Wonders of

The list of World Heritage Sites, where Italy is the most mentioned in the world, is enriched by photographs of Valerio Li Vigni, who works in collaboration with the UNESCO World Heritage Center in Paris, and he says us: "The work that I do in HDR is almost always very slight, almost imperceptible." But, we might add, it gives the deserved beauty of those landscapes and monuments in danger.

I deal mainly with network communication and web marketing; The photograph is a physical necessity which then turns on business when the photos are published by agencies and newspapers. Requests come almost exclusively from abroad, from Italy just requests for free publication with author mention at best; at worst you can find them published without knowing it and without anyone telling you thanks.

But something has changed: I met Barbara Blanchard of UNESCO World Heritage Centre in Paris by chance. The UNESCO-protected sites are a bit 'my reference point in choosing places to photograph and when I have to find a path to be traced I believe the UNESCO should always be the first source to be considered.

I was in Matera at Christmas and during the stay I noticed to my amazement that the related page on the UNESCO site appeared virtually free of iconographic support. I took charge of resolving this incredible gap preparing a selection of images and contacting the Paris office; talking with the manager Maria Blanchard, well understood that the problem was the municipality (but that's another story), I became aware of their need to attract more visitors to the UNESCO sites using the few tools at their available: first of all the images. Basically they did need to represent differently the places under protection: the photos in their possession should have had a cut much less journalistic in favour of a greater appeal that could stimulate the imagination and curiosity of the observer. Having looked at my photo galleries, their enthusiastic request to solve the problem using my material was a snap; and a moment is spent also on my part to accept their proposal knowing that it was a no-profit business.

So it all started. Today I'm working with Valentino Etowar of UNESCO about the realisation of a video that should be presented to the World Heritage Committee in Bonn in July; this video will focus on Italian WHC sites through different pictures I made in recent years.

It 's always difficult to talk about themselves and the ways in which we operate, especially when they become habit and working tool; However, it is not difficult for me to identify what are my main guidelines, mainly because I’m always aware of their importance: detail and memory.

The detail is meticulous research of the cut or cutout that allows me to get images that are independent and completely autonomous from everything to which they are linked. Memory is the attention to the different representation of a place which must be closer to our preserved souvenir rather than its direct representation, even though technically flawless. Then I will explain what I mean.

From a technical point of view I’ve been working with Canon equipment and in recent years I have had all of the 5D-series camera bodies. The lens are currently limited to: a wide-angle Canon EF 14 2.8L II, an old but still satisfactory zoom Canon EF 28/70 2.8 L, a zoom Canon EF 2.8 L IS II 70/200 and a Canon EF 15mm Fisheye 2.8. Faithful companion is a Manfrotto tripod head with 55XPROB 804RC2.

Detail

As I said there's life in details. Inside any particular there’s other than the subject that we are photographing. Inside any detail the photographer can recognise and bring out the hidden elements that create a different landscape. But to show the contents we must open the containers and our openers are the crop in camera and the post editing.

I started when I was 15 and I obviously worked in analog and Internet did not exist. I found that with an adapter ring could overthrow my Canon FD 28mm macro and get new shots and I opened up the world: what I saw in the viewfinder was no longer what I saw with the naked eye, it was other; from then on every detail, the edge of a glass, an ashtray a piece of glass, were no longer common details of the same reality, but images from an unseen real world; reality and not fantasy.

Leaving the macro, I kept a legacy a new attention into the scene through the viewfinder. Each subject for me was always a puzzle to be solved, a lock to be forced to get to the content it could keep. Not having a darkroom, I had to concentrate on the shoot, what to keep and what to leave out, what to leave and what to find.

From a technical point of view you might think that, given that approach, I tend to work only with long focal lengths to enlarge details. Of course I love very much telephoto lens provided that the size and weight of the equipment does not become an obstacle to my shot: at this time my fav lens is a Canon EF 2.8 L IS II 70/200 possibly with a multiplier of 1 , 4x. To be honest I find very useful for my purpose too, a wide lens like the Canon EF 14 2.8L II, because it is not only in the tiny subjects we can find new and unexpected subjects but also in the different visual perception of a place: the corner of field that embraces a lens of that level is very different from the way we have of observing a place where we tend to focus on certain areas at the expense of other, especially the sides.

Memory

When we retain the memory of something, those souvenirs produce fiction. The memory that we keep of the places we visited, replaces the details with the emotions each passing day: the radiating heat of a souvenir which involved us, feeds itself with the details that gradually go lost. This is to emphasise that it is not accidental that the second time we return to a place that we loved, we feel almost always a hint of disappointment; because memory is much more evocative and powerful than reality.

When I work in HDR I try to reproduce that memory, in other words I try to get the image of the memory of a place rather than the place itself and the HDR procedure helps. The intervention in HDR that I do is quite often very light, almost impalpable, certainly recognisable to anyone who has a basic knowledge of the process, but never obvious or, worse, distorting the image for the viewer. The HDR should never be the protagonist of a picture and even the actor, but only a useful tool to restore the depth and the color palette needed to reproduce the memory of places (as well as to shrink in alleviating the gap between a camera and the human eye).

For shooting, I work without autofocus with bracketing of 3/5 shots if I can work with a tripod or 3 in case of handheld shooting. In post production I use Photomatix for merging bracketed pics and Noiseware for noise reduction before bringing the file in its normal workflow with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. In Photoshop then takes a further step by using on different levels the Photomatix file and one or more files taken from the original bracketing sequence; then on a Wacom tablet Intuos A3, using a soft brush with 5% opacity, I blend them trying to enhance realism of the image and increase dynamism and intensity.