Blog - Luigi Barbano Photography

The art of photography since 1994

May 13

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, FineArt, Fujifilm, meditations, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: flowers, fuji XPro-2, Luigi Barbano, macro photography, mother's day, photography

Mother’s Day

I know, I’m late, one day… …but here I am with a post to celebrate the memory of my mother. Yes, I’m a typical Italian male, so my mother had been very important in my life and I miss here every day. I have many good memories, and while I’m here looking to sell the house, I’m immersed in memories. My mother loved her garden and still after more than four years, every spring the garden starts to bloom and her beloved flowers come to life. She also left a diary, a story of her life she started to write when she was around 80 years old. I decided to make a book from her diary and using images of her flowers. It is a work in progress, I started to translate the diary and insert it in a historical contest to transform it in something interesting for a wide audience. Great part of her personal story is set in the 1930s and 1940s in Italy, not an easy time to be a kid, but sure filled of experiences that are interesting to read now. Anytime I see new flowers bloom in the garden, I spend some time taking pictures, […]

Apr 25

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: Casmona, Casmona Hotel, Luigi Barbano, photography

Dear Casmona Hotel, I will miss you!

Dear Casmona Hotel, I just discovered that you are no more a part of Camogli, and sure I will miss you. I just published my novel Lasting Photographs and I was looking for the address of the Casmona Hotel in Camogli, to send a copy to the owner Alessandro Machi, since his hotel was mentioned in the book and is part of the story. But I found out the Casmona closed few years ago. I was looking for the right words to express my homage to a great place, but the only thing coming to my mind right now is a long venting against the absurde laws and regulations killing all the small business in Italy, and the people and philosophy that created them and killed the medium class. So, goodbye Casmona, here is my photographic tribute to what I considered a great place to stay every time I went to Camogli. All the pictures are of the hotel or taken from it’s balconies and windows.

Apr 12

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Books, Film photography, FineArt, News, nudes, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: aviation, CarbonCub, Christ of the Abyss, Clearwater, clearwater Beach, Fascism, italy, novel, photography, romance

Lasting Photographs.

“Almost eighty years and an ocean separate John Ragnar, a pilot with a mysterious past, from the photographs he found in a box on the beach in Clearwater near a diver in coma. The desire to give a voice to the nude young woman portrayed in the Italian Riviera, will bring John in a journey of discovery of terrible times and the power of romance.” Yes, I did it, I wrote a novel. Lasting Photographs In the past years I had the time to immerse myself in my family archive and I had a confirmation of the importance of photographs and the stories around the images. Real printed images that I was able to see with just my eyes and a simple source of light. But sometime we find images and there is nobody around to tell their stories. Sometime is just too late in time, and sometime the image traveled far away from the people who knows the story. On the antique markets we often find old photographs, most of the time of people we don’t know, and we will never know who they were and how was their life. All this made me think about the importance of […]

Mar 12

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Fujifilm, News, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: digital camera, dream camera, Fuji, Fujifilm, photography, X-Pro, X-Pro3

Dear Fujifilm, will you make me happy?

Dear Fujifilm, I think you are one of the best manufacturers of cameras and lenses. The quality of the products in one reason, the other is that you listen to the users when you update your products. So, the question is, dear Fujifilm, will you make me happy with the XPro-3? Some years ago, after I started using the X-Pro1, I wrote an article saying you were one step away from my dream camera. Partially you satisfied me with the firmware options of the X-Pro2 but still something is missing for me. I am satisfied, I sold all my Canon and I have no regrets but a tilt and shift wide angle. But something is missing from my ideal small format camera, not in the quality of the images produced but in the handling. So here my hopes for the X-Pro3 to make it the perfect camera for me and I’m sure a lot of other users. The most important is the last, so keep reading. First of all, keep the hybrid viewfinder. It is the essence of the X-Pro series and I really don’t get why people happy just with the EVF don’t buy the X-E or the X-T… […]

Mar 06

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Film photography, Fujifilm, News, Portfolio 0 comments tags: Model, Pentax 67

Film, digital, a beautiful model and a foggy day

A couple of weeks ago I had scheduled some pictures, just for fun, with a local model. Nothing special and elaborated, just an hour outdoor to know each other professionally and start eventually to think about other projects. It was the only cold and foggy day in a beautiful italian spring and, to be honest, I was almost tempted to reschedule. Instead I carried in my bag my beloved Fuji XPro-2 and, to have some fun, my Pentax 67 with a couple of Ilford HP5+. The model, Anca Dina Serban, was great and the diffused light, coming from the arches of the colonnade of the church front porch we used as set, was the equivalent of a huge light diffuser. As usual I found a lot of differences between film and digital. The response curve to the light is one, but most of all is my attitude different when I have in my hands a film camera with a big focusing screen.With film all become simple. I measured the light on the model cheek at +1 with the Minolta Spotmeter and did not worried anymore about the exposure. The big focusing screen, without disturbing elements allowed me to focus in […]

