Blog - Page 4 of 6 - Luigi Barbano Photography

The art of photography since 1994

Feb 20

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Film photography, Uncategorized 1 comments tags: bad habits, catahrtic experience, digital, film photography, kit camera, pinhole

Clearing my mind from digital bad habits

Or… How to have some photographic fun without technology. Digital photography created a wonderful new world of opportunities but it also changed the way we photograph, instilling in us a lot of bad habits. One of the worse effect of digital photography is to make us shot too much and post process even more. It’s kind of strange, but also with a strong film background, when we use digital we forget to have a slow approach to our subjects. Sometime to remember what make me take great pictures I have to immerse myself for a day in some sort of cathartic experience that will force me to the basics of photography and forget the digital world and the infinite possibilities to post process my images. Those cathartic experiences are not intended to take great pictures, but simply to clear my mind and have some fun far from a computer. The most basic way to photograph is with a pinhole camera. I suggest to every beginner to try the pinhole to understand deeply the basic concepts of photography, I even created a full chapter about it in my book “Photography: The f Manual”. The simple idea is to […]

Jan 12

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Books, Uncategorized 0 comments

Recensione di “Pensieri Fotografici”

Su La Guida di oggi, giovedi` 12 gennaio 2017, e` apparsa una breve ed ottima recensione del mio libro “Pensieri Fotografici. Meditazioni politicamente scorrette di un fotografo in sciopero”. Il libro puo` essere acquistato su Amazon Buona lettura!

Dec 23

by Luigi Barbano in Film photography, News, Uncategorized 1 comments tags: Christmas, Christmas cards, Luigi Barbano. wishes, New Year, photography

Merry Christmas… for this year and the past 20(ish)!

Every year, since 1995 for Christmas I created a card to send my best wishes to friends and clients. I always went in to the effort with the idea to create a real Christmas card and not a commercial work and I think I succeeded most of the time. Here my cards from 1995 to 2016 with the explanation of what I did, how and why. Obviously my wishes for this year are at the bottom of the post… so if you want a nice year… read it all!!! 😉 1995 This was my first year as professional. I opened my studio in July 1994 and I started to really work and promote myself in 1995. I always had a passion for reconstructing ambiences and mood so also for Christmas I went in that direction and realized a model of a mountain lodge. It was all made in 4″x5″ film with a Cambo Master Plus. I printed the picture to attach to the card in 4″x5″ and you can see here under the black shade the original image and, clear, the crop I used. The reason to realize a larger image and then crop was to have more depth […]

Dec 18

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, News, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: best gift, cameras, christmas gift, photo accesories, photographer, photography

10 best Christmas gift for a photographer… from $0 to a lot!

It’s Christmas, time to buy gifts and nobody deserve gifts more than photographers! So here my personal list of the 10 best gifts, from $0 to a lot of money. A free gift that you can give to your photographer friends is to give them time: your time as subject, patient partner to explore the world with them or simply time to review their pictures and be honest. Honesty is the key for the gift, tell them if their 5000 pictures of a yellow lemon are boring or exciting, tell them why you like or dislike an image and tell them why. For few dollars you can handcraft a visualizer. Years ago, in the film era, it was a very common tool, specially for view cameras, and was ready to buy in the shops. Now is not possible to buy it but very easy to build. Take a piece of black cardboard, cut a hole the size of the sensor in it and attach, close to the hole, a piece of measuring tape in millimeters. The visualizer can be used to evaluate the scene looking thru the hole and the distance between it and the eye will correspond to the […]

Dec 11

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, News, Uncategorized 10 comments tags: electronic viewfinder, EVF, Fuji, Fujifilm, Hybrid Viewfinder, Luigi Barbano, optical viewfinder, OVF, OVF vs EVF, photography, viewfinder, XPro

OVF vs EVF… a philosophical difference

OVF vs EVF! Let’s the bloody war begin 😉 The world is divided in two… always, that is why there is people making a lot of money selling t-shirts for opposite points of view! The users of mirrorless camera are not different, photographers loving the optical viewfinder and photographers loving the electronic viewfinder and hating each other. Since Fujifilm introduced the hybrid viewfinder with the X100 and the XPro we can have the best of both worlds and decide what to use for every picture. It is surprising for me to see, on various blog posts and comments, Fuji users hoping to have a future release of those cameras without one or the other option when Fuji made the most intelligent move leaving the choice to us. But this is not the point of this article, here I want to concentrate on what I think is the philosophical difference between the OVF and EVF. Personally, on my Fuji XPro1 I use both but mostly the OVF. When we look at an EVF we look at the camera representation of the subject on a display, when we use the OVF we look at the framed reality. Basically people that […]

