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Second part of my selection of film photos (see weekly snaps #11 for the first batch). I figured that this double bill could be a way to compensate for the entire month gone by without any updates.

I will be off the grid for a couple of weeks for some family holiday from tomorrow, and hopefully I will have time to do some photography, be it reading or studying or actually shooting something good.

The black and white, London edition (yes, there’s also one taken on the Dorset coast so it’s not 100% London). Issue #12 will be online on Friday with a second batch of film photographs.

Last Sunday Fuji organized a test event in Milano, so I grabbed the opportunity to play with the XE-1 for a good fifteen minutes.

The event was a crowd-pleaser; a perfectly lit¹, beautiful model striking sexy-annoyed poses for all those who were interested in this type of photography (a good number, from what I could see). Two street/documentary photographers leading hour-long walks in the surroundings. The possibility to use any camera you wanted², and play with it at will, in the gallery or outside on the streets.

It just happened that all the past “weekly snaps” have featured photos linked by some sort of thread or connection. But my original idea was to collect random shots as I wrote at the beginning.

So today I was resolved in finding a few shots that I liked, with nothing to link them; I went from folder to folder in my library, and selected these shots.

However, I now realize that even all of these photographs are joined by something; it’s a bit obscure, and unless you are a bit of a naturalist, you might not find it though (especially for that brown rocky patch)¹.

June 2012, my wife Giulia is 7 months pregnant and we’re having our last holiday together, before the baby comes and wipes clean our current life¹.

We drive our van to Elba, a beatiful island off the coast of Tuscany, just before the hoards of tourists take over the whole place. We spend these 7 days camping in the only campsite that has no animation and no music; and we notice the relation between the percentage of non-italians staying in this campsite and how quiet this place is, and we connect the dots.

Somewhere, behind the sad story of Lance Armstrong and his team mates doing EPO and other shit to dominate professional cycling, lies the reason behind my personal preference of a certain kind of sport.

Ask a MotoGP rider do drugs; or a mountain biker doing an downhill or enduro race; or a climber on a vertical wall in the Dolomites: none of these athletes will do drugs. That’s because the core of their activity more technique than physique.

I wrote something about this little iPad a while ago, and on reading again that piece I find that it still represent my thoughts today. Yesterday Apple held the official announcement and among other cool things¹ there was the iPad mini.

I’m disappointed by two things; first is the lack of the retina display, but I now understand what’s at stake here (and I can’t believe all the tech commenters do not realize this): you want the retina display, you need more power and more battery to feed it.

I have been doing some experiments with this “stitching-bokeh” method; a neat idea to get the look of a medium-format camera but it takes too much computer work to get a good result; this is one of my attempts, definetely not as flashy as Brenizer’s, and I am pretty sure only a minimal percentage of viewers would spot something ‘different’ here:

The other photographs that I have collected for this ninth installment have been taken during the past few days in Parma; two days of sunshine and then two rainy days. These are the rainy days photographs¹.

It might be quirky and it might be cool but I would argue this is something which should not appeal to anybody apart from facebook photographers.

I’m talking about the 15mm Olympus body c(r)ap lens.

The reasons are two:

1. judging from the shots which you can see here the quality is abysmal. But you have to look at 100%, and while I’m against pixel peeping, when it comes to a technical choice, there is no other way to judge objectively the quality of a lens. This is why I think it may only appeal to facebook photographer, because reduced to web size all photos are sharp and correctly focused (there is a law waiting to be expressed: the lower the resolution of your final output, the less you can spend on equipment, or something like that).
2. the price is ridiculous ($110). I would then happily recommend buying a Pinwide which sells for forty dollars and makes a completely different kind of photo (real quirky here!, not crappy-quirky) or the wonderful Panasonic 14mm f/2.5 which can be found used for $100 and is tiny (I recently bought this lens to replace the Olympus 17mm f/2.8 which was starting to get on my nerves with its plasticky silver color).

Special edition today, featuring only iPhone photos.

Random photos this time. Some are very old, and I can’t even recall which lens I used. The last two are reminders that today was Giulia’s birthday (and this year there was nothing really which could compete with that special gift we’re enjoying together since the 4th of August).

It’s almost a year now that I have the Nikon D7000. It’s time to write something up about this camera.

I arrived at the Nikon D7000 after a long apprenticeship. I started with a Yashica FX-3 and its 50mm f/1.8, then I moved to a Nikon F70 (we’re still in the ancient film era). After a few crappy compact digital cameras (and one less crappy than others, the Canon G5) I got my first DSLR (a Nikon D70s) which was excellent until it broke down.

Click and Drag, the amazing xkcd cartoon that went online a few days ago, was fascinating and threw me back to the worlds I used to explore when I was a kid (through videogames obviously).

I selected a few places and made 1920x1080 captures to use as wallpapers for my 24" monitor. They’re clean, not distracting, and inspirationals (the one I use as a backdrop for my writing is The Cave).

I did a few experiments with the camera over the past two weekends. Thought to share a few pictures here, even if they are not particularly inspired shots. But if you’re trying to find how damn good is the D7000 sensor, just look at the green tomato shot.

All shots taken at “Il Montale”, Sala Baganza (Parma), with my usual gear (Nikon D7000, 35mm f/1.8, 50mm f/1.4, Tokina 12-24mm f/4).

I find it difficult to take interesting/compelling/creative photos of familiar places. So what I did this time was just to take random snaps, without thinking too much, without trying to sample all the possible aspects of a place.

They may not show what the true Rosamarina is: to do that, I should have taken photos of:

• all the fancy people who spend their holidays there, pretending to be more than they are
• the delicious Ciccio’s ice creams
• all the scooters and cars zipping by making this holiday resort as busy and dangerous as a city and so unfriendly to walkers and cyclists

I should have done this if I wanted to give an objective view of Rosamarina but in the end I decided that I didn’t care about this; what I wanted was only to mark a specific moment in my life.