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I have had this Nikon FM2 lying around in my house for some time now. It has not seen much action though.

You see, I started taking photos when I was sixteen or seventeen with a Yashica FX3, and I don’t really have any kind of nostalgia for those times when I had to wait days before realizing I missed a certain shot, or that I focused on that insignificant detail behind my subject.

The only type of competition I have ever enjoyed is two-wheeled racing; I have raced motorbikes and mountain bikes in the past (and I will probably continue to do so once this daddy thing wears off).

In this sort of competition there is no subjectivity; if you go faster than everybody else, you finish first. If you are slow, if you make mistakes, you finish last¹. I have always been a middle-pack kind of guy. But I still enjoyed racing even after finishing behind elders and youngsters, males or females – if somebody is faster than me that is pretty darn objective and I respect that.

Months ago I asked the OTP community about their online reading habits. I mentioned my favourite blogs and briefly discussed my main concern which is: is online reading just a filler, sort of reading your twitter feed when you’re bored¹?

Anyway, my idea is that yes, books give you something else, something that takes you away for longer times, requiring a committment to the act of reading and comprehension that is essential if you really want to go deep into a subject.

This is the second part of my selection of photographs from Eastern Turkey.

The first part features cityscapes and city dwellers and people in general.

This second part is all about landscapes and geology which hopefully would interest even those of you who are not into geology. After all, geology has at its core a certain fascination with the natural beauty you find in nature – but sometimes those who work in the field seem to neglect this simple fact and then geology can become truly boring.

Last May I went to Eastern Turkey to see some geology. I also had the opportunity to hit the streets of cities that were unknown to me.

I have collected my favourite photographs in two separate posts¹. This is part 1, featuring street portraits, cityscapes and other stuff I liked while walking on the streets of Adana, Kahramanmaras and Elazig.

Part 2 is all about landscapes and geology which hopefully would interest even those of you who are not into geology.

A brief interlude to note down a couple of things.

I follow only one podcast, and that’s On Taking Pictures. As the name says, it’s about photography, and in one recent Q&A episode they kindly answered a question I have made; what’s cool however is their comment on my name which I’d like to remember for the future – skip to the 1h18'28" mark:

The second thing is about Flickr: they have recently published a collection of baobab’s photographs and have included one of my photos from my Madagascar honeymoon trip¹.

[Click here for italian version.]

This is a short post just to let the readers know that I am ready to be back on track with some brand new content – and apologies for not being very active these past few months here or on my other channels like twitter or Google+.

I have been busy with moving to the new house, stay with my family, work and all this sort of things that simply takes your time away; I have to say, some of these things are exhausting mentally (e.g., the moving!), others are quite different, you simply enjoy having your time taken away (and that’s why I’ve put those two photographs of my daughter Valentina).

Richard Koci Hernandez made this video asking if “mobile photography has made us more reliant on tools than on our eyes”:

Sometimes you can find smart youtube comments. For example this guy wrote:

Hernandez makes a valid point - the image shouldn’t be defined by the camera it’s captured with. It’s a shame he had to spend five minutes saying what he could easily have said in five seconds. I turned off after that - couldn’t take the pretentiousness of his language any more.

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I have always liked Craig Mod, since I read years ago his travelogue/review of the Panasonic GF1. He traveled to Himalaya, captured some great shot with this little camera, and wrote extensive and very well written thoughts about ‘gear’ – linking tech talk to excellent photography and interesting, deep commentary about how it feels to use a camera to capture your emotions. So far, this has been the best review of a camera that I’ve ever read. And it has been that review that inspired me to abandon (although only temporarily) DSLRs and got myself that little micro 4/3 jewel that was the GF1¹.

Last month two bikes were stolen from a certain garage in San Donato Milanese. Those were my mountain bikes; the garage, well that wasn’t mine¹.

And it was dead easy to open the garage for these gentlemen. Not only did they steal my two most precious bikes, leaving the city bikes untouched, but also my tire pump and all of my tools like allen keys and sockets etc. These gentlemen, they were really into bikes and knew their stuff pretty well. I hope they won’t be so stupid to go ride my bikes in Finale Ligure.

These are the days when everybody talks about their new year’s resolutions. I mean everybody in the english-speaking world, I don’t think that italians do this often – but this will change (or may already have changed) because we seem to follow, like sheep, everything that americans do.

And I thought I was immune from these habits but here we go: I’m gonna make something this year, something not particularly original, something that countless other amateur photographers have done or are doing right now – a 365 project: one picture a day, on a specific theme. And the theme (as you can deduce from this post’s title) will be my daughter Valentina.

In other words: good reasons to avoid using “Ph.D” and other titles appended to your email.

From an article on the New York Times about the latest Spider-Man movie (the one filmed by Marc Webb):

Gwen Stacy asks Peter Parker if he likes branzino: you know, “Like, the fish?”.
Then she invites him to dinner, where everyone is saying “branzino”: Denis Leary (playing Gwen’s dad), Peter, Gwen again. We see a full branzino at the dinner table, neatly plated.
Why branzino? The film never says — it just offers up this delightful serving of unexpected weirdness.

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File naming has always been a bit of an obsession for me. Recently, after seeing the proliferation of too many duplicate filenames in my photography folder, I decided to solve this problem once and for all.

Something to bear in mind: using programs like iPhoto or Lightroom or Aperture (also known as DAM¹) you should not be worried about how to name your camera files, because these programs are made just for that, i.e. to manage your digital library and forget the intricancies of the filesystem. But for old maniacs who still like to feel like they’re in control of their files and not rely on the search tools offered by the new operating systems today (e.g., Spotlight), then carry on reading this because you could find something of use.

[Click here for italian version.]

This post was somehow inspired by a conversation I had on the On Taking Pictures Google+ group¹. It was something I wanted to talk about for a long time.

I have always enjoyed linking a series of photographs into something more organic. The lonely (even if beautiful) photo does not satisfy my hunger, exactly like 50g of pasta are never enough for me. The excitement for getting a single good (or even excellent) shot is just too short-lived, it just feels to me like an isolated thing with no anchors.

It’s been more than a year since I moved to a Jekyll blog hosted on github. I think I have never been so productive in this period of time, despite having a much busier life both at work and off-work (Valentina is here and she’s here to stay! We have now trespassed the 15 months mark, if she was a car I’d say we have a looser engine now – and it shows from the way she runs and skettles; she is just unstoppable).