Hey, thank you for visiting my site
My name is Naoki Tomasini, I’m Italian with half Japanese origins.
I am a photographer, ex journalist, formed in philosophy and arts.
I make images, portraits in particular, for personal, commercial or editorial use.
I currently reside in Lisbon.
★
I used to have a link to my Bio here.
But … who reads the biographies in the photographers’s websites?
Unless we talk about Gregory Heisler or Stanley Greene…
So I thought: let’s write something that someone might actually read:
My history in cameras
Gear does not make who you are, it follows
I remember I was sitting on the floor, in front of the kitchen where mom was preparing lunch, I was six years old. In my hand I was holding my first camera. It was made of Lego bricks, and of course it did not work except in my fantasy.
It was a rangefinder. Leica M style, while my father at the time was sporting a bulky Japanese reflex. He had one of the first autofocus reflex on the market, and a ridiculous super tele 500mm catadioptric that reminded me of the Russian – pardon, Soviet – space modules. Strangely enough, we had a dog called Laika, in honour of the first dog in space.
Fast forward 20 years, to 1999, my first digital camera: the mighty Olympus c-2000, 2.1 Megapixels. I used it to study the light for my amateurish paintings and to snap visual notes in the art shows, but soon the machine derailed my interest and photography took over.
I admit it took me a while to understand that yes digital was easy, but it was not as good as analog. Not even close at the time (my personal evaluation of the digital/analog dispute is the following: from a 35mm film I can get around 12 megapixels, with 4 stops latitude. While the latest 35mm digital cameras today can output up to 50Mp and 14 stops of dynamic range).
I hope you see that I am talking about gear, equipment, machines, because I can’t strip all that from my history and still have it make sense. Plus, I think that assuming the importance of the technological extensions on our experience, and identity as a consequence of that, is something everyone alive today can relate to.
Back to the story. So here’s me, spending the following five years trying to grasp the secrets of optics and digital manipulation, without the tutorials of Youtube. At that time knowledge was still a scarce resource, and photography still a profitable career.
Optics was approachable, because not much had changed from film to digital. But photoshop, I mean Photoshop 4.0, that was esoteric. Honestly, I did not manage to understand what I was doing until I got my hands on the digital course of photo retouch by Dan Margulis. Seeing him colorizing the images with the curves, and being delighted every time he applied the Man from Mars technique… that feeling of control meant the world to me (now I know he was slaughtering jpegs… but those were the possibilities back then).
Getting the basics of photoshop, however, meant to me that I was covered enough on the digital end, and that I could focus on photography.
I remember the first time I made a journey with the only purpose of making images. It was 2003, my testing field was Negev desert, Israel. I was dressed up as Woody Allen, with a black leather DIY shoulder bag in which I carried two items: a Sony Cybershot F707, straight from the space age (best ergonomics ever) plus a gigantic .7 wide angle screw in adaptor, that in my eyes made it look so badass… until I realised how bad the images looked with that on. Never again. This is experience.
Those images, nonetheless, got me into my career as a journalist: I got a job for an online news website called peacereporter.net, which was produced by an Italian Ngo called Emergency. They were crazy enough to give me a chance, so I’ve spent the following five years writing and take pictures for them, from Tibet, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan… It was tough, more than everything because un-filtered reality is tough: I could ingest it, but I was not ready do digest it. Nor as a man, nor as a photographer.
But how exciting it is to be the only witness with a camera when history happens? That is not when leaders make speeches or sign treaties, at least not only. In my opinion, history happens daily, silently, in the shoes of the people. Individuals, entities with rights, desires and aspirations. In my mind there was no greater responsibility, no greater honor.
Compared to my funky Negev kit, my bag in those years kept growing. There is a line here: before and after 2008. Before it was CCD and APS-C time, after, digital began real photography. My Nikon D700 was the camera I loved the most, I had two of them. Full Frame meant finally reaching the visual equivalence with 35mm film, CMOS meant that darkness had become a virgin territory to explore. The real thing was there. The only limit was me.
