This year my message is very simple: don’t forget the real meaning of Christmas and don’t be afraid to celebrate it properly. Most of all, don’t be afraid to make the right moral choices all year.

Decorations, lunches, dinners, gift and so on are meant to be a celebration for the essence of Christmas but if you forget it, all the lights, food and money will never bring the real joy in your hart.

I wish you all a blessed Christmas full of joy and goodness.

For the technically curious followers this year imaged required:

1 Hi-Fi stereo system

1 Bach’s Christmas Oratorio CD

1 Glass of Lagavulin Scotch while listening

1 8×10 Cambo Legend viewcamera with a Schneider 300mm

1 4×5 Cambo MAsterPlus viewcamera with a Schneider 150mm

1 Hasselblad 503 cx with 80mm and extension tubes.

1 Pentax Mz-s with the 100mm macro

1 6×7 adapter for the 4×5 camera

1 Pentax K1 mkII with a Takumar 55mm 1.8 for the final image

5 film formats Ilford FP4

1l ID-11 developer

200cc Ilford Hypam

5 developing session in the darkroom

2 Broncolor Grafit A generators

3 Broncolor Pulso flah heads

~10 playing of a Christmas Jazz CD while creating the photograph

Merry Christmas my friends, and a wonderful next year full of rebellion to tyranny and regained freedom for all of us!

Just click on the image if you like to see it enlarged.

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See you next year my friends.

Every year for Christmas I dedicated time and efforts to create a Christmas image. Usually a still life with plenty of symbolic contents and often references to the year main events. If you are curious to check them, last year I posted on my blog all the images I made in the last 20 years.

This year I kept it very simple, with a winter picture I took few days ago with a Pentax 67 with a 45mm and an Ilford FP4 film. A landscape, less then a mile far from my Italian home.

I’m in a kind of sabbatical period, staying at my 91 years old father home taking care of him, and I dedicate myself to photographic personal research and books writing when I have the time. Obviously he is my priority and in December I simply had not the option to subtract time from him to create a Christmas still life.

Mentally, staying far from the professional duties, I also started to look for simplicity and film photography is part of this research for a simple way to photograph, far from hours of retouch and the computer. A slow method, perfect for the rhythm of life I have to follow lately.

This Christmas for me is very simple, I was not even able to find a real (I hate fake ones) Christmas tree and last week was spent in and out of hospitals, with a couple of days fighting the socialist italian health care system. So my Christmas, as the picture, is a little empty and without decorations, it is reduced at the essence, a family moment where the importance is to give and help.

Around there is the snow, and all is quite, the winter time is ticking slowly and the world is waiting for the first signs of spring to bloom and reborn following the cycle of life, an analogue cycle that requires time, patience and love.

Merry Christmas