Creative Thresholds

by Luca Rajna

These three sequences are inspired by what Wolfgang Goethe wrote about the gondoliers’ songs during his Italian tour.

Luca Rajna is the founder of the photographic studio Luca Rajna Progetti Fotografici (Photographic Projects) and works mainly with weddings and photo shootings. His team of world-class professionals consists of storytellers who have won all the most important awards: World Press Photo, Sony World Photography Awards and so on. The know-how of his team allows him to avoid a single standardized working methodology, getting the most suitable style for every client.

When he takes photographs he always looks for conveying emotions and feelings beyond what is represented: “There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect” taught G.K. Chesterton. Before to become a photographer Luca was a musician and researcher specialized in baroque Venetian music. His wife Maria Rosa is from Venice: her slang easily stands out, so…They got married in 1996, the year in which he did his last concert and was already the leader of a photography studio since two years, after studying photography in Milan from 1992 to 1994 at the CFP Ricccardo Bauer.

At the end of the 90s he was among the first Italian photographers to have a full website and after noticing on the Internet the work of his colleagues from abroad he made the wedding photojournalism philosophy famous in Italy, which was virtually unknown in his country then. In private life he is still fond of ancient (and ethnic) music, loves to translate the Bible from the ancient Hebrew and Greek texts and… would never stop playing Subbuteo (a kind of “Table Soccer” very common in Italy). Luca and his wife chose to live in the country, out of a big city. Their children names are Mattia (Matthew) and Noemi.

Among famous names, Luca learned to framing his images reading the treatises of Vasily Kandinsky, looking at the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, and to discover the poetry of the light from the black and white of William Eugene Smith. His favorite photography books are from the analogue era: “L’Isola Intima” [The Intimate Island] by Carmelo Bongiorno and “Venice” by David Hamilton. Recommended Movies: Ushpizin (2004), Fireproof (2008) and Courageous (2011).

Main Website › www.progettifotografici.com

Instagram › luca.rajna https://www.instagram.com/luca.rajna

Facebook › https://www.facebook.com/LucaRajnaProgettiFotografici

Google+ › https://plus.google.com/+ProgettiFotografici

by Keisuke Takahashi

Welcome to my Eyesight – Filtered with my Insight.

The Lighthouse Man

City and Street

Seaside

Beautiful Species

Artist: Keisuke Takahashi

Keisuke Takahashi is a photographer who lives in Tokyo. He bought an iPhone4S in December 2011 and it opened the way to express his feeling in photography. Four years and little has passed since then. Now he’s aiming to express the strong and deep representation in B&W Photography with various cameras like DSLR, Film SLR, Film compact camera but his main camera is still iPhone. He held his first exhibition “The Lighthouse Man” in February 2016. The idea of this project came out of his divorce experience in 2014. He defines Lighthouse as a symbol of the isolation, and he tried to shoot himself as the lighthouse man who watches the ships run through the ocean of life. Not only the photograph, “The Lighthouse Hat” was created by himself also.

EYESIGHT/INSIGHT – My Portfolio on Smugmug https://tokyogyango.smugmug.com/
Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/tokyogyango/
Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/KeisukeTakahashiPhotography
Twitter https://twitter.com/keisuke_photo

by David Giovannetti

My name is David Giovannetti and I live in a small town in Italy, called Corinaldo. I am not the son of an artist, nor did I attend art school, but still boast a curriculum that goes beyond any academic teaching: the tales of the adventures of my father, an Italian who emigrated to the United States to try his luck.

Thanks to his absurd stories, sometimes fantastic, my childhood flourished with wonder and curiosity about the world. Through fantasizing about his stories, I found the way to express myself through imagination which was sparked through art, specifically photography.

The path to turn this passion into a full-time job is long and arduous but I’m giving it my all to achieve this.

Website: https://davidgiovannettiphotography.wordpress.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DavidGiovannettiPhotography

Email: david.giovannetti@outlook.com

by Alessandro Ciapanna

These photographs were taken in a train cemetery on the outskirts of Uyuni, a small city in the south of Bolivia. This series is entitled “Asi Es La Vida,” from graffiti scrawled on one of the rusting locomotives.

Artist: Alessandro Ciapanna

I throw myself passionately at life. And life often smiles back. When that happens, I like to have my camera ready.

In what is a perennially ongoing process, I have developed a sense of what works, photographically. I can sometimes perceive when a situation has the quid I like to call the “wow factor”. I have honed my ear to the sound of a ball bouncing or a child laughing. Because these are telltale signs that something wonderful is taking place. It is a miracle, happening, unscripted. And sometimes – if you develop and trust your serendipity – it’s happening right around the corner. It’s something universal, and fleeting. Therefore all the more wonderful. All the more worth capturing. This is what I most like to photograph. Some call it life.

Website: ciapannaphoto

by Cecilia McDowell

Hampstead Heath: nearly 800 bucolic acres of parkland within London’s city limits, a city home to over 8 million people.

Though they are much cultivated and maintained now, these are lands that were mentioned in the Domesday Book (c. 1086AD), and upon which still stands a Bronze Age barrow (c. 2000-3000BC). Certainly, there have been major human-made changes – the now-famous bathing ponds were first dug as reservoirs in the 17th and 18th centuries – but this ancient park is tended with such an artist’s eye as to still feel pastoral. It is a public space in one of the world’s largest cities, a space that receives millions of visitors per year, and yet it is possible to sit under a tree in splendid silence for hours without seeing another living person. There is an undeniable magic in this place, regardless of your definition of the word, and even more so at dusk and dawn; at midsummer; at the edge of dappled shadows, ‘through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.’

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?

–John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 1819

Artist: Cecilia McDowell 

Introvert.  Artist.  Inveterate reader.
Curious.  Traveller.  Consulting palate.

Media links:

www.ceciliamcdowell.com

instagram.com/ceciliamcdowell

coming soon – accidentalalchemist.co.uk