I still have all that bundle of feelings pulsating in me: I see my sweated hands holding it, while the jeep was climbing up mount Qandil, Northern Iraq. Me and my friend Chicco were about to meet the guerrilla fighters of the Pkk, and all I could think about was: how the hell can I use the in body flash to command-trigger the speedlight without it appearing in the images? Enter off camera flash. Enter control over the light. The cream of my job.
Note, a photo editor that afterwards saw the images refused to buy them because they were “too much flashed”.
Whatever she meant, I screwed up. But I was hooked.
As I said, since the D700 was the perfect body, in those years my guts started to salivate on glass more and more, because that is what makes the difference in the final images. Once again, I had learned this from hard experience: on that first Iraqi assignment, my friend Nicola had lent me a lens he revered (on his crop camera): the Nikkor 17-35 f2.8. That piece of glass made every human positioned near the corners look like a proper member of the Addams family. Never again.
I will also give a swift mention to another piece of artillery that I have carried with me for years, until I finally ditched it for good. The “indispensable” 70-200 f2.8… except mine was an older 80-200, pump zoom. It changed the focal by pushing the outer barrel in or outwards: it was way too heavy and intimidating for my taste. I sold it, and never missed it. Good for weddings and guns lovers.
As my experience and knowledge evolved, I found out that perfection for me, as a photo-journalist, meant sturdy, reliable and light weight. The symbol of what I liked was the Nikkor 50mm 1.4D. Heritage of the film lenses, small, well built, lightweight. The 50mm focal became the gold standard of my visual approach. Some people have the same love with 35mm, which to me is just uncomfortable. I guess it is a matter of working distances.
I said that 2008 was when the photo game changed, because of the introduction of full frame pro bodies from Nikon, and Canon with the 5D (hands down, no less of a cult camera than the D700). But wait a minute, who am I kidding? 2008 was the year when the photo game changed because of the i-phone. Only, when it happened I was going the opposite direction and I did not notice it.
In my mind photojournalism was still an artisan job. I thought that pushing the limits of image quality was more important than cutting the times of delivery. So, for quite a while I just slashed the emerging works shot-with-i-phone as a commercial conspiracy, and went on head down into my quest for image quality.
Sure, 35mm digital was already better than 35mm analogue. But what about medium format film? What about large format 4×5 technical cameras? So there I went again, finding more space in my bag to accommodate for a Hasselblad 501, a light-meter, a bunch of 120 rolls and a sturdy tripod… (hand-holding a medium format film camera? Not me). Pretty much always, my digital images came out better than the analogues, my fault for sure, but the point is: doing that unnecessary effort made me feel a real photographer. Film made me understand a couple of ideas that stuck until today. First: you can not negotiate with physics. Second: gear will always be in the way, but it should be as little as possible. Maybe third… romantic clichés won’t give you better images, and they might get you bankrupt. Conclusion: my all black Hassy, most beautiful object ever designed, was sold on Ebay.
Speeding up to more recent times, 2013, it was time to replace the D700. I did not want to buy a D800. In my opinion 36Mp were overkill. But still I bought one. I used it for a personal project in São Paulo, Brazil, and… I was right with my worries. When I got home after three months in the favela of Paraisopolis, I realised that those huge files made my computer crash like a crazy donkey. That a big chunk of the images that I had to reject would have been ok if those were 20Mp. Plus, the camera was heavy as a stone, a mediocre focuser and… man, that shutter sound… why do photographers get so obsessed with the shutter sound? That one sounded like a mouse-trap.
I have to be honest: the camera was good, the D800 is still a great deal in the used market. But to me, I had enough of the golden ring, so I made the switch to the red one.
If you check on Youtube, making the switch is a buzzword. It is a defining moment, when someone sever his/her loyalty to a brand and embrace another. It is betrayal, It is… a pile of crap actually, click bait in most cases. What is true is that switching bodies and lenses is a very expensive process with no way back. In my case, I had uncommon luck in the form of a colleague, Bruno, that had a Canon 5D mark III and wanted to try Nikon, so… deal.
