WePhoto Portrait vol. 12 by Mario Buncuga

WePhoto Portrait 2021 - Vol 12 Dear all, Here comes yet another proud moment for us to release the next edition in Portrait Photography under our larger banner called - The Series. WePhoto Group was founded in the year 2014, and since then we have come all this long for our sheer passion for this art. All this while, thanks to the continued help and support of a few likeminded colleagues being as enthusiastic as me while contributing to this cause - that today we have created many platforms and thematic pages to represent the various genres in photography. Today WePhoto group has the widest presence across Facebook representing almost every possible genre of photography. As of date we have thematic Facebook pages, picture boards on Pinterest, a dedicated web portal and more than 100 books published on issuu.com already. The books are simultaneously accessible on Apple Books too. This annual collection called - The Series - is made of eBooks each belonging to a specific photographic class, and includes the artwork of several authors from Italy and abroad. The one in your hands is the eleventh book exclusively on Portrait Photography. Apart from the e-version these publications are available in the form of coffee table books as well. Editorial Board Mario Bunčuga: Editor & Art Director Germana De Chellis: Chief Graphic Designer & Portrait Group Leader  Francesco Marinaro: Portrait Editor Pankaj Anand: Review Associate Priyanka Agrawal: Review Associate

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We are very excited and happy to feature these beautiful images and most of all, be able to share them with a wide range of viewers. Please spread a word around by sharing these, and recommend them to as many photo enthusiasts as you can to visit these eBooks from our webpages and links given ahead. Do leave your positive feedback on the eStores if you care. This is how you may help us grow and share our passion for photography! In this Book you can also find the links to our Facebook Group - WePhoto. Come and join the group, invite your friends to share their work in there and enjoy some of the best images from around the world.

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Gratitude My special thanks to Germana de Chellis, Chief of WePhoto Portrait domain, closely supported by Francesco MAainaro, who have helped me select images, contact authors and collect materials. They may always be found putting things together at the back office. Thanks to all the authors who have made this volume such a great collection with their valuable contributions. I also wish to thank Germana De Chellis for her impeccable layout and cover designs and to Pankaj Anand and Priyanka Agrawal, who are responsible for translations to English, proofreading of drafts, and content development. I owe my thanks to our admin colleagues too, who are constantly managing and taking care of the group as well as its 12 thematic pages and online magazines and are ardently bringing forth the best photographers from across the globe. I have no words to express my gratitude to the wonderful work they do every day with great passion and dedication. WePhoto Network the Founder Mario Bunčuga

The Authors

Amit Vakil

Antonio Cristini

Franceso Marinaro

Debarghya Mukherjee

Moah Mattos

Roberto Rampinelli

Roberto Scanu

Titir Baidya

Copyright All rights are reserved to WePhoto and Mario Bunčuga for this entire eBook and to individual authors for their work included in the related chapters. This book can be downloaded for free and distributed freely only as a whole. The images and text are exclusive property of the authors who might authorize their use elsewhere at their own discretion, if contacted personally in advance. You may also order a print version coffee table book from our link through Peecho online print service. Any misuse or otherwise will be prosecuted through the prevalent rules on the subject of copyright.

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Portrait Photography

For us, the human beings, there could be nothing more ‘personal’ than a worthy portrait. You look through a pair of eyes and find every single person hiding some emotions deep within. Making of a portrait involves intricate techniques, observant eyes, and a creative mind because a portrait is not supposed to be merely an image; it rather has to hold the essence of the individual personality. Whether it is a gorgeous girl with languid eyes, a rude old man with his skin marked by time, or a child with sad eyes, their portrait has to strike the conscience of a viewer. It has to make them lose their heart. Our job as a photographer is to seize the dream of that girl and make the viewer feel the sourness of the old man’s suffering. Presented herein is a collection of some of the best works of our time.

