Un Giro D’Italia – Parte Tre: A Zine By Me

Hello everyone, long time no speak. I’ve been working on another small publication of my images that I created during my most recent trip around Italy in Spring of this year. I’m please to say it’s finally ready and is available to buy through my Etsy store.

The zine is 28 pages of medium format images taken mostly on Kodak Ektar but also some Portra using my trusty Yashica D and features scenes from Florence, Siena, Turin, Bologna, Parma, La Spezia and others. Because I’m nice there’s a little 5×5 print of the River Po flowing through Turin included too AND the postage is free to anywhere in the world.

So if you like my work why not do me a favour and buy a copy? 🙂

Un Giro D’Italia – Parte Otto

For my tenth day in Italy I awoke early to catch a train, I was going on a day trip from Firenze to the nearby city of Prato. What I was soon to learn that not only had I gone far too early in the day but that I had also gone on the wrong day, a Monday, when half of the place was closed.

Italian Trip Images

As regular followers of this site may be aware across November I took a trip around Italy, travelling from Turin to Rome and stopping off in Genoa, Lucca and Florence on the way. I’ve shared a few of the images I took as and when I had the chance while I was still in Italy, and as the vast majority of the images I shot were done so on film that hasn’t yet come back from the lab, at present I don’t have a huge amount to show for it. That is except for these.

This is a small selection of images, mostly snapshots, I took while out there using my digital Olympus OMD EM5 and it’s 17mm M.Zuiko 1:1.8 lens. I will stress these are “snapshots”, the good stuff (i.e. shot on medium format film)should be available to share by the end of this week or early next week. Enjoy these for the moment.

Little Update

Buona Sera followers, friends and casual readers/viewers alike, as you may have noticed from the last week or so of lack of updates to this site I am not currently in the UK. Although if you saw my post from yesterday where I said that I wasn’t currently in the UK then you probably already know.

I am at present sat in a very nice, if slightly small, Airbnb in Lucca, Italy, having just finished my first week of travelling around this beautiful country with the dual aim of seeing places I have always wanted to see and shooting a million rolls of film at the same time. So far, so good.

I thought that I’d post up a quick update style post this evening though just so nobody thinks I’ve gone completely off the radar, and as tomorrow I will be off to my favourite city on the planet, Florence, for the next week, it seemed fitting to share an image I took the last time I was there. I’m aiming to recreate this on medium format and hopefully a much better exposure.

 Olympus OM1, FujiColor C200.

Nine Days in Italia – Parte Sette: Top Of The World & Mercato Centrale

Day seven and we finally climbed to the top of the Duomo itself, exciting for me, not so much for Jo who’s not keen on heights (although will always climb up to the top of cathedrals and buildings with me when I want to). As you can imagine the view was pretty spectacular, the inside of the building itself on the way up however was two things; Hot and Crowded, horribly so on both counts. I was glad to get to the top for a bit of breeze to dry the sweat I was drenched in, I can’t remember exactly the number of steps but it was in the high hundreds and went on forever. One thing I need to mention as it’s one of those things that really winds me up, the amount of graffiti on the way up to the top of the Duomo was shocking, despite the number of signs asking please not to write on the walls. I mean come on, its a historic monument, why would anybody think writing your name on it adds anything? Today we also took a walk up the Mercato Centrale, I bartered with a guy to buy a belt, Tuscan leather is one thing I wanted to buy before we left. I don’t think my poor Italiano was the reason for the supposed heavy discount I got but maybe it helped, I’d also question how much the belt was worth if the market stall guy was happy to drop the price from 42 Euro to 22 without much of a fight. The outside of the market was pretty much all leather goods, this being Tuscany, the inside was a different matter entirely, a huge food hall with street food stalls and food made to order in front of you, bars, the whole lot. The place was amazing, so good in fact that this is where we came for dinner that evening. The final thing we did this day was get some fancy gelato, because why would you not want to do that? I bought a Baci flavoured one, if you’ve never had Baci before then I suggest you try them, in gelato form it’s even better. Anyway these are the final images (well except one from the next morning) of Firenze as the next day we left early for Pisa, this film used this day was Agfa Vista 200 (you can probably tell from the fact the sky doesn’t look quite so vibrantly blue as it does with Fuji) and as usual all taken with my Olympus OM-1 and either 50mm or 28mm lenses.

Nine Days in Italia – Parte Cinque: The Big Three Oh!

