Film photography Archives - Luigi Barbano Photography

The art of photography since 1994

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 […]

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 […]

Feb 05

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Film photography, FineArt, Fujifilm, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: Fuji, Fuji X Passion, Fujifil, Luigi Barbano, photographic magazine, photography, XPro-2

Fuji X Passion magazine… I’m in!

Fuji X Passion magazine featured, in the February 2018 issue, my article about the comparison between film photography with Ilford FP4 on a Pentax 67 and digital Acros simulation on Fuji XPro-2. It is always great to be published in a beautiful magazine with other extremely talented photographers. In the meantime I just developed a roll of Fuji Acros taken with my Hasselblad 500C/M and the 80mm f2.8. More later…

Jan 31

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, CaptureOne, Film photography, Fujifilm, Uncategorized 8 comments tags: film photography, film vs digital, Fuji Acros, fuji XPro-2, Ilford FP4, Pentax 67, photography

Digital Fuji Acros vs Ilford FP4 Film

Is Black and white better with digital or film? I compared the Fuji Acros film simulation on my XPro-2 with an Ilford FP4 film on my Pentax 67. Lately I had the time to scan old negatives and I was pretty impressed by the quality and quantity of information available on film, so I decided to use film again, particularly for the PhoenixPhotoProject. The quality of the images created was pretty impressive so I decided to try some film in medium format. I used to work with Hasselblad but I decided to get a used Pentax 67 and have some fun with it. Next time a Pentax vs Hasselblad comaparision! I took some pictures on the snow in a sunny day. The dynamic range a the quality of the tones were great and I started to have the feeling that film can be better than digital sometime. I decided to do a simple non scientific comparison and take the same pictures with the XPro-2, in RAW and jpg with the Acros simulation, and with the Pentax 67 with a roll of Ilford FP4. The choice of a medium format film, compared to an APS-C digital is very simple, 24 MegaPixel […]

PhoenixPhotoProject #1: Free to choose

What is the value you give to a photograph? With the PhoenixPhotoProject #1 you are free to choose! Since its invention photography had been defined and valued in many different ways. With the PhoenixPhotoProject #1, “Free to Choose”, you can decide by yourself what value you give to photography. For Niepce, Talbot and Daguerre, the men we consider the inventors of the photographic process, photography was a chemical and mechanical way to reproduce reality. Nothing more than that and we know how, for long time, thanks to them and their definitions, it was so difficult to make photography accepted as art by the most. If this is the value you give to photography you will find in the box a great mechanical tool to reproduce the reality. The camera is a Pentax Spotmatic SP, one of the greatest mechanical cameras produced in the 1960s, very simple and without any automatism, only an internal exposure meter. The camera is completed by a SMC Takumar 55mm 1.8 – a great camera/lens combo! I found the camera on E-Bay and I bought it attracted by the engraving on the pentaprism: SPAIN 51862335. This camera has a story and for […]

Dec 31

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Film photography, IR Photography, meditations, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: New Year, new year resolutions, photography, year balance

End of the year, time for balance and resolutions

The end of the year is always a time to do a balance of the time passed and make new resolutions for the new year. At least it is for me. The 2017 was a peculiar year. I took a sabbatical from my work, I had the option to put myself in a situation where I had to work 16 hours a day to make a sufficient gross to have, after the italian 85% taxes (35% income, 22% V.A.T. and 27.7% mandatory state managed retirement plan) enough to pay for someone taking care of my 91 years old father, or I could just do it personally and avoid to work 85% of my time for the government. The choice was a no-brainer: I took time for myself and gave back the care I received all my life. Professionally I consider this a great year. With the few time I had for myself I managed to write some books with very good reviews and realize some personal projects. To be far from the pressure of the profession I reignited my love for photography and had the time to think and develop new ideas. January started with a beautiful review […]

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 […]

Apr 27

by admin in BlogUpdates, Books, Film photography, IR Photography, News, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: book, Luigi Barbano, manual, photo technique, photography, photography manual

Photography: The f Manual

Do you want to have a solid base to understand the photographic process? This book is for you! You can be a beginner amateur or a professional photographer but if you want to easy understand what is involved in the photographic process to make the correct decisions you need to have strong and clear basis. The book contains the essential basic concepts to understand the photographic process. The author is explaining all the concepts and rules photography is based on, giving a general theory. Luigi’s book talks about everything from f stops to file formats, the difference between JPG and TIF and how image scaling and DPI relate. His section on how camera, computer monitor and printer color calibration works is explained so well, you’ll never forget it (just think toast). It even has in-depth explanations on photo composition, HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, depth of field, printing your images, publishing, and more. Luigi’s English is pretty good yet his lovely Italian flavor and sense of humor still come through. You can buy the book on Amazon or directly on CreateSpace

Feb 25

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Film photography, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: cathartic, digital, film, Ilford, patience, Pentax, photography, right moment, wait

Film and my old loved Pentax MX

Sometime we are so busy taking pictures with our digital cameras that we forget to actually look for the right moment. A roll of expensive film, a simple camera without displays, histograms, 10 frame per seconds, auto focus and we can free our mind again from the tool and concentrate to the moment. Yes, I love digital photography and all the opportunities that it offers to us just, once in while, is worth to create a cathartic experience and relearn what is really important. Only 36 frames, a day to spend in a place. I had to walk around and really look for an interesting subject and avoid to waste a picture opportunity on something not worth. Walking around, looking around and, once I found a nice scene with a good composition, just wait for something to happen. In this case was a storm with a lot of rain and the sun appeared illuminating the rain with its rays. Sometime we must think film also with our digital camera, be patient and take the one good picture instead of thousand of mediocre images.

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