Creating a visual diary with Olympus

My name is Maddaluna and I am an architect. I live in La Morra, a special place in Italy known for the production of wine, especially Barolo. This is the environment where I was born and raised: both my parents are architects, my family produces wine, and I have always lived and worked in contact with wine and vineyards, and I love to immerse myself in this nature.

I have always approached the visual arts in many ways, both as a spectator and as an author (drawing and painting as a child, graphics and communication as an adult). As an architect, I love to find the right proportions, perspectives, colors, and the relationship of forms with the landscape. For this reason, my recent approach to photography has been a very fluid process.

I bought my Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark II in January 2020, basically to photograph my architectural works, with its supplied lens (M.Zuiko Digital 14‑42mm F3.5‑5.6 II) and a wide-angle (M.Zuiko Digital ED 9‑18mm F4‑5.6).

I immediately realized the difficulty of my inexperience and then I gave up, but I liked the contact of my hand and my face with the camera. Now I often say: “this is the only object for which I feel affection”.

The real beginning took place in the lockdown. Closed in my country apartment with my partner Momo, I decided to try to be an Instagrammer: I felt the need to relate in a different way to my physicality and femininity, to solve some insecurities, so I took my own Olympus and, armed with a tripod, I started taking selfies. For these photos, I have always used the wide-angle lens, as I liked the width of the image and the sharpness of all the details.

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Once the lockdown was over, I decided to take photography lessons, and I was lucky enough to meet a talented teacher, Barbara, a photographer and psychologist. We started working on my self-timer photos, clearly changing the way of photographing myself: we decided to abandon the previous sharpness – a symptom of my need for control and perfection – to begin to immerse myself in the shadows, bringing to light only some details of me, always using natural light coming from the many windows of my apartment.

At this stage, I started using a Lumix G 20mm F1.7 II ASPH lens, a fixed focal length pancake that I immediately fell in love with, due to its brightness and depth. In this period I also started to change my way of exposing myself on Instagram, going from set photos to real “mirror selfie” made with my Olympus, in which I show myself and my outfits simply in front of the mirror.

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My Instagram feed gradually started to change, going from an ego-centric profile to a sort of visual diary. I started taking my Olympus everywhere I went, and every opportunity was good to experiment and learn (How can I photograph my black boyfriend while doing a djset in the dark? How can I photograph people in the fog? How can I take portraits at sunset without making them yellow? Etc.).

The OM-D E-M10 Mark II is compact, easy to carry both over the shoulder and in a bag. Anything that I could not understand, I would go home and talk to my teacher, to correct and define myself – as I still do today.

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Meanwhile, some family and friends have started asking me to photograph them and to study visual communication projects for their businesses. I immediately liked this type of work: I understood that working with people is a great stimulus for me, identifying their personality, but also their “unspoken”, fielding the Human Communication studies that I did in the past 5 years.

I always interview anyone days before photographing him, so that I have time to think about how to best represent that person. My first real job was for my cousin Enzo Boglietti’s winery and his family. For this job, I did the post-processing in Lightroom on a PC, but I usually use VSCO directly on my phone. I love the export function via Wi-Fi directly from my Olympus to my smartphone, it’s ideal for all photos aimed at Instagram.

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I also photographed some events, and in these cases, the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 40-150mm lens came in very handy: people don’t always like to be photographed and the fact of being able to photograph them from afar, without them noticing, it makes everything easier.

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Finally, since summer also came with some parties – albeit contained and always homemade – I found myself photographing people in these situations, and I must say that today, this is what I like best.

Given that my competence and my equipment are very limited for night photography (I always have and only used my Olympus with a Lumix pancake lens, without flash), I am very pleased with the results, I like to experience the party with the camera in hand, waiting for something that inevitably happens: a smile, a look, a hug, the spontaneity of people when they share a happy and joyful moment, perhaps a little uninhibited by wine.

“It is in the emotions that people find themselves in the same place” and I would like, thanks to my photos, for every observer to experience the emotions of those beautiful moments, be part of them, and smile as well.

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