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 […]
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 […]
