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Sain Ali at Qui Quildi, Upper Chitral, Pakistan
Sain Ali at Qui Quildi, Upper Chitral, Pakistan

December 2015 

Welcome to the updated razzetti.com site! 

MONOCHROMES 

I recently saw Wim Wenders' loving tribute to the Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado. Salgado has long been a favourite of mine, and seeing his images projected on the iMax screen at Rheged rekindled my love of monochrome images. Monochrome is problematic in the digital era, as cameras only capture in colour and monochromes have to be extracted from colour originals. This is not straightforward. Simply desaturating a colour image produces a bland monochrome, lacking in the punchiness and subtlety of toning that are achieved by black and white film. I have experimented with duotoning with some success, and recently discovered a Photoshop plugin from Nik Software called Silver Efex Pro, which streamlines the process and produces stunning results. There is a new gallery on the site with a selection of these images - monochromes made from colour film originals. Find them in INDEX / MONOCHROMES / DUOTONES AND VINTAGE. 

PROJECT VERONICA 

A labour of love is going on here! After delaying for much too long I have bought the professional glass film-holder for my Nikon Coolscan 9000. I have also upgraded my scanning software to Silverfast Ai Studio 8. I realised that the two cases containing thousands of medium format transparencies in my office were going to do nothing for me until I digitized them. Agencies, magazines, publishers all refuse to accept film today, so I have started working my way through this material. It is a daunting task! But if I consider the years - twenty years! - that I carried Veronica the Bronica on my back the length and breadth of the Himalaya, I owe it to her to do this now. The times I dragged myself from a warm sleeping bag and tent before dawn, pulled on a down jacket and sprinted to a vantage point with cameras and tripod, the weight of all that kit in my pack over hundreds of passes...This is my story really, and looking at these pictures now I feel so satisfied! Digital fans eat your hearts out - these are now available from me as 48 bit uncompressed TIFF files, 8500x6500 pixels, each about 350Mb. And sharp !! 

I'm adding these to the Project Veronica gallery as and when I scan them. They also appear in the relevant galleries throughout the site. I have published a book of some of the black and white material - PAKISTAN ZINDABAD!! - available from www.blurb.com 

In October - November 2012 I returned to Dolpo in Western Nepal for the first time in 19 years and trekked to Shey Gompah, Saldang and Dho Tarap. The weather was perfect and there is a large selection of images from that trip on the site. 

More images are being uploaded almost daily, so please check back!