City on a Hill
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“The idea for the project came shortly after my first visit to Matera, in Southern Italy, in 2018. I had photographed the city on that first trip as a series of panoramas, taken from a series of high vantage points. They were pretty conventional – made with a standard lens which incorporated a foreground, background, and sky. In 2022 I returned to Matera with a Fuji GFX and its stellar 250mm and 1.4 Teleconvertor to play around with the compressed look of a long lens and experiment with something more ambiguous and abstract. I worked in many of the locations I had visited on the previous trip but with the tele lens and converter. The depth of field was an issue more often than not, so I took advantage of the GFX’s focus-stacking feature for those and combined 4-5 images later with Helicon Soft. To remove additional depth cues such as shadows I always worked at the beginning of tail end of the day to keep sun behind me, which had the added benefit of unifying the colour temperature of each image as I moved from location to location.
A handful of locations, such as Naples and Sicily, I had been to before while making other images. It was just a matter of going back to do some legwork for a few days, scoping out a suitable location. The remaining locations in Sicily and Morocco were researched prior to departure. I always start with Google Earth and simply wander about a potential location as if I were there in person. It’s an invaluable tool and I use it frequently but it can be deceiving, so I’ve learned to take what I see with a grain of salt and not discount a location based on what’s on the screen. Sometimes the street view images are old so the streetscapes are radically different in reality. It’s a common occurrence, so if something looks remotely good on the computer I’ll check it out in person and accept that I’ll be either disappointed with my findings or pleasantly surprised”.
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City on a Hill
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