As I stated in the title, the gear follows our steps, our mutations, while we follow the mutations of the world. By 2014 it was already clear to me that photojournalism was no longer a proper job. Even my six years old nephew Filippo told me that. But I insisted.
i-phone 3, 4, 5… (I did not buy one until SE)... photoshop CS, CS6, CC… Facebook, twitter, Instagram… And me, still sending emails to the magazines, because in the meanwhile, since 2009, I had left my old editor and had been working as a freelancer, or independent producer as I prefer to say. Btw, who read magazines today, except in the waiting rooms?
Let’s go to the end of this timeline: present day. I tried. I swear I tried to change field. I saw the value of photography dropping towards zero, included mine. I swear I looked into all the possible alternatives, but the only place I can find myself is into the pentaprism.
Everyone is a photographer today, so I am. Professionalism? That is in the images.
I shoot portraits. I do it because I think there is no machinery or software that can replace a human in this field.
Contact is what makes a portrait unique, like every identity is.
Contact is the key that turn my engine on.
Recently I have upgraded my camera again. This bad boy/girl talks to my phone, to the satellites, it focus with the touch of a finger… I don’t really need this stuff, but this no longer sets me off. Instead of digital vs analogue, these days we talk software vs hardware, because now the software is getting the upper hand. Guess what? I’m playing my game. As long as there is a mirror I will be in. In the future, when I will have no alternatives to mirrorless cameras – that is: watching a tv inside the finder – then, maybe I will consider giving up.
Until then, thanks Canon, for making a reflex camera that weight 200g less than Nikon’s and that never screw up a skin colour. Thanks for the perfection of the 24mm L Tilt Shift mark II (mark I was garbage). Even for the old 90mm TS-E with which I mis-focused so many good shots, until I accepted the limits of my vision and replaced it with the autofocus 100mm macro L. And thanks for the 40mm 2.8 pancake, manifesto of optical simplicity and a reminder that quality can be cheap. In the end, it is all about the light.
In conclusion, as I’m talking about light, thanks also to Profoto, for allowing me to travel with my studio lights, even on a crowded bus.
Well, actually I did that just once, and I thought: Never again. This is experience.
Side note: I skipped the step for reasons of space, but at a certain point I also learnt how to properly retouch without slaughtering jpegs. Thanks to the Adobe guru Marianna Santoni for initiating me to the secrets of the sect.
My name is Naoki Tomasini, I’m Italian with half Japanese origins.
I am a photographer, ex journalist, formed in philosophy and arts.
I make images, portraits in particular, for personal, commercial or editorial use.
I currently reside in Lisbon.
★
I used to have a link to my Bio here.
But … who reads the biographies in the photographers’s websites?
Unless we talk about Gregory Heisler or Stanley Greene…
So I thought: let’s write something that someone might actually read:
My history in cameras
Gear does not make who you are, it follows
I remember I was sitting on the floor, in front of the kitchen where mom was preparing lunch, I was six years old. In my hand I was holding my first camera. It was made of Lego bricks, and of course it did not work except in my fantasy.
It was a rangefinder. Leica M style, while my father at the time was sporting a bulky Japanese reflex. He had one of the first autofocus reflex on the market, and a ridiculous super tele 500mm catadioptric that reminded me of the Russian – pardon, Soviet – space modules. Strangely enough, we had a dog called Laika, in honour of the first dog in space.
Fast forward 20 years, to 1999, my first digital camera: the mighty Olympus c-2000, 2.1 Megapixels. I used it to study the light for my amateurish paintings and to snap visual notes in the art shows, but soon the machine derailed my interest and photography took over.
I admit it took me a while to understand that yes digital was easy, but it was not as good as analog. Not even close at the time (my personal evaluation of the digital/analog dispute is the following: from a 35mm film I can get around 12 megapixels, with 4 stops latitude. While the latest 35mm digital cameras today can output up to 50Mp and 14 stops of dynamic range).
I hope you see that I am talking about gear, equipment, machines, because I can’t strip all that from my history and still have it make sense. Plus, I think that assuming the importance of the technological extensions on our experience, and identity as a consequence of that, is something everyone alive today can relate to.
Back to the story. So here’s me, spending the following five years trying to grasp the secrets of optics and digital manipulation, without the tutorials of Youtube. At that time knowledge was still a scarce resource, and photography still a profitable career.
