Blog - Luigi Barbano Photography

The art of photography since 1994

Oct 17

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, meditations, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: airport, flying, Hilton, Hilton Munich, Munich Airport, photography, relativity, travel

Travel time and relativity

What does have to do a photographer travel time with Einstein’s relativity? Absolutely nothing, but blogs need fancy titles and lately seems all photographers are quoting Einstein 🙂 Also if my travel time is much slower than the speed of light and I do not need to disturb Einstein, I was making a trip last month and I noticed how the sense of time changes as soon as I enter an airport. Going across the Ocean with some overlays requires around 24 hour from the moment I go out to get the cab to go to the airport to the moment I get to destination. Every single time I think about it I feel tired and I perceive it as a very long time. When I enter the airport everything changes. I’m in travel mode and the time seems to expand or compress, different moments bring a different perception. Going thru the security and from gate to gate is done in hurry (also when you have plenty of time) and the time runs fast, when you sit aboard on the tarmac it seems an eternity until the plane departs from the gate, than for me is […]

Oct 15

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, meditations, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: 3leggedthing, ambassador, ambassador program, marketing, petapixel, photography

Ambassadors and CEOs…

Being on FaceBook I often pass by articles from websites like PetaPixel and usually I take a look at some of them. Yesterday was no exception and I read an article written by Danny Lenihan, the founder and CEO of 3 Legged Thing. In the article he wrote complaining about the quantity and attitude of people who reach him asking to become ambassadors of his brand in the hope to get a free tripod. I’m sure he describes a real situation and I understand his point of view, but, as often, I try to see from a more distant point of view that is less attached to one side. So my question for Mr. Lenihan is simple: who do you think is responsible for this situation and diffused attitude? Let’s talk for a moment about how the photographic companies changed in the last years. As a little premise, this is the first time I hear the brand 3 Legged Thing (evidently you know your marketing Mr. Lenihan… but do I have a positive or negative knowledge of your brand name now?), so I have no idea of the quality of the products or how they relate with the customers, and […]

Sep 10

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, meditations, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: clearwater Beach, hurricane, Irma, natural disasters, photography

I’d rather be in Florida in a cat5 hurricane than in Italy with clear skies.

Today I’m following the path of hurricane Irma. It’s a category 4 hurricane, a very bad beast, and she is moving toward Florida and is supposed to arrive over the Tampa Bay area. I lived a year in Clearwater Beach, I been there many times for short periods and I love the place and the people. That for me is home and I consider it my spiritual homeland. In the previous weeks there was Harvey, another hurricane hitting Texas pretty badly. I been to Houston and for me was impressive to see the images of the floods on streets where I drove and places I know. It was very bad and it made victims. Today I see the news in Italy, bad weather in Tuscany, mostly on Livorno. Six people dead. The problem was simple, 10 inches of rain in few hours during the night.  I look at the pictures and are similar to the damages caused by a category 4 hurricane in the USA that brought down 50 inches of rain! I look at the USA and I see people prepared to fight the adversities, included natural disasters at the level of a […]

Sep 09

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, ethic, meditations, nudes, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: digital elaborations, Grand Imaging Award, International photo contest, IPC, photography, PPA, professional photographers of america

PPA – Professional Painters of America?

identity crisis noun Psychiatry noun: identity crisis; plural noun: identity crises a period of uncertainty and confusion in which a person’s sense of identity becomes insecure, typically due to a change in their expected aims or role in society. I had been a member of the PPA, Professional Photographers of America, since 2000. I think PPA is a great association with a lot of benefit and educational resources for the members. Every year the PPA organizes the International Photo Contest. Sending the images, seeing them judged live online and looking at the others is a great way to improve. I sent images in the years, as is normal, some got merits, some got in the prestigious Loan Collection and some was not even considered. I always found a nice challenge to have my vision, more European, compared with the typical American vision of the judges. It’s a nice way to get out of the comfort zone. I always suggest to European to confront with the USA vision and vice versa. In the last couple of years I noticed a trend in the IPC that I do not like and this year, with the Grand Imaging Award Finalists, I was […]

Aug 21

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Books, Fujifilm, IR Photography 0 comments tags: Fuji, fujifil. FujiLove, infrared, photography

Bovisium Infrarubra featured on FujiLove

FujiLove, a fantastic online magazine for the Fujifilm world, featured my article about the project and book “Bovisium Infrarubra”. You can read the article here https://fujilove.com/bovisium-infrarubra-infrared-photography-with-fujifilm-x-series/ Enjoy the reading! 🙂

