Giovanni Savino Photography

18/02/2026

Large Format Photography: Simplify and Economize

Using a beautiful optic, the Schneider 360 mm, I shoot 8x10 negatives when needed, but sometimes, abiding the client’s needs, also smaller and more economic formats.

largeformat Schneider360mmlens simplyfy economize clientneeds 4x5negatives 6x9negatives 8x10negatives

27/01/2026

Bill Brandt is one of my favorite British photographers.

I love so many of his images and I never get tired of admiring them, but today I’d like to focus on a specific body of work he created after 1944, the year he acquired a simple, rather odd whole plate camera, the Kodak Wide Angle.

This type of camera was used by the police for recording evidence, because it could capture a whole room, through an extreme wide-angle lens, the Carl Zeiss Protar f 18, 8.5cm lens.

The camera is very slim, and does not have bellows.
Format 6.5 x 8.5 inches (16.5 x 21.5cm) The wide-angle lens has a very large depth of field, and the aperture of f45 eliminates the need to focus. The field of view is 110°degrees or the equivalent to a rectilinear lens of 14 or 15 mm on a 35 mm camera.

Brandt used it for the photographs in his book “Wide Angle Nudes”, images that to this day I find exquisitely innovative and powerful.


**e

23/01/2026

Winter day

This is the first test I did with the incredibly rare lens “protar 8.5cm super wide angle” that British photographer Bill Brandt used to use. It covers 5x7 (Brandt’s camera was a 6x8) This lens tickles my creativity and I expect I will experiment with it a lot ! This image was shot at f40 on 100 asa, exposed for 4 seconds. The subject was illuminated with an HMI lamp of 1000 watts.

21/01/2026

When in the early years of the last century the first mechanical photographic shutters were introduced, that is, those apparatuses, then very modern and rather expensive, which enabled the photographer to establish the exposure time exactly and even be able to replicate it in each of his subsequent photos, there were detractors.
Many masters of photography said that the newly invented apparatus, with its clock-like mechanism, robbed them of the power and fluency of “sensing” light and being able to “tame” it with a more or less intense, more or less fast pressure on the rubber pump they had been using until then and which opened a very simple mechanism composed of two blades placed behind the lens.
The speed with which they operated that very simple air pump and which “blew” the time they perceived to be the right one for the exposure, was determined by one thing only: their experience.
The timing of the shot was certainly fairly replicable for subsequent photographs, but never with the sterile exactitude of a mechanical apparatus.

Watch the full video on my YouTube Channel

https://youtu.be/rlG6HoyXI-c.

17/01/2026

An unusual with a motor.
Watch the full video with the story of that day I went to the top of the with this and another five time lapse cameras plus a bar of chocolate on my YouTube channel.

11/01/2026

https://youtu.be/cDcTwotY-XQ

This is a basic tutorial about mixing AMBIENT LIGHT (or a continuous HOT LIGHT) with STROBE (FLASH) LIGHT.It all comes down to remembering that your shutter...

11/01/2026

How to mix Strobe light with Ambient light.

10/01/2026

Inspiring photographers 6. LEON LEVINSTEIN

09/01/2026

Inspiring photographers 5 JOHN GARO … he was mentor… and very little is left of his wonderful work….

08/01/2026

Inspiring photographers #4
Carlo Mollino #

01/01/2026

In the Beginning, before my world of photography was created, there was music.

And music remained, discreet as a never forgotten first love.

It looks like she’ll keep staying on my side. Until the end.

31/12/2025

GOOD LUCK FOR 2026 !! #2026