Use of very hard light, just off camera. Likely nothing more than a Speedlight, but getting it off direct camera access makes it so much more palatable. You’ll also get the sense he’s using predominantly one portable source for many of these on set snaps. So well done.

Second note, Paolo seems to love breaking - no, crushing - the ‘rule of thirds’. You’ll find a lot of faces placed dead center of the photo - and it works. Probably not a great rule to promote breaking, but the shots are so well composed that they do work, and it creates wonderful and interesting tension in number of the picts.

Third note, Paolo seems to love to shoot through stuff. Mostly car windshields. Brilliantly done and it adds a great layer of light, color and effects. Great stuff.

via materialicio.us

Ah, the magic of photoshop – you can’t believe everything you see. Sure, we expect stuff like Maxim and GQ to be heavily photoshopped, but you’d be surprised what else gets doctored. Here a very good run down of the history of ‘retouching’ that dates way back before the days of photoshop. Many of the examples are quite well known photographs that’d you’d expect to be doctored up, other are surprising.

When I first say this picture of this (above) I was super excited. I miss the days of shooting twinlens stuff. What could be better, a twin lens digital camera from Rollei. Complete with popup waist level finder and real ‘crank action’. Awesome, right? Well, then I started to read the specs - 5MP interpolated. Strike one. Then I saw the picture below, strike 2 and 3. It’s tiny! It’s practically a toy. The banner shot should probably be considered macro photography.

I guess the ‘mini‘ in the name - Minidigi AF 5.0 - should have given it away. Damn. It does look pretty cool. Not cheap for only 5 ‘interpolate’ megapixels - $329.00. Full size, and a real 6MP and I might have paid twice the prize, but for this, no way. Get it here.