It all began in 1967, in the boarding school in which I lived; when I was 14 I attended a course of photography held by a photo amateur friar, Giuseppe. I'll never forget the first feelings I felt in the darkroom when I saw my first photo slowly appearing from the development, almost magically.
I couldn't have a camera, so ten of my schoolmates and I used the same one, a Soviet camera, Smena 8. I was 19 when I bought my first reflex, the Yashica FR, an excellent manual camera, which is still working; then I bought my first enlarger, the UPA 5, a Soviet 8x automatic enlarger.
Now my equipment is more prestigious (Contax, Leica with original lens) but, I think, when you're charmed by photography, you can express yourself by the meaning of each kind of camera: it's pleasant to look at it and to observe all those view-finder frames, with your forefinger ready to release, so immortalizing the scene. I've always loved this art. Above all I love B&W photos; I've always been charmed by portraits and I consider Henri Cartier-Bresson as being my teacher, even if I don't share full-format printings and the only use of 50 mm lens.
I'm charmed by landscapes. I like strong colours and the sharpness of details. I think composition of images is very important, if possible; I can obtain it only using my tripod and, generally, in my darkroom, when printing my photos.
I also like graphic design and music. When I decided to build my web-site, first of all I had to accept the idea to put photos different from the originals on-line. The images I proposed are a compromise between quality, which has to be acceptable, and the downloading speed of images, usually J-PEG files.
As you can easily understand, I had to compress my photos, cutting their KB short, otherwise the downloading would be so slow that you couldn't either see one of them and you'd rightly go to other sites. You can never find a solution and the right compromise. Nevertheless my wish to let people see my photos prevails over all... All my photos are accompained by a MIDI Files background, which takes 2-6 KB. up. I had better to use MP3 files but, at this moment, they're too big to be downloaded. In the future I wonder... I made this choice not only to mitigate your wait during the loading but also to complete the page.
Music lets image pass on those emotions which get in your mind. I hope to be good, at least with some of my photos. We can only wait...
www.nicobastone.com