Mario Bunčuga April 2021 viii

AMIT VAKIL Chamba, India

amitvakilphotography@gmail.com facebook.com/amit.vakil.5 instagram.com/amitvakilphotography/

Born in and based out of Chamba, Himachal Pradesh - a place with natural abundance, I started photography as a hobby but soon it turned into my passion and now I am a full time professional photographer, honored with more than thirty awards, eighty publications and fifteen assignments/projects. It was not an easy journey but I had full faith in my capabilities. I am still open to learning as I consider it as a never ending process.

My endeavors bore first fruits when one of my pictures bagged 1st prize for Macro, Micro Flora and Fauna contest organized by Bing, in 2014. Since then I have not looked back and have won several photo national and international competitions including Colors of Macao by NatGeo Traveller India in 2016, followed by a photo assignment at Macao. I also won ‘Artistique’ contest by Asian Photography Magazine for the theme Black & White, 2017-18. I traveled to Sri Lanka on a photo assignment for NatGeo and Vivo, in March 2019, and another for Gujarat Tourism, 2019 to capture the essence and colors of the state. Recently won a wildlife photo contest by the Pangolin Photo Safaris Botswana, South Africa, and recently the Right ‘Xposure’s Photographer of The Year 2020 award. 10

ANTONIO CRISTINI Roma, Italia

facebook.com/foto.tonyangel

I was born in 1974 in a family of merchants in Rome - a city, where art and history come abound, what the rhythm of life often does not lead us to appreciate enough. Well, I cannot say that I always loved photography, but the great curiosity towards the camera can be contributed to the memory of my father who would take the classic family photos with a rectangular box, called Agfa, equipped with a magical cube I learned later was the flash. This curiosity for this magical medium gradually transformed into passion in me.

I cannot quantify how many films I burned of my father to learn the skill but the reason I could follow it so passionately was that this was the only thing that excited me. I owe a great deal to my friends, admirers and followers to be with me during this journey full of physical and economical commitment, and often also of anxieties, waiting for the shot to become matter through the process of development and printing. Back then situation and emotions required us to use a more careful, conscious and refined approach to photograph, contrary to present time, where abundance of resources, tools and techniques helps us focus on finer nuances of a perfect photograph while shooting. I still follow the principle to think analog and shoot digital, and that is where I experience the inspiration for pure photography coming from. 22

FRANCESO MARINARO Taranto, Italia

www.facebook.com/FrancoMarinaro talassano@hotmail.com

A graduate in Accounting, and currently a public employee, I am an amateur photographer since the days of the film. Photography for me is a starting point for developing cultural and topical projects, rather than an end in itself.

I find training fundamental and I do not hesitate to travel from Taranto, to go to the central and northern Italy in order to attend a course or workshop. I believe the development of a digital negative in software is inevitable and I always use the most advanced photo editing software available to do my work. With a group of friends, we have established a cultural association that uses photography to promote my territory and its cultural and historical resources. In my experience as an amateur photographer, I have always placed man at the center of my attention rather than the technological novelty in terms of photographic equipment. The photos presented here refer to the place in which I live since birth, Talsano (the name seems to be derived from Greek Thalassa) that in the months of spring takes on unusual courses around the sea area. And I wanted to present it to you in this very way34

DEBARGHYA MUKHERJEE Howrah, India

facebook.com/debarghya.mukherjee behance.net/debarghya_mukherjee instagram.com/debarghya.photography/

Can you tell us a little about you? My name is Debarghya Mukherjee, I am a creative and art photographer from India, my photographic journey started with a vision of expressing myself. Visual art and its different forms were always a very interesting subject to me, I used to be a self-taught painter, but couldn’t continue, and then I jumped into photography after many years. And some way around it changes my life. It gave me freedom to express myself in many ways. I always feel that we all have something deep inside, that we either want to paint or want to write. And photography gave me that freedom. I started using this as a medium.