So….this is the day I turned the horrifying age of thirty. No longer could I tentatively claim to be youthful and vibrant and have my whole life left ahead of me to do fun things, I’d reached an age where I had to be a grown up. How terrible. On the plus side it was our first full day in Firenze which is where I had decided if I had to become that age I was going to do it here. Today consisted of a few awesome things; Seeing pretty much every Renaissance piece of art ever made in The Ufizi, having a good wander around the beautiful city, eating a Bistecca Alla Fiorentina the size of my head from the best restaurant we had visited so far (and to think it was practically opposite our front door) and discovering that the bottle of what we thought was very reasonably priced Prosecco was actually an awfully over-priced bottle of Asti, doh.

The day started with me nearly falling flat on my face from the dozen or so “Happy 30th Birthday” balloon’s Jo had woken up in the middle of the night to decorate the apartment with, which was a lovely thought even though it reminded me what an old man I had become in those small hours between going to sleep and waking up. The free WiFi in the apartment also meant I could be constantly reminded of this descent into geriatrics from people at home as well, thanks guys. OK all joking aside it is nice when people say Happy Birthday. I finished off my bowl of “Nice Morning” and we headed down to The Ufizi museum, a fantastic building that was once the palace of the rulers of Florence and later Duke’s of Tuscany. Two things happened here, one terrible and the other great, first was the horribly long queue to get in which although was shaded, was outside and obviously not air conditioned. The second is that you can skip this queue simply by going to the front and buying a ticket for a specific entry time rather than hanging around just trying to gt in when you get to the doors. It’s advertised all around but no one seemed to notice or realise until we were told by someone and then passed on the information Chinese Whispers style. It was around this time that security guard stopped to have a chat with me about my camera, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, shoot film and people want to talk to you because it’s different and interesting. He described my choice of using film as “brave”, until I showed him my back up digital camera as well. After getting our tickets for a set entry time we killed time by taking a walk up to the Ponte Vecchio, the wonderful thing about Firenze is how close the major sights are, the river is at the end of the street where the Palazzo Vecchio and Ufizi are and the Ponte Vecchio is another 2 minute walk from there.

Anyway lets get onto the photographs from today, not too many were taken inside the Ufizi as the ISO of the film was a little too low and there was far too many things to photograph in there. As usual all are taken with my Olympus OM1 using my F.Zuiko 50mm or Vivitar 28mm lenses, the film for today was Agfa Vista Plus 200.

Nine Days in Italia – Parte Quattro: The Questionable Window Seat

We left Venezia on the right day, it was absolutely hammering down although still very warm, and took the train to Firenze. Once again I am in love with Tren Italia, air conditioning, a reserved seat, a just under two hour journey that doesn’t cost a million pounds like in the UK, all great things. What wasn’t so great was the questionable “window seat”, sure there was a window and our seats were next t it, sadly the seats blocked most of the window so you didn’t get to see a huge amount. The photo’s taken of the countryside are mostly of Emilia Romanga, the regione that Bologna is the capital of, as we had to travel through this to get to Toscana, and also because of the hundred or so tunnels that we went through once we did get into Toscana, the Tuscan countryside with its rolling hills obviously weren’t designed with the ease of train travel in mind. what we did see out of the semi window was very pretty, it seems that the rain was only in Veneto as it gave way to blazing sunshine after only a half hour or so on the train. Once we got to Firenze we took a walk to the apartment we had rented, shouldn’t have been a problem as it was only around a twenty minute walk from the station, unfortunately we didn’t know that Florentine streets have two sets of house numbers, one set for businesses and one set for residences. Yes that’s a real thing, look it up because we had to. After standing outside a farmaccia for 10 minutes after ringing the person who was meant to meet us Jo decided to look up the street numbers on Google and that’s how we found out that the apartment was actually the other end of the street. Confusing huh? Anyway the apartment was basic but clean and perfectly fine for our purposes, the main reason I liked it though was the view and how close we were to the centre of the city, seriously for the price we paid I did not expect such a central location. One big issue however was the street cleaners that woke us up at 3/4am, the soundproofing, if there was any, was pretty atrocious in the apartment, luckily it only happened the first night as Jo refused to stay there if the second night was as bad. Again I suppose that’s the price you pay for a central location.Anyway onto the photographs from day four, this day was all taken on Fujifilm C200.

Firenze Duomo

 Olympus OM-D EM-5, 17mm M.Zuiko, ISO 200, f8, 1/800th sec.

Street Photography – Olympus OM-D EM-5; 53

Another selection of street images images taken in Italia on my Olympus OM-D EM-5, enjoy.

 25mm, ISO 400, f8, 1800th sec.

Firenze At Night 2

 Olympus OM-D EM5, Panasonic Leica Summilux 25mm, ISO 800, f1.4, 1/13th sec.