Feb 16

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, ethic, meditations, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: contests, digital elborations, ethic, photography, retouch, Saad

Ethic and Photographers

Definition of ethic, from the Merriam-Webster 1 ethics plural in form but singular or plural in construction : the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation 2a : a set of moral principles : a theory or system of moral values b ethics plural in form but singular or plural in construction : the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group professional ethics c : a guiding philosophy d : a consciousness of moral importance forge a conservation ethic 3 ethics plural : a set of moral issues or aspects (such as rightness) debated the ethics of human cloning One of the latest news in the photographic world is the Australian Photographer Saad losing her prizes because in her composition she used images produced by other photographers. Not only, but even without the permission of the original creators.In a previous post I already talked about the fact that personally I do not consider photography what in reality are digital illustration, and is not the point of this post. Lately we have seen a long list of photographers that in some way cheated or at least stretched the rules a little too much. Many contests […]

Feb 13

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, CaptureOne, ethic, Fujifilm, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: house for sale, italy, photography, piedmont

Contests, editing, advertising and trust

Few days ago it was snowing in my little town in the Italian region of Piemonte. It was quite beautiful and I took some pictures from the balcony. My reason was not just to have some photographic fun but also to create some images to promote the sale of my house. I posted this image on FaceBook and a friend commented: “if he had a red umbrella that would be a competition print possibly loan collection!” I’m sure it was a compliment and a way to stimulate me in a moment I’m getting far away from photographic competitions and some associations. But this made me think. Why do we have to modify every image with a contest or likes in our mind? I like this picture because it’s real. It was not snowing anymore so no need for an umbrella, eventually why red when the most common umbrellas here are the cheap interchangeable black ones?This is not a contest image that will catch the attention of a judge in 3 seconds on a screen, but I do not care, it is an honest one. Part of my idea is to show how beautiful is the view from this house. I […]

Dec 23

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Film photography, meditations, Uncategorized 4 comments tags: Baby it's cold outside, Christmas, Christmas wishes, joy, New Year, photography, reality, Rudolph, Snowflake

Merry Christmas 2018

I heard a noise outside the door, I walked to it, opened the door and there was the newspaper, confused I started to read it… (Click on the image to open a large version) …I woke up sweating from the nightmare, I was sitting on my couch and I immersed myself in my beloved reality. Some years the Christmas reality is happier than the others, this year for me some sadness is in the air filling everything with the emptiness left by the people I loved and are no more with me. But still all is real and I will never change it with a fake safe zone. I love reality because I know I can rationally deal with it and I can follow some little Christmas rituals, as setup a family traditional stone carved Nativity, to still feel the presence of the persons who gave me my life and helped me to become who I’m today. Christmas is the moment to forget the sadness and get ready to reborn being in charge of our own life. It is the moment to find the joy in everything around us and start planning the future with the blessing […]

Nov 22

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Fujifilm, meditations, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: Barbano, blessings, Fuji, Luigi Barbano, photgraphy, thanksgiving, typewriter

Thanksgiving 2018

Thanksgiving, a holiday I learned to celebrate. Thanksgiving is not an Italian tradition so I grew up without it. Thanksgiving is one of my preferred holidays. Every year, also when I’m in Italy, I celebrate it. I dedicate a day to think about the blessings I had in my life, I try to quit my complaining and enjoy at the fullest what I have. Today I was looking thru my parents belongings and I found a typewriter, so I celebrated thanksgiving playing with it. I let the images speak. And here the letter I wrote to remember what I’m thankful for.

Oct 07

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Film photography, meditations, Uncategorized 1 comments tags: Analogue photography, family archive, film photography, history, past, photo archive, photography, present, print, prints

Exploring the analogue past

In the last days I’m exploring an analogue past and thinking about the digital present. A lot of water passed under the bridge since my last blog post. My father passed away, my sabbatical I took to take care of him is going to end soon and at the moment I’m putting some order in my home getting ready to sell it and move on with my life. I come from a family were we used to keep everything and for sure a lot of pictures. Opening boxes and drawers I found the photographic archive of the family, the oldest one consisted in a lot of prints, starting from the beginning of 1900, the newest one, mostly created by me consists in CSs, DVDs and hard disks. Guess what? The oldest archive is accessible without any tools but my eyes and a source of light, the newest one requires a ton of tools and it is still accessible thanks only to the redundancy I applied when I created it, using different media to store my images, but the CDs and DVDs are almost all unreadable now. Vint Cref, one of the Internet fathers and Google VP, warned us about […]

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