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Here’s the one for March, using a photo taken in Pisa in March 2011. Click on the thumbnail below to download a high-resolution (1440×900) version and let your friends know about it. Use Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, or anything else to spread this. The best thing is that it’s free.

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The theme of the calendar is Skies and Water and it has a page per month, illustrated with one of my best pictures.

This link points to a ZIP file which contains 12 individual PDF files, one per month. The files are all high-resolution for best print quality, so the ZIP weighs in at 189MB, but it’s really worth it.

Print the calendar and hang it in your home, office, shop, school, wherever you like. It’s free and you can make as many copies as you like.

If people are interested in personalized calendars, in different sizes and various languages, using any of my images, please leave a comment here and, if there is enough demand, I will try to satisfy everyone, possibly for a small fee.

Happy 2012!

Given the precedent, you might think I’m crazy for committing to doing not just one Project 52, but two of them.

I have resolved to do Don Giannatti’s new Project 52 and try to complete all the assignments like a good school-boy. I have learned a ton of new stuff in 2011 and want to bring my photography to the next level in 2012.

I have also started doing the Project 52 that’s been started by Giuseppe Basile on Google+ This one is going to be more free-form and relaxed, but promises to be as much fun.

The deadline for the first assignment there is tomorrow, so I spent a couple hours this afternoon to capture something that fit with the theme of “New Year’s Day/Eve”. I went down to the boat-bridge that crosses the Ticino river not far from home and shot some moderately long exposures at sunset. The idea was to use the flowing river as a metaphor for the passing of time that is marked by New Year’s Day. Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch, but the light was great and I came home with some interesting images. The one that accompanies this post was my favorite and I uploaded it as my submission for the week. Hope you’ll like it.

Yesterday I did something that my wife thought was completely crazy: I drove 200km to Bologna and back, just to meet Steve McCurry, listen to him talk and get one of his books signed. Luckily, we had a break in a long series of foggy days and the journey was without problems.

As someone told me, these chances may only happens once in a lifetime, so better catch them while you can.

Well, anyways, I got my book signed, bought a couple more books and got those signed as well, then attended his talk. This basically consisted in a slide-show of his most iconic photographs, together with some new ones that he shot during a recent trip to Italy, interspersed with commentary and a bit of a background about each picture’s story and circumstances.

Incidentally, the most recent photos denote a certain change in his style, but that’s maybe only because Italy and its people are so different from India or Afghanistan. That’s not I want to talk about, however. This post is about some reflections that were inspired by the examination of the photograph I included below.

In my opinion, this is just a perfect shot. The boat coming in from the lower left corner, the shape of the man, with his arm raised at the apex of his movement, perfectly framed within the V formed by the reflection of the sky in the water, the contrast between the warm colors of the flowers and the cool, blue-green tones of the trees and the water. The viewer is pulled towards the center of the frame and stuck watching the human figure and thinking about the story of this man, his work carrying flowers across a lake to a market somewhere, day in, day out.

If there ever was a decisive moment captured in a photograph, this is it. If the photo had been taken a fraction of a second earlier or later, a few inches to the left or the right, from a higher or lower viewpoint, all that delicate balance would have been destroyed.

You might think that this was just sheer luck and, to a certain extent, an element of luck was certainly involved. However, the story behind this photograph, as Steve McCurry recounted it, is that he spent eleven days on the shores of Dal Lake, in Kashmir, living with the people there, photographing them, and finally getting the shot. A great amount of pre-visualization was certainly involved, and there is nothing casual about this image.

Now consider that the guy was using film! So he had no chance to see whether he had captured that fleeting moment until after he had developed the film. With digital, he could easily have glanced at his LCD, but maybe he would have gotten complacent and lazy, thinking that he could always get one more shot and hit the lucky one. Knowing Steve McCurry a bit, I think this would have not been the case, but who knows?

In the end, I would love to have this image printed, framed, and hung on a wall in my home. Not just because it’s a beautiful photograph, but also because it would always remind me that there are certain heights in art that I will never be able to attain… not the least because my wife would never agree to spend eleven days on the shores of an Indian lake, watching the boats go by.

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Anyway, I managed to snap some cool streaks, swirls, and other cool effects by keeping the shutter open for a handful of seconds and hoping for the best. I’ve collected some of those in a gallery on Photoshelter, where you can order prints, if you liked them.