Usually, I carry with me only the equipment that I need for a specific subject: this afternoon, I was going to photograph herons and other birds, so I had with me only the 1Ds3, 600 f/4 and teleconverters. I have seen a lot of herons, but they were way too distant, even for the 600 f/4, so in the late afternoon I begun to wander around in search of other subjects...

I have many better flower photos, but this one tells an interesting story: it is not taken with my usual macro lens, but with a miracle of modern technology: the Canon 28-300 L IS USM superzoom. I was in the beautiful mountains of Alpe Devero, at an haltitude of 2400 meters...I was wondering around with the 28-300 borrowed from a friend...

The Sigma 180 Macro is a true jewel: even though I have it in my bag since more than two years, it always amazes me! After using it for some time with the 1.4x TC, I tried the 2.0x and I immediately bought it - it helps a lot with working distance and background blur, and the image quality is still extremely good. Coupled with the Sigma 2.0x EX...

The Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1x-5x Macro is the most extreme macro lens currently available in every digital SLR system. When I look through this lens, I feel like Alice in the Wonderland: through this lens, you can see a whole new world of amazing creatures, colors, shapes...even the smallest creatures becomes fascinating alien-like...

Years ago, when I decided to buy my first macro lens, I chose a Sigma 50mm Macro. It was a nice lens, it was very sharp and it reached life-size reproduction ratio (1:1). On the other hand, the results were not as good as the photos of many professional photographers where a nicely sharp subject stand out from a clean, out of focus backgroud...

This is one of my favorite photos, it captures the action and the iteration between the two birds. It is also one of my most post-processed photos: I've spent more than two hours with Photoshop to get the final image. I don't consider it an example of my standard workflow - it was an exception, a good image that could be "saved" only with heavy...

The Canon 600 f/4 L IS USM usually is considered a "tripod lens" - it weights 5.5 kg, and it is not easy to handheld it for an entire day. But I knew that we were going to walk a lot, and I wanted to reduce weight as much as possible, so I decided to leave at home the sturdy, but bulky and heavy, Gitzo 1548 tripod with Wimberley head. I carried...

It does not happen often to know a person since three days and feeling like being with the friend of a life...but there is not other way to describe the two days that I spent on Sile river, with my good friend Fenice. Fenice is a young - and talented - photographer, and a sweet girl....she was kind enough to bring me on Sile river well before the sunrise...

The European Bee-eater is one of my favorite subject...it is one of the most beautiful and colorful birds of Italy. It breeds in Italy and other contries of southern Europe in spring and summer, and it migrates in North Africa during the full and winter. It is a relatively small bird - 20-25 centimeters from the head to the tip of the tail - and I was a bit distant...

"Snow? What snow? There is no snow!" Ciro said. So, we didn't expect to find much snow; Ciro had visited the Roseg Valley just one week ago, and the temperature was still relatively warm (between 0 and -4 celsius degrees...last year, in the same period the temperatuer was around -20°). Instead, few kilometers after the Swiss...

This is one of the first photos that I've taken with the Canon 20D, few months ago. It was a dark, cloudy day, and I was photographing from the hide of Racconigi under a light rain. Mounted on my camera, there was one of the most beautiful lenses ever produced my Canon - the 300 2.8 L IS USM. This is an extremely sharp lens, it has a super...

This is another photo taken in my recent trip on the Entella River, where I photographed many species of gulls. Photographing birds in flight is surely more challenging than photographing the classic "bird on a stick": it is easy to do something wrong, since there is little time to check the techs and the composition. One of the most common errors is to clip the tip of...

The last weekend of October I've come back in Roseg Valley (Engading, Switzerland) with my three fellow photographers: Daniela, Marco and Francesco. It was a dark, cloudy day, but as soon as we arrived to the Koncertplatz, we were greeted by an amazingly beautiful vision...dozens of tits, other birds and squirrels were all around us! As soon as I looked...

It was a cold day of December 2005 when my good friend Luigi Ziotti invited me to join a trip to Roseg Valley, in Engadin, Switzerland. Luigi is a very skilled photographer and he knows well the best places to photograph birds and wildlife, so I was glad to accept his proposal. We arrived at Pontresina at 9 a.m. Pontresina is a small village...

I discovered the Racconigi Park a while ago, when my longest lens was the Sigma 180mm Macro. Since then, it has become one of my favourite places for bird photography. The park was created in 1985 by the ornithologist Bruno Vaschetti and the LIPU (Italian association for protection of birds) to reintroduce the White Stork in Italy...

Every time that I led a workshop about birds and wildlife I teach to photograph in every weather condition: sun, rain, fog or snow. Yesterday, the sky was quite cloudy and sometimes there was a light rain...moreover, there was even some fog, that remained for the entire day. Overall, the conditions were far from great, but...

This morning I was photographing at Torrile with my friend Carlo. It seemed to be an unlucky day in every respect: when I came out from my home it was raining and there was fog; as if it wasn't enough, when I arrived at Parma I discovered that I've forgot the teleconverters at home...

Choices...many times, you have to face a choice...and here, I had a particulary difficult choice: I had just realized that I was on the wrong path...it was late afternoon, and I had still few hours of light. As if it was not enough, there was a thick fog, I was alone, and tired. The darn GPS was somewhere on my desktop, at home...But let's begin from...