The Roving Sea Turtle

Exactly a month ago I watched another Sea Turtle being released into the Adriatic Sea.

Atlante, that’s her name, had been caught into a crawl net and hurt in the process but luckily the fishing boat brought her to a specialized center, the Cetacean Foundation in Riccione, where she was nursed back to health. Fast forward 10 months and she was on the beach of my hometown, surrounded by hundreds of very excited and very loud school kids – not to mention a few dozens of equally animated adults — for her “release party”.

After enduring with turtle poise her role as the star of that particular show, she was let go a few meters from the shore and finally dived into the sea with all the gusto one can imagine a prisoner (if by quite benevolent and well-intentioned captors) finding her freedom at last.

Since then, Atlante has, as they say, been around: the GPS receiver mounted on her back is enabling a group of marine biologists to track her whereabouts. They’ll be mapping her roaming across the Adriatic (which explains her male name even though she’s a female: Atlante is Italian for Atlas) for at least a year and the results are readily available on the web.

Godspeed, Atlante!

I’m a web necromancer because I love my town

I’m a bit in love with my hometown today. Not only we’re about to host a mobile video/web video content festival, which for this parts is akin to predict the Internet in the fifties, but we’re also having an online news sites festival this week. Regardless of how both events will unfold and how much (or how little) they will grow in the coming years, I think it’s awesome. So much so, I basically resorted to web necromancy, posting something new here.

Back into the blue…

Or, rather, the green with a mild yellowish tint… but I don’t think the eleven sea turtles that were freed today really minded the color of the sea. These young animals (the oldest is just 8 years old) were all found dying and were nursed back to health in Riccione, Italy by the local Cetacean Foundation. This morning, at lunch time, they finally went home 200 km south in the Adriatic Sea and 2 miles offshore after a short trip on board a Coast Guard patrol boat (and, btw, thank you for the ride!). It was fun and actually moving seeing them excitedly shaking their flippers in the anticipation of going back in the water.

This one, above and below, is Orange, the “elder” of the group.

Crazy about the blue

I’ve decided that a blue tennis court is my new most favorite thing right now. Last year Recanati had a fine-looking green hard court, this year they painted it blue (and still green on the outs). I like the new color so much that this morning not even the 40 degrees (centigrades!) discouraged me from getting out there and shoot, shoot, shoot.

As one comedian used to say: I like it.

ATP Challenger Recanati

The tournament is midway through, tomorrow the second round will be completed, leaving only 8 players fighting for the title. Among them won’t be Riccardo Ghedin, who put up a good fight today against the number two seed Sergey Stakhovsky. Ghedin is a fun player to watch, he’s very aggressive and serves & volleys pretty often, at least on this surface.

Stakhovsky isn’t boring, either and not the waiting type, even though my picture shows him on the defense, scrambling:

Tomorrow play will star at 6 pm, which kinda sucks because there’s only one good hour of light to shoot at 200 or 400 ISO with high shutter speeds (I like to keep at least 1/1600 with tennis if I can). Of course I can up the ISO and later on the light is beautiful (the magic hour, you know) but harsh and bright do help with action.

Qualifying in Recanati

Amazingly enough, two posts in one day. I almost feel like a blogger 😀

Recanati’s ATP Challenger is on this week and I’m there with my beloved camera. Recanati’s the only Italian Challenger played on hard-courts and this year they have been painted a nice combination of green and blue (it used to be all green) which looks fantastic. And very US Open-ish 😉

 

The weekend saw the qualifiers fighting for a place in the Main Draw, which starts this afternoon. Here’s a few shots, first Morocco’s Rabie Chaki:

 

Then his “victim” in the Qualifying second round, Italian Thomas Fabbiano:

Young up-and-coming Grigor Dimitrov, who lost in the first round Saturday:

And Nikola Mektic, who ousted him:

And can I just say I hate when players wear a hat that casts a shadow on their faces? Well, I do.

ATP Challenger San Benedetto

Ideally I should have posted this at least a week ago, but my internal clock said it was time to do anything BUT. I also slept a lot. The tournament, btw, went great. The stands were always full for the night sessions and that was a beautiful thing to see. The only snag were the early upsets and retirements: the tournament lost 7 of its 8 seeds in the first two rounds. Things straighten up in the end, though, with the victory of the young and promising Italian Fabio Fognini, the number 1 seed. Here’s a nice (I think) picture of him during the final:

Fognini’s opponent in the final match was Argentina’s Cristian  Villagran, one of the nicest guy ever. He also won the Doubles with Stefano Ianni, so he didn’t go home empty handed. On court, he’s a fighter:

I’ll finish with my most favorite tennis shot… ever! The player is Marco Crugnola. The linesman keeping his eyes on the line behind him is what makes the shot, in my very amateurish opinion.

Rainy day, new photo tent…

I recently picked up a cloth photo tent to replace my DIY lightbox. The setup is still a far cry from anything resembling a serious rig but does a better job to diffuse the light (I think). It also doesn’t stick in the room like a sore thumb, or, actually, it probably does but it’s less… sore-y. Also, it was dirt cheap, off Amazon. That’s nice too.

Today’s rain, or should I say tropical downpour, is still going strong and with nothing better to do, it was the perfect opportunity to play with this new toy. It’s weird but I never feel like trying my hand at this kind of photography with a nice weather. Wait, that isn’t weird at all.

As subjects I chose a bunch of different stuff, bounty of a quick hunt around the house: a nice fat plant covered with small red berries, a wood giraffe, a blue stylized cow made of ceramics, a steel surfing man that moves (almost) on his own… I’ll get around to my action figures next, I suppose.

Here’s the surfing man:

This is how it looks when he’s motionless…or, yeah, shutter speed is enough to freeze it. The Surfing Man was a Easter Egg gift. It was pretty dusty, it shows, and I did clean it beforehand. But I like it anyway.

This ceramics cow, I honestly have no idea where it came from: some travel souvenir, for sure, but not mine. I’d rather fancy visiting a place where they make blue cows, so I’ll make sure to find out.

I must admit I’m pretty happy with these three. DPP (and the RAW format) was again my friend: the black wasn’t quite this black out of the camera. It still isn’t full black, but it’s very close now. Close enough, I’d venture.

There’ll be a general wind theme

We’re getting warmer and nicer weather by the day now in my corner of the world and beach activities are picking up. One such involved one I would hardly had interest in if I didn’t like taking pictures: a Flying Kites Competition/Festival. My relationship to kites is pretty much akin to Charlie Brown’s, with a pivotal difference: he, at least, usually gets to fly his though it always ends badly. Mines stubbornly refused to.

But I’m all grown up now so I picked up my camera and went to watch people who are really good at building flying kites that actually fly (or possibly they’re good at flying kites in addition to building them). Anyway, I mostly used my standard zoom but brought along the Tammy 70-300, for two reasons: it’s my longest lens and, in a situation where sand and wind are involved, I’d rather have a € 130 lens than a € 600 one. In retrospect, I regret not using the Tammy a lot more. On site it felt like shorter and wider was the way to go but watching the pictures I miss not having a few more close ups. And my two favorite shots came from the Tammy. This guy making his kite soar:

 

And this close up:

In addition to slapping a polarizing filter on the 18-55 (I don’t have one that fits the Tammy) I used the Landscape picture styles in DPP on all the pictures: this picture style enhances the blues and the greens so I think I reached really unhealthy levels of too-blue-to-be-true skies and general oversaturation. I look forward to browse these pictures in a few months and recoil in horror.