As I am from a computer science background, digital processing gave me an extra advantage. I started following works of many famous visual artists, and developed my own style of art. But sometimes I feel an artist cannot be settled, maybe it’s my style right now, maybe I can change myself completely in a couple of years, it all depends on your mind. How and when did you get into photography? I used to teach in school and colleges, and then started my own business and became so busy with life that made me depressed, and one day my wife asked me to spend some time with something that interested me, something out of my regular routine. Then I started photography and everything changed. I had that interest inside of me, to express my visual representation of thoughts, and I jumped into it. What does photography mean to you? Photography is a visual art form to me. Photography made lots of changes in my life; I started thinking about things in a different manner. I started studying color, lights, human emotions, and most importantly “How to tell a story”. As a creative photographer, storytelling is most important to me. 46

MOAH MATTOS São Paulo, Brasil

facebook.com/moahmattosphoto instagram.com/moahmattos/ facebook.com/venusaoespelhomagazine

I have always been a lover of photography, proudly self-learned. I studied the history of art through my lessons in painting, and I learned from the great masters the technicalities of making a worthy photograph.

Dissatisfied with the standards, I started to build my own style, photographing places, objects and people, giving them my look and, portraying them in nude artistic essays, the multiethnicities of women in Brazil. I am currently coadministrator of the WePhoto Photography Group (Italy). 58

ROBERTO RAMPINELLI Bergamo, Italia

facebook.com/roberto.rampinelli.3 instagram.com/rampinelliroberto/ I live in Bergamo, where I was born in the year 1959. I have loved photography ever since I was small, when I used to watch photographers at work and was enraptured by the prodigies with which they transformed the clicks of their ‘magic boxes’ into very realistic ‘drawings’. I have cultivated this passion over the years, initially only dreaming about it and then starting with the first rudiments of taking photo. My initial learning came from a dear friend, with the help of a small camera bought for me with little money and a lot of love by my father, whose unique but fundamental quality was that it was completely manual and equipped with an exposure meter.

From there I continued to refine my technique. I discovered little by little the subjects that I am most passionate about and the common thread that unites them - the humanity of people. People in work, sport, art (especially dance), religion. Also in the simplest moments of everyday life when men and women become ‘just human beings’ and that is what I represent in my photographs. I am not a professional photographer, but a Human Resources Director in a company. I like my job for many reasons, and a few probably the same why I love photography. A separate chapter, now closed, was underwater photography in the days of film and the legendary Nikon. Although the experience is over, I still have fond memories of it, as well as a thousand photos, now also in digital format. 70

ROBERTO SCANU Cuneo, Italia

facebook.com/roberto.scanu1

I was born in Varese in 1975. From an early age I loved playing with a beautiful Polaroid that allowed me to have fun and immediately see the results. I have always wanted to stop time in a click and for a long time I continued with very small analog device. When digital technology arrived, a new photographic journey began with the aim to document my travels.

Ten years ago I decided to buy a compact camera and that substantially improved the quality of my photos. Since then I formally started studying the photography journals and books available at a photographic club and brushing my techniques at a portrait studio. I had always done Landscapes because that excited me the most, even though I found an artistic balance in doing UrbanEx, street, events etc. for several years. But all of a sudden I found myself doing portraits. Now I love photographing people and capturing them in the most enticing forms and postures. Managing light is an area that pushes me more and more into this passion, not forgetting my first love for landscapes though. 82

TITIR BAIDYA Kolkata, India

facebook.com/Som1880 instagram.com/titir_baidya?igshid=1ub2p08sm1qyc

I was born and brought up in the south of Greater Kolkata. I belong to a decent, humble, yet conservative Bengali family, where it was unimaginable to even dream of photography as a career option. But as destiny called upon I had to quit my Highschool and begin a quest for livelihood. I made my living by working as a banking agent and supported my family.

However, soon thereafter I had a calling for creativity. About seven years back while browsing the web I came across a photographic portal and thenceforth I started checking in regularly and following renowned photographers. With each passing day my obsession for photography grew loftier and soon I took a desperate decision to invest in a camera with almost my entire saving and that’s how my photographic journey kickstarted. On my nonworking days at the office, photography was the only thing that kept me engaged. I learned all the technicalities by self-experimentation and continued practice. Today I am proud to call it a perfect decision to get into portfolio and product photography. It did not take longer for my work to get acknowledged by eminent photographers and photography forums. 94

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Portrait Vol. 12 - April 2021

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