CineTales

CineTales Everyday in awe of Planet Earth

Every morning for 68 years, Anna Possi has opened the doors of Bar Centrale in Nebbiuno, a tiny village perched high abo...
09/27/2026

Every morning for 68 years, Anna Possi has opened the doors of Bar Centrale in Nebbiuno, a tiny village perched high above Lake Maggiore. She is 102 years old. She may well be the longest serving barista in Italy, perhaps in the world.

Her bar is open 365 days a year. Christmas Day included. At home, she says, she gets bored. She would rather be among people.

We stopped for a coffee. We stayed for half an hour.

Anna remembers everything. She took us back to WWII with astonishing precision: names, places, the smallest details. When she spoke of the atrocities committed by German soldiers as they retreated after the Liberation, her voice still trembled, some eighty years on. It is the chapter of history she loves most. She reads constantly, and her customers bring her books.

We also asked her how the climate had changed over her lifetime. Snow used to fall heavily by late October, she told us. Between spring and summer, the fields could yield wheat three times over. Today, one harvest is a struggle.

It was an encounter that left its mark on us. An extraordinary woman, with a love of life and of her work, and a clear sense of purpose: to be of service to anyone who walks through her door, even if it simply means offering a restroom to foreign tourists on Christmas Day.

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Ever since I was a kid, Bagheera has been my favorite character in Kipling’s The Jungle Book.Then I watched the Disney m...
09/19/2026

Ever since I was a kid, Bagheera has been my favorite character in Kipling’s The Jungle Book.

Then I watched the Disney movie, and I was hooked for good.

Everyone else in the jungle was loud, wild, or afraid. Bagheera was none of that. Calm. Elegant. Always sure of himself, like he already knew how the night would end. A leopard in a tuxedo. Agent 007, with whiskers.

Two days ago, at the safari park, I found myself face to face with this panther. Same eyes. Same stillness. One paw hanging over the edge like it had nowhere to be, and a gaze that drifted right past me, as if I was not worth the trouble.

I felt like that little kid again.

I chose black and white because it already looked like a film noir. Some characters do not need color, they just need light and a little silence.

Who was your favorite character growing up, and why?

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Se vuoi, posso aggiungere il nome del safari park, così il post ha un riferimento più concreto.

She never really looked away.Even when her eyes drifted to the branches, to the visitors, to something only she could se...
09/18/2026

She never really looked away.

Even when her eyes drifted to the branches, to the visitors, to something only she could see, I could feel her keeping track of me. Patient. Heavy. As if she had made up her mind about me long before I raised the camera.

I shot this in monochrome, straight out of my Nikon Zf. Some feelings don’t need color. They need shadow, and a little light caught in the eyes.

She’s a siamang, one of two sisters, Bianca and Bali, who came to Safari Park Pombia as part of a European breeding program for endangered species. Siamangs are the largest of all gibbons, with an arm span of about six and a half feet, built for swinging through the rainforests of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. Their scientific name, *Symphalangus syndactylus*, hides a curious detail: two of their toes are joined by a web of skin. In the wild, families wake the forest every morning with loud duets, amplified by an inflatable throat sac that can carry their voices for more than a mile. And their favorite food? Figs.

Today the species is listed as Endangered, pushed back by deforestation and the illegal pet trade.

Somewhere behind that stare there is a forest she has never seen, and a song meant to cross it.

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Almost five months had passed since the last time I picked up my camera. Just a few kilometers from home, I’m lucky enou...
09/06/2026

Almost five months had passed since the last time I picked up my camera. Just a few kilometers from home, I’m lucky enough to have one of Italy’s most important bird sanctuaries, and honestly so much more, right in my own backyard: Oasi di Sant’Alessio.

I got there right at opening time, and by the time an hour and a half had gone by, I was already back home. I felt good about it too, happy with the shots I’d come away with, and just as happy that my body had held up. I’m still recovering from a complicated ankle surgery, so every bit of that walk mattered more than usual.

The benches scattered along the path made all the difference, giving me somewhere to sit and catch my breath before moving on.

That feeling of being alone out there in nature, listening to everything around me, waiting patiently for the right moment to click the shutter. Only I know how much I’ve missed it.

These are straight JPGs, touched up only slightly in Lightroom.

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Bolinas Beach, California. Golden hour, the kind that turns a whole beach into a sheet of hammered brass.I shot this bac...
08/12/2026

Bolinas Beach, California. Golden hour, the kind that turns a whole beach into a sheet of hammered brass.

