It's me, Davide Petilli!
On one hand, I create high quality Fine Art Photographs, choosing their subjects based on my personal taste, and crafting them to accomplish my vision and memories of the places I visit.
On the other hand, I produce travel and documentary imagery for commercial and editorial purposes. In this case I work on assignment, and I go wherever my clients ask me to go.
The subjects of my Fine Art Photographs are somewhat related to my travels. My intent is to share my vision of the places I visit, capturing the people who inhabits them, the details that characterize them, and catching the essence of the cultures with whom I come into contact.
In my body of work, you’ll find a lot of images of Italy–my home country–and Japan–where I travel a lot.
Fine Art is the result of both artistic and technical endeavor. Technique without art is dull and soulless, while art without technique is simply impracticable. A work of art is the expression of a single individual, and is appreciated the most by people who resonate with the artist’s vision.
In my approach to Fine Art photography, I strive to have a complete control of the result of my endeavors. Depending on what I want to create, I carefully plan my shooting sessions, or I shoot in a more casual way. In camera, I can control the framing, and I can choose my subjects and lighting, but this is just part of the artistic work.
In my Fine Art work, I freely work my images to reach my vision. I welcome digital manipulations in Fine Art, because I see them as a way for the artist to express himself. Fine Art isn’t a mere reproduction of a scene, and shouldn’t be appreciated as such.
My style is constantly evolving, and I’ll update this artistic statement accordingly. In my vision, I try to be as faithful as I can to the scene I’ve seen. For this reason, there are things I’ll do and things I won’t do to my images.
- I will freely crop my images to balance the composition.
- I will adjust tonality and contrast.
- I will remove disturbing elements that ruin or don’t add anything to the image.
- I will fine tune the image sharpness.
- I will use HDR techniques.
- I will not add elements that aren’t original to the scene, such as a sky from another image.
On the other hand, when doing documentary photography, I use a more restrictive approach. Documentary has a different purpose than Fine Art, and the vision of the photographer is less prominent (but not absent) than the faithful representation of the scene. For this reason, I will limit my post production activity to sharpness and tonality/contrast adjustments (besides cropping).
I consider an image “complete” only when it is printed, and maybe hanged on a wall. In a print, you can really see how beautiful an image is. You can appreciate all the small details, color nuances and tonalities. For this reason, I spend a lot of time testing my prints.
I sign my Fine Art prints only when I’m completely satisfied of the result. I make a lot of test prints, taking notes and fine tuning them. When I’ve reached my goal, and I’m able to reproduce it constantly, I mount my prints on high quality museum grade archival mats I custom cut personally.
This website is my place on the internet, where I show my work through my portfolio. If you’re interested in licensing my images, you can take a look at the agencies with which I work.
If you’re interested in buying a Fine Art Print, just contact me and I’ll give you a quote and all the details.
Besides my portfolio, I write a blog where I share my experiences, and maybe insights on travel and photography, hoping to be useful to the photography community online.
Oh… and please, excuse me for my horrible English!
