News Archives - Luigi Barbano Photography

The art of photography since 1994

Apr 12

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Books, Film photography, FineArt, News, nudes, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: aviation, CarbonCub, Christ of the Abyss, Clearwater, clearwater Beach, Fascism, italy, novel, photography, romance

Lasting Photographs.

“Almost eighty years and an ocean separate John Ragnar, a pilot with a mysterious past, from the photographs he found in a box on the beach in Clearwater near a diver in coma. The desire to give a voice to the nude young woman portrayed in the Italian Riviera, will bring John in a journey of discovery of terrible times and the power of romance.” Yes, I did it, I wrote a novel. Lasting Photographs In the past years I had the time to immerse myself in my family archive and I had a confirmation of the importance of photographs and the stories around the images. Real printed images that I was able to see with just my eyes and a simple source of light. But sometime we find images and there is nobody around to tell their stories. Sometime is just too late in time, and sometime the image traveled far away from the people who knows the story. On the antique markets we often find old photographs, most of the time of people we don’t know, and we will never know who they were and how was their life. All this made me think about the importance of […]

Mar 12

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Fujifilm, News, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: digital camera, dream camera, Fuji, Fujifilm, photography, X-Pro, X-Pro3

Dear Fujifilm, will you make me happy?

Dear Fujifilm, I think you are one of the best manufacturers of cameras and lenses. The quality of the products in one reason, the other is that you listen to the users when you update your products. So, the question is, dear Fujifilm, will you make me happy with the XPro-3? Some years ago, after I started using the X-Pro1, I wrote an article saying you were one step away from my dream camera. Partially you satisfied me with the firmware options of the X-Pro2 but still something is missing for me. I am satisfied, I sold all my Canon and I have no regrets but a tilt and shift wide angle. But something is missing from my ideal small format camera, not in the quality of the images produced but in the handling. So here my hopes for the X-Pro3 to make it the perfect camera for me and I’m sure a lot of other users. The most important is the last, so keep reading. First of all, keep the hybrid viewfinder. It is the essence of the X-Pro series and I really don’t get why people happy just with the EVF don’t buy the X-E or the X-T… […]

Mar 06

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Film photography, Fujifilm, News, Portfolio 0 comments tags: Model, Pentax 67

Film, digital, a beautiful model and a foggy day

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 […]

Feb 21

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, CaptureOne, Film photography, Fujifilm, News, Uncategorized 10 comments tags: Acros, analogue camera, digital camera, film photography, film versus digital, Fujifilm, Hasselblad, photogrpahy, XPro-2

Fuji Acros Digital vs Fuji Acros Film

Digital or Film? Fuji Acros Digital on a XPro-2 compared to Fuji Acros 100 Film on Hasselblad 6×6… who will be the winner? Few weeks ago I did a non scientific comparison between black and white digital and film, using my beloved Fuji XPro-2 and a Pentax 67 with Ilford FP4. The article got a lot of interest and was also published on Fuji X Passion magazine. I decided to improve the test and use Fujifilm Neopan Acros 100 film, instead of Ilford FP4 and Hasselblad instead of Pentax. The use of actual Acros film instead of Ilford is obvious and needed for a less casual comparison. Hasselblad instead of Pentax is because I suspected some lack of sharpness was caused by the lenses, and since I have used Hasselblad all my life and I’m sure were the best analogue medium format camera and optics, I simply wanted to eliminate every variable related to the lens. As I said before: I know that, scanning the negative, part of the process is still digital so is not perfect I do not intend to give all the answers I did this just for fun and to understand myself a little better […]

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 24

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Film photography, News, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: Christmas 2017, Ilford FP4, Merry Christmas, Pentax 67

Merry Simple Christmas

Every year for Christmas I dedicated time and efforts to create a Christmas image. Usually a still life with plenty of symbolic contents and often references to the year main events. If you are curious to check them, last year I posted on my blog all the images I made in the last 20 years. This year I kept it very simple, with a winter picture I took few days ago with a Pentax 67 with a 45mm and an Ilford FP4 film. A landscape, less then a mile far from my Italian home. I’m in a kind of sabbatical period, staying at my 91 years old father home taking care of him, and I dedicate myself to photographic personal research and books writing when I have the time. Obviously he is my priority and in December I simply had not the option to subtract time from him to create a Christmas still life. Mentally, staying far from the professional duties, I also started to look for simplicity and film photography is part of this research for a simple way to photograph, far from hours of retouch and the computer. A slow method, perfect for the rhythm of life I […]

Nov 03

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, meditations, News, Uncategorized 3 comments tags: ginseng, ginseng festival, Midwest, photogrpahy, rural USA, travel photography, Wausau, Wisconsin

Wausau, International Wisconsin Ginseng Festival

Wausau, it’s a small town in Wisconsin, in the middle of a beautiful country where the hills are spotted with colorful barns immersed in cultivated fields. Few people in the western world know that in the Wausau area, one of the best species of ginseng is produced. This ginseng is appreciated all over the world and especially in Asia, the largest export market for Wisconsin Ginseng. In 2010 I had the privilege to photograph the cultivation process of the ginseng and portray most of the farmers associated to the Ginseng Board of Wisconsin. For the first International Wisconsin Ginseng Festival I was invited to do an exhibit of the images taken in 2010, part of the book “Wisconsin Ginseng”, and I had the opportunity to take the pictures of the Festival and the correlated events. The festival was great and perfectly organized, the people at the Ginseng Board of Wisconsin and Lori McGehee from Millennium Marketing did a perfect job. A lot of people attended to enjoy the ginseng products offered at the booths and the live performers on the stage. There were meany correlated events, a 5k run, visits to the farms […]

Oct 19

by Luigi Barbano in BlogUpdates, Fujifilm, IR Photography, News, Uncategorized 0 comments tags: Achievemnts, B&W, Black and White, contest, infrared, Infrared photography, photography, Spider Award

Luigi Barbano’s five pictures nominated at the 12th B&W Spider Award

12TH ANNUAL BLACK AND WHITE SPIDER AWARDS HONORS PHOTOGRAPHER LUIGI BARBANO LOS ANGELES October 20, 2017 – Professional photographer Luigi Barbano was presented with the 12th Annual Black and White Spider Awards Nominee title in the category of Nature at a prestigious Nomination & Winners PhotoShow streamed Saturday, October 14, 2017. The live online gala was attended by over 11,000 photography fans around the globe who logged on to watch the climax of the industry’s most important event for black and white photography. 12th Annual Jury members included captains of the industry from The Armory Show, New York; Christie’s, London; McCann, Singapore; GQ, New York; Hot Docs Film Festival, Toronto; Y&R, Malaysia; Sharon Calahan, Pixar Animation Studios, Emeryville; Bloomsbury Auctions, London; and Donald Schneider Studios, Berlin who honored Spider Fellows with 672 coveted title awards and 1034 nominees in 31 categories. “Spider Awards 2017 proves once again to be a great challenge for the jury to select the best images of the year. Every year this photographic competition increases its quality of content, reputation and prestige” said juror Andrea de Polo, Cultural Heritage Consultant at Fratelli Alinari Photo Archive in Florence. Curator and Arts Writer Paola Anselmi added “Congratulations […]

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 […]

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 […]

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