TOC
I’m Davide, 26, and I love cameras. During the day, I am a management graduate and work in Milan for an international financial consulting firm. I started taking photographs as a child, with one of those instant plastic cameras in the shape of a Bugs Bunny. The results were obviously terrible, but it was a great way to keep me busy at family dinners and birthdays. However, the passion remained with me, and I continued to shoot, mostly digitally and rather carelessly.
I did not particularly feel the desire for analog, or collecting cameras. I had bought a Nikon FG just to try, but I had made some rolls of it just to see how life was before pixels. Some years later, at the age of 21, I was selected for a Bocconi exchange program at Purdue University in Indiana. Born with the American dream, inherited from my parents who had lived in California in the 80s, I could not wait to leave and take a lot of photos. However, there was a problem.
For those unfamiliar with it, Purdue is famous for two things: it is the university of astronauts (Neil Armstrong studied there), and is its temperatures. I still remember arriving in Chicago after a turbulent flight with this newspaper headline: “Midwest is colder than Mars today.” and it was true! The thermometer showed -15 ° Fahrenheit, -26 ° C for the rest of the world. Chilly. I knew it, and I was prepared: warm clothes, a bus ticket, and an analog camera since I was not ready to test the cold resistance of my DSLR.
I had a lot of fun, and even if my pics were not stunning I was super happy with all the process. When I returned to Italy, I slowly began to study how to get the best out of my rolls. I set up a small dark room with a friend in the basement, starting to develop and print. I started buying cameras, first for little money, then for something more. I didn’t do it with the spirit of the collector, to use them as decoration, but because I was curious to try what they were like.
In the meantime, my small arsenal grew and became populated. Some cameras were common, others less so. in recent times, I have also reconciled with digital, which I had never abandoned, and in particular with Foveon. I feel it like a natural and much-needed bridge between the analog and the digital world. It has almost the same quality as analog photography, with much of the simplicity of a digital file. It is not a perfect system, as we will see, but it could be an interesting one if used correctly.
If I had to describe in a few words how I think, I would say that interesting rhymes with funny. If something attracts my curiosity, I feel the need to share it, and this is the purpose behind this small site. Good navigation!