Dec 07

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Books, News, Uncategorized 1 comments tags: camera, Luigi Barbano, photography, photography for beginners, photography manual, photography tools, spotmeter

Photography is not rocket science… and the essential tools to learn

Photography is not rocket science and we need few simple essential tools to learn how to make good pictures. Few days ago I wrote an article on my blog, and it was kind of viral in the photography world. Many FaceBook pages and websites re-posted it and, out of curiosity, I went to explore who re-posted my article. Some of the pages were for beginners and others for a more general public and in both categories, and specially the beginner side, I noticed that most of the articles were about cameras, software and gadgets. The idea is “what a camera with what new tool and that software can do”. Nothing bad in this but I was attracted by the comments, specially from the beginners. A lot of people asking questions like “How do I expose for portraits?”, “How do I expose for weddings?”, “What lens is best for X or Y?”, ”I’m experimenting with manual, what settings I have to start with?” and so on. I learned photography with film, mostly large format view camera and medium format Hasselblad, and every time I read questions about how to expose for a particular subject I think in the digital […]

Dec 01

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, CaptureOne, News, Uncategorized 1 comments tags: CaptureOne, CaptureOne vs Adobe, PhaseOne, RAW converter

Why I choose CaptureOne

Today PhaseOne released the version 10 of CapturOne, I still have to test in deep the new version and I plan to do some tutorials about it in the next days (yes, Christmas time is perfect to work on more personal projects) but for now I want to tell why I switched from Adobe ACR (or Lightroom) to CaptureOne. As many photographers I never explored RAW converters before, everybody was using Adobe, I was using Adobe. Photoshop is really a standard in image editing and I used it to retouch my scanned images well before the digital cameras became the norm. When I got my first digital it was the normal choice to convert the RAW in ACR, and I continued for years with the same workflow. When I changed from film to digital I was stuck in photographic mental crisis. With film I used the Fuji Provia a lot for my commercial assignments, and that was meaning the need to be able to have perfect light and exposure. The tolerance of the Provia was a maximum of a third of a stop, and to be precise, when I used it in the view camera, I considered the tenth of […]

Nov 29

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: 55-200, Bisalta, Fuji, Snow, XPro1

Fuji 55-200…

Just a test of my new Fuji 55-200mm, on my XPro1, from my balcony. The sharpness is great!

Nov 25

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Uncategorized 13 comments tags: camera, Fuji, Fujifil, photography, XPro

Dear Fujifilm… you are one firmware option away from the perfect camera!

A love story with a little hate feeling. Last year I bought a new Fuji X-Pro-1, it was a great deal few days before the XPro2 was on the market, I bought it as a camera to keep in my pockets not really as a serious option but I loved it since I started to take the first pictures. I even bought a second one used and converted it to infrared. The quality of the RAW file is incredible and so the quality of the lenses. I really enjoy the OVF and the option to switch to EVF sometime. Low or high ISO the quality is superb and I started to bring the camera with me always, something that I was not doing with the much bigger and heavier Canon 1DSMkIII I own. Every single time I develop the RAWs I like it a little more. So I cannot be happier and I hope I will get the X-Pro-2 very soon. But… I hate absolutely all the buttons and wheels that get pushed and moved anytime I take the camera in my hands from the bag. The macro function seems made only to make me worry that the OVF/EVF switch […]

Aug 21

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, CaptureOne, IR Photography, Uncategorized 4 comments tags: Fuji, Fujifilm, Infrared photography, Luigi Barbano, photography, X Pro 1

InfraRED Fujifilm X Pro 1

I always enjoyed infrared photography, starting with the Kodak Infrared film I always had great satisfaction exploring the infrared part of the spectrum. When I switched to digital photography I forgot infrared for a while until I got my Canon 5D converted to infrared by LifePixel. The conversion was great, the support was perfect but when the camera was sent back to Italy the italian customs asked me to pay the taxes not only on the modification but also on the value of the camera. At the end of the game I had to spend around 700 Euros for a conversion that costs usually $300. I decided to convert a Fujifilm X Pro 1 to infrared and this time I decided to try to do it myself buying the filter directly in Italy from Adriano Lolli Costruzioni Ottiche Meccaniche and avoiding all the import costs. The choice of the X Pro 1 was very simple. I had bought a new X Pro 1 with the 18mm when the new model came around, I did it because was really a great deal (450 Euros included an extra battery, a memory card and the leather bag, since than the price […]

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