Optics was approachable, because not much had changed from film to digital. But photoshop, I mean Photoshop 4.0, that was esoteric. Honestly, I did not manage to understand what I was doing until I got my hands on the digital course of photo retouch by Dan Margulis. Seeing him colorizing the images with the curves, and being delighted every time he applied the Man from Mars technique… that feeling of control meant the world to me (now I know he was slaughtering jpegs… but those were the possibilities back then).
Getting the basics of photoshop, however, meant to me that I was covered enough on the digital end, and that I could focus on photography.
I remember the first time I made a journey with the only purpose of making images. It was 2003, my testing field was Negev desert, Israel. I was dressed up as Woody Allen, with a black leather DIY shoulder bag in which I carried two items: a Sony Cybershot F707, straight from the space age (best ergonomics ever) plus a gigantic .7 wide angle screw in adaptor, that in my eyes made it look so badass… until I realised how bad the images looked with that on. Never again. This is experience.
Those images, nonetheless, got me into my career as a journalist: I got a job for an online news website called peacereporter.net, which was produced by an Italian Ngo called Emergency. They were crazy enough to give me a chance, so I’ve spent the following five years writing and take pictures for them, from Tibet, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan… It was tough, more than everything because un-filtered reality is tough: I could ingest it, but I was not ready do digest it. Nor as a man, nor as a photographer.
But how exciting it is to be the only witness with a camera when history happens? That is not when leaders make speeches or sign treaties, at least not only. In my opinion, history happens daily, silently, in the shoes of the people. Individuals, entities with rights, desires and aspirations. In my mind there was no greater responsibility, no greater honor.
Compared to my funky Negev kit, my bag in those years kept growing. There is a line here: before and after 2008. Before it was CCD and APS-C time, after, digital began real photography. My Nikon D700 was the camera I loved the most, I had two of them. Full Frame meant finally reaching the visual equivalence with 35mm film, CMOS meant that darkness had become a virgin territory to explore. The real thing was there. The only limit was me.
I still have all that bundle of feelings pulsating in me: I see my sweated hands holding it, while the jeep was climbing up mount Qandil, Northern Iraq. Me and my friend Chicco were about to meet the guerrilla fighters of the Pkk, and all I could think about was: how the hell can I use the in body flash to command-trigger the speedlight without it appearing in the images? Enter off camera flash. Enter control over the light. The cream of my job.
Note, a photo editor that afterwards saw the images refused to buy them because they were “too much flashed”.
Whatever she meant, I screwed up. But I was hooked.
As I said, since the D700 was the perfect body, in those years my guts started to salivate on glass more and more, because that is what makes the difference in the final images. Once again, I had learned this from hard experience: on that first Iraqi assignment, my friend Nicola had lent me a lens he revered (on his crop camera): the Nikkor 17-35 f2.8. That piece of glass made every human positioned near the corners look like a proper member of the Addams family. Never again.
I will also give a swift mention to another piece of artillery that I have carried with me for years, until I finally ditched it for good. The “indispensable” 70-200 f2.8… except mine was an older 80-200, pump zoom. It changed the focal by pushing the outer barrel in or outwards: it was way too heavy and intimidating for my taste. I sold it, and never missed it. Good for weddings and guns lovers.
As my experience and knowledge evolved, I found out that perfection for me, as a photo-journalist, meant sturdy, reliable and light weight. The symbol of what I liked was the Nikkor 50mm 1.4D. Heritage of the film lenses, small, well built, lightweight. The 50mm focal became the gold standard of my visual approach. Some people have the same love with 35mm, which to me is just uncomfortable. I guess it is a matter of working distances.
I said that 2008 was when the photo game changed, because of the introduction of full frame pro bodies from Nikon, and Canon with the 5D (hands down, no less of a cult camera than the D700). But wait a minute, who am I kidding? 2008 was the year when the photo game changed because of the i-phone. Only, when it happened I was going the opposite direction and I did not notice it.
In my mind photojournalism was still an artisan job. I thought that pushing the limits of image quality was more important than cutting the times of delivery. So, for quite a while I just slashed the emerging works shot-with-i-phone as a commercial conspiracy, and went on head down into my quest for image quality.
