MICHELE

Before going on holiday to Florida and the Bahamas, I didn’t have any time to take some test shots with the Petzval 85 I borrowed from Lomography Soho. So, while I was there, I used the lens and the Nikon N55 my friend Adrian found for me at a camera market in Warsaw, for the first time. Of course not being familiar with your tools puts you in a funny position, where you’re a bit too stressed about the outcome, try to take the same pic with two cameras, just to be on the safer side, and keep on thinking “what if I’m doing it all wrong?”.
Luckily, and quite surprisingly, the shots turned out to be better than I thought they would. That’s when I came up with the idea of the “Herbst” series. Once back in London I had to return the lens, but before doing it I wanted to take as many portraits as possible with the confident and “make the most of it” attitude of somebody who’s aware of what he is playing with.

“Herbst” is a series of portraits of different people, shot this Autumn in several spots of London with the Lomography Petzval lens.

My brother, Michele, was my first “test animal”.
I hadn’t seen him since Easter, when he came along with my parents to Isabel’s family house in Graz, Austria, so we both were quite excited to know that we would have spent 5 days together. I was actually quite worried about showing him around because the last time I did it, while I used to live in Berlin, we realized that my kind of sightseeing (made of quirky and unusual places) was slightly different from his more traditional one. So, this time, I tried carefully to balance touristic attractions and alternative London, ending with him loving London much more than he liked Berlin. Funny enough, we went to a Berlin pop-up in Shoreditch where we danced in the smallest club on earth (a pay phone), complete with strobe lights and smoke, to Abba’s “Dancing Queen”.
These portraits were taken all over London, from Southbank, to Shoreditch and Notting Hill, while my feet were literally bleeding for the crazy amount of miles we walked.

Nikon N55, Petzval 85, Agfa CT precisa 100 / Kodak Elitechrome 200 (35, expired), 8-12/10/2015, London.