and moment-to-moment survival. And yet, the connection between the two is more than decorative. This professor is himself a climber—an individual who understands…
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Portrait of a Gunsmith
No bravado. No noise. Just focus. This is not a scene from a film. It’s a portrait of a gunsmith — hands steady, brow drawn in close. The room is small, functional, the shelves stacked. There’s no display of violence here. No suggestion of power. Only the patient act of tuning metal into balance. He’s wearing gloves, not out of fear, but out of respect — for the tool, for the work, for the ritual. The gun isn’t loaded. It isn’t posed. It’s an object in process. A mechanism being read, understood, maintained. I took this photo in near silence. The only sound was the faint click of a slide…
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An Old Boxing Gym
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Real Time Update
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Who Can It Be Now?
He stood apart, not physically—just mentally. Everyone else was turned toward the stage, pulsing with light and sound, faces lifted, absorbed. But he was here, high above the crowd on a metal platform, lit by a cold phone screen. Not watching, not present. Swiping, scrolling, messaging—connected to everything but the moment directly in front of him. I composed this with intent. The platform rails frame him almost like a cage. He isn’t trapped, but the symbolism’s hard to ignore. The crowd beyond is dense, soft-focused, awash in ambient green and blue from the stage lights. Exposure had to be pushed—concert lighting isn’t kind to dynamic range—but I kept it tight…
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Staged?
This pictures portrays Max Gazzè 2016 tour’s official photographer asking the crowd to raise and wave the hands. Although the picture is staged (meaining: the photographer “created” the “moment” instead of waiting for it) the outcome is not, since is the result of the dialog between the photographer and the people.
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Crowd Control
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Accidental Precision
This wasn’t a technical success. It was a mistake. I had just raised the camera when I accidentally twisted the zoom ring mid-exposure. The result: a vortex of distortion with a woman at the centre, walking straight into it. And yet, it worked. Not in spite of the blur—but because of it. The composition wasn’t planned, but it landed with an unexpected balance. The vanishing point draws backward, while the red coat blasts forward—like pigment dragged across the frame by a restless brush. The background—palm trees, streetlights, suburban geometry—melts into curves, turning realism into gesture. This image violates every rule of clarity. It’s not sharp. Her face is unreadable,…
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Multiple Peripheral Visions
This frame was shot instinctively—no time to refocus, no second attempt. What emerged is less a photograph than a study in misdirection. Every figure in this image is out of focus, yet the meaning is sharper than most high-resolution portraits. The scene plays like theatre. A soldier, heavily armed, stands at ease in the foreground. A woman in heels walks away, blurred into silhouette. In the background, people sit, smoke, talk, check phones. The corridor and its black door—dead centre, unnerving in its neutrality—stares back like a question. The sign reads “BALCONE DIPLOMATICO,” almost comical in its contrast to the ordinariness of what surrounds it. Technically, it’s a failure by…
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Carabinieri:To Serve And Protect
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Art Auction at Piazza Navona
Piazza Navona, with its fountains, baroque facades, and endless hum of voices, has always been more than a square—it’s a theatre. In this scene, the performance is one of persuasion. An artist, dressed for the chill in a beanie and heavy jacket, holds up a framed painting. His expression is animated, hand gesturing as he speaks, the stance of a man who knows he has only a few minutes to turn curiosity into commitment. Across from him, a young couple listens. The woman’s hand hovers near her mouth—hesitation, calculation, or perhaps simply the reflex of someone considering a purchase that’s more about emotion than necessity. The man, in his blue…
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A coffee at Saint Eustachio’s
Saint Eustachio is not a place for rushed photography. Between the crush of customers, the warm glare off the coffee machines, and the tight spaces, you’ve got to work with precision — and patience. Using the Fuji X-E2 with a Zeiss Planar 50mm f/1.5, I knew this would be a manual focus game. Autofocus would have been hunting in the low light, and besides, the Planar has a way of rewarding the slowness it demands. I focused carefully on the barista’s eyes, knowing that at f/1.5 depth of field would be razor thin. He was completely absorbed in his work, and I wanted that concentration to be the anchor…
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Action! (beware of Fuji X-Pro 2)
I’ve shot this picture with a Fujifilm X-E2 and a Zeiss C Sonnar T* 1,5/50 ZM. The split-image manual focus confirmation worked properly (though with a strong light it’s more difficult to handle it) and the resulting file in term of size and quality is fairly satisfying. Enter the X-Pro2 with a bigger resolution and new RAW format. While a 24 Megapixel APS-C sensor creates file that can be handled by most of the computer currently in place, the new RAW format will require the latest Photoshop CC/Lightroom update. So, if you chose not to enter into the mud of a subscription-based software licensing model, all of a sudden you…
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Max Gazzè Tour 2016 Live @Pescara
For this reportage I’ve borrowed a Canon 5D Mk III coupled with a EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS USM and my Fuji X-E2 with the XF 18-55 f/2.8-4R LM OIS. Of course, I got no operational problems with the 5D (if you know how to overcome its limits) and the lens performed very good, but I must admit that I’ve been surprised by the quality of the X-E2 images, taken at ISO 3200. Does this means that is time to trash the Canon and go for a “Fuji-only” setup? I don’t think so, in particular if telephotos are a recurring presence in the jobs. True, now Fujifilm too has a…
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After a Tough Day
I took this photo with a Fujifilm X-E2 and a Leica Elmarit 90/2,8. Manual focusing with the split-image option has been fairly easy.
