-
On Prizes and Awards (a Long and Tiring Musing)
Prizes and awards are ubiquitous also in the photography world. There is an award for everything, and I wouldn’t be suprised to discover an award for the best photo award as well. When we’re just starting out on our photographic journey, it’s natural to think about entering a competition. I am not an exception, in fact I tried a few myself and I also got one honorable mention for the photo featuring this post in a competition organised by a local chapter of the Italian Photoamateur Association (FIAF).
-
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,…
-
High Heels Ghost
I took this on a Saturday night, tripod low, exposure long. The street was busy but silent—one of those moments when you hear the city breathe between footsteps and engines. She passed quickly, dressed for somewhere else, but the shutter stayed open just long enough to erase her features and leave only motion. She became a spectre. Legs firm, heels sharp, but the torso blurred into translucence. It wasn’t planned. I wanted to catch life, but what emerged was absence—graceful, flickering, unresolved. That duality between presence and erasure fascinated me. Compositionally, it’s a static stage: parked cars, rough bark, municipal geometry. The frame’s symmetry anchors the chaos of the motion…
