Finally, in 2016 I made it home for the first time in... I refuse to think how long. Naturally, my representative image for that year just had to be this one, even though it dates from a little after my time.
It is, nonetheless, the symbol of home. And that was as much as I originally wrote for this image which, I now realise, tells you nothing about my photographic journey, which is the subject of this gallery.
During this time the Olympus OMD E-M1 was still my lead camera, with the 12-40 f/2.8 Pro lens doing most of the lifting up front. Neither of them failed me.
A couple of friends had gone to Europe (Britain and France) on package tours. They suggested that we all go to Italia in 2016. "You speak Italian, right?", they asked. Sì, naturalmente, after all, I'm from there, right? The problem is... I hadn't been speaking it. Not regularly. Not for years. You go into an Italian restaurant with an Italian owner in Australia and they speak English to you. Streaming then isn't what it is now and I wasn't able to watch Italian programs. So I started reading Italian newspapers. "Wait, that word, I know that word, it means, ummm... and that verb, that's... oh, it's the subjunctive, the conjugation is.... Oh. S**t." I heard of a guy who was born and bred in Australia and who went to northern Italia to become a calcio (football) professional (player, later manager). This was in small town Italia, not one of the big tourist cities. 20 years later he couldn't remember how to speak English. I wasn't quite that bad, but it certainly wasn't good. So I started hitting online lessons to get la mia lingua back.
The others wanted to go on a package tour rather than a self-managed one. I was not, and am not a fan of "If this is Tuesday it must be Belgium" tours but in retrospect we were incredibly lucky with our group, and although I was occasionally called upon to translate it took the pressure off a bit.
I would never go to a country where I could not speak ANY of the language unless it was a package tour.
Second lesson, one which is less relevant now; use global roaming. It's not exactly cheap but it costs way less now than it did in 2016. For the first few days we had no mobiles (until we bought an Italian SIM card), and therefore no GPS tracking of where we were. Which means no geotagging of my photos or tracking in Google Maps, which has been invaluable for tagging some photos. Unfortunately Google is going to screw us over by taking it away from us at the end of 2024, but it was good while it lasted.
Third lesson: A good photographer's vest is a thing of joy and utility. Mine was rugged and perfectly designed. Unfortunately it also aged ridiculously fast with the black dye fading to brown and making me change from "Han Solo" to "possible hobo" in a couple of weeks.
Fourth lesson: Buy a fisheye. In Italia a lot of the things that you'll be shooting are indoors; churches, archaeological sites, etc. I bought a lightweight compromise wide angle lens (the 9 to 18 mm f/4 to f/5.6), since I realised that I would need one. (I discussed my reasoning in my 2016 PESO gallery, 15 January 2016.) In retrospect, though, I sorely regret not having my 8mm macro that I would not buy until 2022.
The biggest lesson? I really need more practice in being able to tell a story of time and place with my photos. Unfortunately as we'll soon see, it wasn't one that I learnt for the subsequent two years.
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