I shot this back when I only captured in JPEG, which means the blown highlights up top are gone for good, no rescuing them in post. Normally that would drive me mad. But looking at this frame again, I've made peace with it. The overexposed sky isn't a flaw here, it's the point. It reads like memory does: the middle ground sharp and true, the edges bleached out by time and light until only the important shapes remain.

And what remains is everything. A father walking his son by the hand. A dog checking in on its people. Surfers hauling boards toward the last light of the day, shoulder to shoulder like they've done this walk a thousand times together. Nobody posed for this. Nobody needed to.

This is what I keep coming back to with community and family: they're not concepts, they're choreography. Nobody hands you the steps, you just find yourself in step anyway, boards under one arm and a toddler's hand in the other. That's culture. Not the postcard, the pattern underneath it.

Imperfect exposure, honest frame.

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Mojave desert, 2007.First roll with the D90. Giorgio driving, a tank of gas, no fixed plan beyond crossing the desert be...
07/30/2026

Mojave desert, 2007.

First roll with the D90. Giorgio driving, a tank of gas, no fixed plan beyond crossing the desert before nightfall.

The Joshua trees start appearing somewhere past the halfway mark, black shapes against a sky with nothing in it. Worth knowing: it isn’t a tree at all, it’s a yucca, and the name comes from Mormon settlers who saw in its raised limbs a resemblance to the prophet reaching skyward.

Giorgio had a copy of U2’s *The Joshua Tree* in the glovebox, the 1987 album that borrowed its name and its cover from this same stretch of desert. “Where the Streets Have No Name” came on somewhere near Barstow and stayed on repeat for the rest of the drive, the guitar building the way the horizon does out here, slowly, then all at once.

I shot this one in black and white. Colour felt wrong for a landscape this stripped down.

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A lighthouse you only earn after 313 steps down, and every one of them worth it.I want to tell you about the air here wh...
07/28/2026

A lighthouse you only earn after 313 steps down, and every one of them worth it.

I want to tell you about the air here when the fog stays away. That same fog that rolls in off the Pacific in late afternoon, pushes miles inland along the coast, then dissolves the next morning as the sun climbs. When it clears, this is what you get.

The golden hour here has no rivals. There’s a stretch in winter and early spring when gray whales pass just beyond this point on their migration, heading south in January, north again by March, sometimes with calves close to shore in the weeks after. I didn’t see any that evening. But I stood there knowing they pass through this exact water.

I’ve rarely felt I caught the light right. This is one of those rare times.

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Golden light on Ocean Front Walk, Venice Beach. Skaters all around her, spinning and dancing, clearly showing off their ...
07/20/2026

Golden light on Ocean Front Walk, Venice Beach. Skaters all around her, spinning and dancing, clearly showing off their skills for the tourists watching.

She was different. Eyes closed, face turned to the sun, moving in her own rhythm. Checkered brown and white trousers catching the late light, not caring who was watching.

Not my usual kind of shot, honestly. But I had fun chasing that one moment when she forgot the street was even there.

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There’s a spot on the Bay Area’s northern coast that earned a reputation all its own. Back in the ‘70s it became a haven...
07/17/2026

There’s a spot on the Bay Area’s northern coast that earned a reputation all its own. Back in the ‘70s it became a haven for the hippie community, an isolated corner between the hills and the ocean where life ran on its own rules, far from the noise of the cities.

That communal, slightly anarchic spirit never really left.

What happened next became local legend. Over the decades Bolinas started drawing curious visitors and tourists, and the residents, protective of their quiet, found a simple but effective solution: they kept tearing down the road sign with the town’s name, every time the highway department put it back up. Even today, coming in from certain roads, you won’t find a single marker. If you don’t already know where it is, you simply don’t get there.

I shot this photo late one afternoon, with dozens upon dozens of pelicans diving into the water to feed, a nonstop show of wings and splashes. Full disclosure, I could have done better: the autofocus motor on my Nikon D700’s zoom had just given out, and I ended up chasing those dives almost blind.

I’ll be back.

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Venice Beach Skatepark, California.Not the kind of subject I'd usually choose, and this hard, frontal light isn't the ki...
07/07/2026

Venice Beach Skatepark, California.

Not the kind of subject I'd usually choose, and this hard, frontal light isn't the kind I usually chase either. I shot it anyway, more focused on limiting the damage of my inexperience in that moment than on truly building the image.

I'm posting it here for exactly that reason. Not for the result, but for the honesty of admitting there's something to learn even from a shot that didn't fully come together. Stepping out of one's comfort zone often means just that: accepting an imperfect image for the sake of growing.

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