Sure, 35mm digital was already better than 35mm analogue. But what about medium format film? What about large format 4×5 technical cameras? So there I went again, finding more space in my bag to accommodate for a Hasselblad 501, a light-meter, a bunch of 120 rolls and a sturdy tripod… (hand-holding a medium format film camera? Not me). Pretty much always, my digital images came out better than the analogues, my fault for sure, but the point is: doing that unnecessary effort made me feel a real photographer. Film made me understand a couple of ideas that stuck until today. First: you can not negotiate with physics. Second: gear will always be in the way, but it should be as little as possible. Maybe third… romantic clichés won’t give you better images, and they might get you bankrupt. Conclusion: my all black Hassy, most beautiful object ever designed, was sold on Ebay.
Speeding up to more recent times, 2013, it was time to replace the D700. I did not want to buy a D800. In my opinion 36Mp were overkill. But still I bought one. I used it for a personal project in São Paulo, Brazil, and… I was right with my worries. When I got home after three months in the favela of Paraisopolis, I realised that those huge files made my computer crash like a crazy donkey. That a big chunk of the images that I had to reject would have been ok if those were 20Mp. Plus, the camera was heavy as a stone, a mediocre focuser and… man, that shutter sound… why do photographers get so obsessed with the shutter sound? That one sounded like a mouse-trap.
I have to be honest: the camera was good, the D800 is still a great deal in the used market. But to me, I had enough of the golden ring, so I made the switch to the red one.
If you check on Youtube, making the switch is a buzzword. It is a defining moment, when someone sever his/her loyalty to a brand and embrace another. It is betrayal, It is… a pile of crap actually, click bait in most cases. What is true is that switching bodies and lenses is a very expensive process with no way back. In my case, I had uncommon luck in the form of a colleague, Bruno, that had a Canon 5D mark III and wanted to try Nikon, so… deal.
As I stated in the title, the gear follows our steps, our mutations, while we follow the mutations of the world. By 2014 it was already clear to me that photojournalism was no longer a proper job. Even my six years old nephew Filippo told me that. But I insisted.
i-phone 3, 4, 5… (I did not buy one until SE)... photoshop CS, CS6, CC… Facebook, twitter, Instagram… And me, still sending emails to the magazines, because in the meanwhile, since 2009, I had left my old editor and had been working as a freelancer, or independent producer as I prefer to say. Btw, who read magazines today, except in the waiting rooms?
Let’s go to the end of this timeline: present day. I tried. I swear I tried to change field. I saw the value of photography dropping towards zero, included mine. I swear I looked into all the possible alternatives, but the only place I can find myself is into the pentaprism.
Everyone is a photographer today, so I am. Professionalism? That is in the images.
I shoot portraits. I do it because I think there is no machinery or software that can replace a human in this field.
Contact is what makes a portrait unique, like every identity is.
Contact is the key that turn my engine on.
Recently I have upgraded my camera again. This bad boy/girl talks to my phone, to the satellites, it focus with the touch of a finger… I don’t really need this stuff, but this no longer sets me off. Instead of digital vs analogue, these days we talk software vs hardware, because now the software is getting the upper hand. Guess what? I’m playing my game. As long as there is a mirror I will be in. In the future, when I will have no alternatives to mirrorless cameras – that is: watching a tv inside the finder – then, maybe I will consider giving up.
Until then, thanks Canon, for making a reflex camera that weight 200g less than Nikon’s and that never screw up a skin colour. Thanks for the perfection of the 24mm L Tilt Shift mark II (mark I was garbage). Even for the old 90mm TS-E with which I mis-focused so many good shots, until I accepted the limits of my vision and replaced it with the autofocus 100mm macro L. And thanks for the 40mm 2.8 pancake, manifesto of optical simplicity and a reminder that quality can be cheap. In the end, it is all about the light.
In conclusion, as I’m talking about light, thanks also to Profoto, for allowing me to travel with my studio lights, even on a crowded bus.
Well, actually I did that just once, and I thought: Never again. This is experience.
Side note: I skipped the step for reasons of space, but at a certain point I also learnt how to properly retouch without slaughtering jpegs. Thanks to the Adobe guru Marianna Santoni for initiating me to the secrets of the sect.