meditations Archives - Luigi Barbano Photography

The art of photography since 1994

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 […]

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 […]

Oct 28

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, meditations, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: Adobe, client privacy, Cloud, Lightroom, nude photography, photography, privacy

Photographers, clients, privacy and clouds

I was reading yesterday about the new move of Adobe to offer Lightroom only with a subscription method, the same move Adobe did with Photoshop and the CS programs years ago. As a little premise, I quit to update my Adobe programs, years ago, after CS6 because I do not like the subscription method and I never used Lightroom since I prefer CaptureOne or Irident. For editing, designing and books’ layout I still use the CS6 and I’m moving toward Affinity. There are many reasons why I want to own and not to rent my software and I will not list the reasons here. Here I want to talk simply about privacy. Reading about the rental options for Lightroom I was impressed by the offer of GigaBytes of cloud storage. All of the Adobe programs seem to be concentrated on the multi platform trend, so you can use them from your computer, tablet or phone. Reading comments to various posts I see the cloud storage is considered essential and a great value by many photographers. I see people complaining for the rental costs, others happy but nobody worrying about the cloud and the privacy of our clients. To understand why […]

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 […]

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 […]

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