Jul 27

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, ethic, meditations, nudes, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: Milo Moire, models, moralism, morality, nude, nude photography, photography

Milo Moire`, photography and nudes

Today on FaceBook a friend of mine posted an article criticizing an artistic performance of Milo Moire`, the performance in question is “The mirror box” and you can see it here and read a description. My first impact was to not consider the performance as something positive, but then I started to read the comments, all similar, just to quote some of them “What happened to this world? Seriously.” “What? She needs psychological help” “A singularly perverted narcissist and exhibitionist. Gets her thrills this way. Proves no point!” “She likes it?” “A true media whore. People are morons…those people touching her are pigs.” “Mediawhore” and so on… you can imagine how it went on. So I used Google to fine Milo Moire` page and read the explication of her performances and watched the others. After the comments and after seeing the other performances I have to say I really like her and she made a perfect point. Particularly I liked the Protest over the Cologne attack. In a culture where the answer of Cologne Mayor was to suggest the women to cover themselves I though that this performance was perfect. I’m a photographer, mostly a commercial photographer, but […]

Jul 09

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Film photography, Fujifilm, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: Acros, Black and White, film photography, Fujifilm, ols potographs, swissinfo

Old pictures, dynamic range and Acros…

I was reading on Swissinfo.ch, the article The breathtaking photos that showed Switzerland to the world by Marguerite Meyer (Writer), Ester Unterfinger (Photo editor) I was impressed by this picture: The picture in itself is just a good documentary photograph but what I noticed is the dynamic range (or latitude of exposure as we called it before we were trendy…). We can easily see details in the dark areas inside the gallery and we can see the details in the panorama toward the arches. Some burning was made in the darkroom and the effect is visible, but all the details were in the original plate. This was for sure a large format plate made before the industrialization by Kodak, so there was no need to save on the quantity of silver in the emulsion. You can see the same latitude of exposure in almost all the old professional pictures well exposed and developed. If you are in Italy there are some good places to watch the impressive quality and dynamic range of old films the Alinari Archive is one of the best and has a lot of publications. The rule in film was to expose for the shadows […]

Jul 02

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, ethic 0 comments tags: archeoindustrial, manners, perimssion, photoraphy, Roman Robroek, urbex

You camera is not a free pass to every place!

I read on PetaPixel an article by Roman Robroek, an “urbex” photogrpapher… if you wander what this means is a short for “urban exploration” basically taking pictures of abandoned buildings. He is from Nederland and when he traveled to Austria he entered an abandoned hotel and, few months later, received ~$2800 fine to pay for trespassing. Obviously he consider the fine too much etc. Read the article for the details. Now, I’m sorry for all you photographers but your camera is not a freaking pass that allows you to violate the private property. If you think so you are doing a lot of damages to the profession and reputation of serious photographers. Also if you have a camera, you still need to use proper manners and simply ask permission, to avoid fines, jail or bullets. It is that simple. As soon as I started to take photography seriously I did an assignment that can be called “urbex”, I always referred to the specific genre as industrial archaeology, less fancy and trendy but a little bit more clear. The subject was an old building where silk was produced, some friends of mine studying architecture were doing a project and […]

Jun 28

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: camera, camera boy, photography, short moves, Spencer Brown

A beautiful short movie… not only for photographers

Today I found online a short movie that I really loved. “The boy with a camera for a face” directed by Spencer Brown. This 15 minutes short movie tells perfectly the problem of watching vs living. I consider this a must for every person in the image business. Enjoy it!

Mar 05

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, News, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: CIPA, digital cmera, film, market, photogrpahy, sales, sven Skarfisk

Good news for professional photographers?

Today I read an article on PetaPixel abut the camera market compared to the smartphone market. You can find the original article here. From the article I took a graphic that was created by the photographer Sven Skafisk (I wanted to go to the source and link him, but I have not found a link in the article or his page on Google) who spent the time to put on a graphic the data of the camera production from 1933 to today, divided by typology and including the smartphone camera market. The article is very interesting and points the difference in scale between the camera and phone market. It’s worth to read. But what really impressed me about this graph is the comparison of the camera numbers before and after the digital revolution. How this can mean good news for professionals photogrpahers? We can see that after the end of the film era in 2005, anybody wanted to become a photographer and the sales of digital equipment (from compact to serious cameras) really increased exponentially. In those years we have seen crowds of people getting one good picture with a digital camera that decided to buy a D-SLR and become […]