Photos from Pitti Immagine Uomo 95

Pitti Immagine Uomo in Florence is considered one of the most important weeks for men’s fashion in the world.

It attracts people from all around the world, as I’ve covered in previous editions.

Last winter edition I was honoured to work on the first day for Karl Lagerfeld, doing a photo reportage inside their fair stand. This year I got commissioned a photo session for John Varvatos and I’ve covered this in the previous post.

In this post, I want to share the other photos I took over the four days at the fair. My vision for street-style photography may be different from that of other photographers: I prefer to get people into a pose for me, directing the shot. This is in contrast to the “snapshot” kind of photo you see on many other street-style blogs.

But this doesn’t mean I don’t also take some “hidden” street-style shots during the fair.

To me, directing the person I want to photograph creates an interaction. This is what I want when shooting. The interaction is important and, in the end, you can feel it in the picture. My other obsession in the photos I take is about colors and sharpness. This time I was able to use the new Fujifilm GFX 50R digital medium format camera with 50 megapixels of resolution.

It’s not the resolution that I’m impressed about (there’s the Canon EOS 5DR with the same count), but the quality of the image: the huge sensor (compared to full frame) combined with lenses designed for this frame gives a stunning final result.

I’m amazed that shooting almost always at the maximum aperture (which is usually the softer setting) produces excellent sharpness on the focus point. Pay attention to this step: with this camera, a small variation of the focus point (that may be caused by the camera autofocus or by human error) leads to a photo where the nose is in focus, but the eyes are not.

So you have to be extremely precise about focus with the Fujifilm GFX 50R. All these photos, compared to the one I shot for John Varvatos, have been developed using Fujifilm film.RAF file in Lightroom. I wanted to test how close I could get in matching the colors and sharpness from the in-camera JPG. I have to admit that I was able to get very close to the look of the JPG file in Lightroom using the Fujifilm color profiles. Some shots, however (I found the more contrasty ones), showed slightly different saturation in the JPG file, so I had to boost it with the selective colors tool in Lightroom to try to match the original file.

Let me also talk about the sharpness on the Fujifilm GFX 50R raw file. This camera doesn’t have the classical X-Trans pattern from the APS-C cameras that we know isn’t managed so well in Lightroom. Instead, the sharpness of the GFX 50R is rendered perfectly in Lightroom without any issue. For the sessions, I used two lenses: the 45mm f/2.8 (equivalent to a 35mm on full frame) and the 110mm f/2 (equivalent to an 85mm). Both of these lenses are stellar, with the 110 f/2 being even more extraordinary: from sharpness to bokeh smoothness to color rendition, every aspect is the best you could ask for.