⬆️ I met @fedecunial (middle photo in sequence above) along with @tmarzaro via instagram as part of @astroclub.y. Long story short—I gave them a large official banner I picked up from the 2021 MXoN (Motocross Des Nations), where the Italian team won the title at Maggiora Park—what an event! See more from that here or over on Vurb Moto. These guys are Italian, and doing an incredible job photographing Italian riders that were on the team (Tony Cairoli and Mattia Guadagnini ) I thought it would be better that they have it than me 😀 Of course, they photograph + video tons of other riders as well and travel frequently on the MXGP circuit. They’re also working in video with Mattia Guadagnini’s “Behind” series—so good—and so much freakin’ work (and helpful for learning Italian, BTW)!! Long story short, I’m super impressed by these guys—and they’re as nice as they are hard-working, which is awesome. Since the IG convo we had about the banner I’ve kept in contact with these guys—they’ve been super nice to me and I really enjoy what they are doing with the Astro Club and hope they keep the party going. As a former racer, it always just feels way better to know people in the paddock doing awesome stuff! I hope I can meet up with these guys at another GP sometime soon.
Better late than never…
Wow y’all. No other way to say it. I’m way, way behind on posting. I was lucky enough squeeze a trip in last month to absolutely stunning Pietramurata, Trentino for an MXGP race. I decided to go analog with my cameras—taking my Minolta SRT 201 35mm with some Fuji 400 and my Diana F+ toy camera with a few roles of 120 Kodak Portra film. I also had my trusty digital LUMIX, but didn’t really use it. It was a perfect day for racing and for photographing—such an amazing experience. The difficulties started once I took the film from the cameras 😅. I’m not able to process C41 film myself, so I had the film processed by a local shop in Sacile called Cosmo Foto. From there, I began the arduous process of going through all of the negatives (probably around 150 frames or so—I’m a whiner, I know), selecting, scanning with my flatbed scanner, and finally processing the photos I scanned in photoshop. I post-process very minimally when I shoot film to try to honor the analog process as much as possible. I generally only edit exposure, levels, and throw a highpass filter on for clarity. That said, boy did it take a long time! I’ll admit there where moments during the process when I was questioning whether or not it was worth it anymore to keep buying + shooting film. It’s SO damn expensive now. But then, I look at the selected photos together and I remember all the good things about shooting film…and how good / free I feel when I have an analog camera in my hands. There’s unquestionably something unique about these images—there’s a story being told—even in the frames. I written about this a bit before—and the feelings haven’t changed much. I think we can all agree uniqueness in today’s media landscape doesn’t come easy. I’d venture to say these images are unique because the process reflects that—even down to the tape I crudely used in some of the images to tape them to my scanner bed. It’s there. Who cares! I just might try to keep it to one roll at a time in the future and maybe scrutinize a little more before snapping the shutter, but probably not. Ha! It’s pretty much impossible to stop once you start snapping that real shutter hardware—shoot ’em if you have ’em. Ciao!
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