Guestblog Andrea Livieri

This is also I shot I loved. Personally I love the movement and mood of the shot, with this kind of shots it’s so easy to go overboard with the postprocessing but I think Andrea did stop just at the correct time. In this blog post Andrea tells about the shot and more…. So here you go Andrea the blog is yours.

THE BOXER – Andrea Livieri
I am a professional musician since 15 years and I really love all the forms of art, as well as being an eternal curious about everything that surrounds me. My first love was definitely music, especially electric guitar and rock music, in which I could wreak and make real, in form of “sound”, all the devilry I had in my mind. I have always taken pictures as amateur with several different compacts bought over the years. It was during the summer 2009 that I purchased my first SLR, a Nikon D60 and it was a total lightning, and from there I began reading and experimenting seriously. Up to now I have made considerable investments concerning camera equipments, switching to Canon camera and optical accessories, including softboxes, flash, transmitters, etc …, all in support of my ideas and not only for the pleasure of owning the latest “toys” on the market. I usually do not waste money for equipment I don’t need, I rather prefer to invest them in one more beer. I have the constant need to deepen and concretize photos which could eternally fix a phase of my life. Photography has become a fundamental part of my life as a means of expression of many ideas that were impossible to realize in music. I feel like a man with two “prothesis”, a guitar in place of the left hand and a camera in place of the right one, my arms have been lead to an extension induced by my head and my heart. Making music and taking pictures, it makes me keep a balance between real life and obsessive delirium, and I admit I like it.

My approach to photography is still evolving, but it is the portrait that stimulates me the most. The interaction with people is a chemistry that is difficult , if not impossible, to replace with anything else. My point of view on the art forms is the same I have in music, I mean that also photography is a sharing of emotions raising from the eyes and invading the rest of the body. The technique in itself has no value, it must be nothing more than a support to creativity, the important aim is to communicate something. I largely owe my training to the Internet, my obsession, and to Mauro Ranzato, an amazing photographer I met in 2010 and with whom was born a wonderful friendship.

For my photos I am always looking for subjects with strong personality, and with a natural liability to dive in the role, I think that some skills can not be taught, because they are an intrinsic part of the nature of each human. All this concerning the contexts in which I analyze the location, the look and composition to re-create my ideas. I am a fussy by nature and I am inclined not to give for granted any detail when I photograph. However I behave in a diametrically opposed way, when I’m portraying people in everyday contexts, where I no longer act for a “settlement” but for “Crop”. In reality the camera’s viewfinder is simply a way to isolate a certain dimension, a certain space, a real “crop”: the composition in these cases results to be a consequence and not a starting point.

With regard to the picture I put in this post, and I thank Frank for this opportunity, it is an image extracted from a small sequence of photos taken during a session in summer 2010. My intent was to develop a situation in which I could reproduce the training phase of a boxer, and that could give the sense of an atmosphere of discipline, loneliness and self-sacrifice for a sport which often absorbs much of the daily labors of a sportsman, setting aside the idea of the glory that could be obtained on the ring and celebrating instead the necessary efforts needed to achieve great results. The location is an old garage where the punchball was hung; I used a specific corner of the room where the wall had a perfect texture for what I had in mind. The system of lightning I use, is a basic “One step light”: an off-camera flash 580EX II, set manually, whos was light diffused through a white translucent umbrella Placed at the top and inclined at 45 degrees. The flash Was driven with a radio system Pocket Wizard Plus II. I used a wide angle lens to get a distortion that emphasizes the trajectory of the fist and the arch of the arm.

Below I’ve included some screenshots concerning the post-production process I have applied to the image,: two channel levels with which I acted on the color contrast to obtain the mood I was looking for, a level for the control of color saturation, a texture contrast to emphasize the overall texture both of the background and of the subject, and finally a Vignette to strengthen the atmosphere of the shot.

Usually I shot in tethered mode (where it’s possible), and I love to use Lightroom 3 & Photoshop CS5 on my iMac for the post-processing workflow. I really thank Frank for the space he dedicated to my work and I hope that this brief tutorial will be a useful inspiration for your shots. Click’n’Roll 😉