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Sales Force
There’s an odd tension in this photograph — one that pulls you in before you’ve even had time to work out why. On the surface, it’s a straightforward shop-window scene: mannequins in carefully styled outfits, lit with that clinical precision that retail chains excel at. Yet the longer you look, the more unsettling it becomes. The composition is tight, almost regimented, with the mannequins arranged in military formation. Their identical, expressionless faces create a chorus of stillness, reinforced by the repetition of hair colour, pose, and stance. The red “ALDI” sign in the foreground slices into the frame with an almost aggressive verticality, its bold typography competing for attention with…
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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,…
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Should I Buy It? (Best Taken With an 85mm)
…but actually with a 23mm (35mm equivalent, cropped.) It’s not just a shopping street. It’s a stage. Look closer: this frame holds a silent performance — a subtle interplay of desire, decision, and doubt. Three women stand just outside the warmth of the boutique, their eyes fixed on mannequins who, ironically, seem far more confident than the living observers. The mannequin inside strikes a bold pose, clad in red and certainty. The women outside? Bundled in coats, their body language somewhere between ambivalence and negotiation. On the far left, another kind of window. A glowing child’s fantasy, plastered with Disney’s “Frozen” — a reminder of simpler times, when wanting something…
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The Watchman (Street-Photography Shortcuts)
As every thing under the sun, Street-Photography too has its own shortcuts: freaky street-portraits are one of those. It’s easy to have your pictures noticed when your subject is a 60-years old Brit-Punk, an implausible-color dressed man or whatever alike: these subjects do the work on your behalf and it is very hard to obtain such kind of picture AND conveying actual meaning. Personally I like photos that – alone or made meaningful by a title – can tell a story. This way I can try to (pretend to) make “unique” shots, that stand with dignity in front of the zillions of 500px/Instagram/Flickr’s great images that are often perfect but…
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True Leather (Saved by Photoshop’s Crop)
A 35mm focal length is definitely much too wide for my kind of street-photography, but I must admit that the advantages of using a Fujifilm X100s in terms of efficiency and portability, beat any other issue related to the wideness of the lens. And the X100s’ resolution is good enough to obtain a good composition through Photoshop’s crop feature.
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Fujifilm X-Pro 2: Does It Worth It? (Lost In Via Del Corso)
As a Fujifilm camera early adopter (during time I got the X-pro 1, X100, X100s, X-E1 and X-E2) I was waiting for the X-Pro 2 to come and when that finally happened I didn’t feel so compelled to trash my (now) old cameras to do the switch. Long gone are the days of GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome), so I shall not buy this new piece of electronics because it doesn’t do anything that I can’t do with my actual set up (in particular, with the X100s and the X-E2.) The only actual point of interest, to me, are the dual-slot card and the weather sealed body: but I never needed…
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A Nikon’s Portrait Made With a Fuji
A Nikon camera strap curls into the lower left of the frame, its familiar yellow letters unmistakable to anyone who’s ever held one. Yet the photograph itself was taken with a Fujifilm—a quiet, almost private joke between photographer and viewer. The rest of the image leans into misdirection. The camera is not the subject, at least not in the obvious way. Centre stage belongs to a pair of hands opening a quilted leather handbag, rings catching the light, fingertips poised in the act of searching or arranging. The fabrics, textures, and colours—matte grey, deep burgundy, soft velvet—compete gently for attention. The Nikon strap rests there almost incidentally, but of course…
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Reflexes
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Labcoats In A Moment Of Rest
The lab was quiet. Machines still hummed, but the people had stepped away—lunch maybe, or a seminar down the corridor. I found this row of coats, slack and ghostlike, lined up with the kind of accidental symmetry that only happens when no one’s trying. Each hook bore a name: Stef, Erica, Anna, Sara, Giorgio… markers of identity in a place that prizes protocol over personality. Shot on a Canon 5D Mark II with the 24–105, the image leaned into its neutrality. No attempt to stylise the whites or fake a sterile glow. The coats were wrinkled, some slightly yellowed at the seams. I kept the exposure honest—highlights restrained just below…
