PHOTOGRAPHY AND STUDIO EQUIPMENT
Leica SL3/SL2s Cameras and Profoto Lights

I found my dimension in that space that fades between being a nerd and living as a geek. I love tech as much as I love the art you can create with it.

Since I'm receiving many requests asking about my photo setups, I decided to make a little compendium with some information on my photographic equipment, lights, and computers.

I'm a Leica Worldwide Ambassador and Profoto Illuminati Ambassador.

I shoot all my assignments with Leica Cameras, and in my studio photography, I use Profoto light equipment. Since 2016 my studio and on location setups are based on the Leics SL system.

Right now I have two Leica SL3 and one Leica SL-S with the Vario-Elmarit-SL 24-90 f2.8-4, the APO-VARIO-ELMARIT-SL 90–280 f/2.8–4 and the Leica APO-Summicron-SL 90mm f/2 ASPH.

I also own several Leica M lenses that I use through Leica SL-M adapter and a series of Sigma Art Lenses such as the 14-24mm 2.8, the 21mm 1.4, the 35mm 1.4, the 50mm 1.4, the 105mm macro 2.8 and the 135mm f1.8. I also got a Panasonic LUMIX S 24 - 105 mm F4 MACRO O.I.S.

My Studio and location light equipment is made of 2 Profoto Pro-11 Generators with 4 heads, 2 Profoto D2 studio strobes,4 Nanlite Forza 500 led lights panels, 4 Phottix Nuada R3 and R4 led lights panels.

I manage two daylight studios in Rome: Hangar63 and StudioB49.

Both Studios have a white limbo, makeup rooms, storage, and offices. This is where I hold my Portrait and Post-production Workshops in Rome.

Street Photography setup consists of a LEICA M11 with the Leica Super-Elmar-M 21mm F/3.4 Asph. lens and the new Leica Q3 with a 28mm 1.7 Summilux lens. I also always have with me a Ricoh GR2, a Ricoh GR3 and a Ricoh GR3x.

In my street bag, you can find several things depending on what, where, and how I’m going to shoot. Many memory cards, a Neewer RGB150 Led Light, a Xiaomi 13 ULTRA, a Google Pixel 8PRO and an iPhone 13PRO, an iPad Mini 2022, a Nintendo Switch loaded with old school Jrpgs, and a pipe filled with some good Latakia tobacco.

My little Soho was updated in March 2020. As I said I’m a Nerd-Geek-Comic lover and videogamer so as you can imagine my office is not filled only with photography books but also with hardware, artbooks, action figures, videogames and so on.

I do all my post-production on a PC loaded with a Ryzen 3950x (16 cores) AMD Processor, 128 gbyte of Ram and two RTX 3080 Ti Nvidia Graphic Cards. The computer is connected to a 32" Asus PA329Q ProArt 4K Monitor and I’m using a Wacom Intuos L Tablet for my retouching jobs.

All my backups are stored on a 80 Terabyte Synology DS1819+ and a 96 Terabyte Synology DS1821+ both in SH2 configuration connected to my computers with a gigabit LAN. I also have a couple of RAID 1 SSD portable storage devices to backup files during assignments. The most important files are also stored on external hard drives located in a secure location. The main studio portfolio is also stored in Tif and Jpg formats on three cloud accounts (Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft One Drive).

I’m working with the Adobe Creative Suite environment (Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, After Effect). All my 3D Renderings are done with the latest release of Blender 3D.

My laptops are a 15.6” Nitro 5 an515-45-r0yq with 64gbyte of ram and an RTX3080 graphic card connected to a Benq Pd3200U Monitor and a Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 PRO tablet for heavy retouching loads and a 13.4" MacBook Air 2022 with M2 Cpu and 24 Gbyte of Ram connected to a XP-PEN Artist Display 15.6 for illustration works.

An i7 Mac Mini 2012 with 16 GByte of ram works as a small server to access my hard drives when I'm not in my studio and as a Plex Server for my media libraries. My studio manager Antonella works on an M1 Mac Mini 2020, 16 Gbyte of Ram a BenQ bl3200pt Monitor and a Wacom Intuos 5 S tablet. Music in my studio is streamed through a Denon DNP-800NE Network Streamer connected with my Spotify and Apple Music Playlists.

Besides work equipment as you can notice from the picture above, I’m a videogame / Scifi Movie / Comic addicted. All around the office you can see Blu-rays, Artbooks and several consoles: PS5, PS4 PRO, XBOX Series X, XBOX One, Nintendo Switch OLED, Xbox360, PS3, PS2, PS Vita, Wii, Gamecube, 3DS, Nvidia Shield and many more much older devices (I'm a retro gamer as well). My favourite games are RPG and JRPG.

For PC gaming a second unit: a HP OMEN 30L  gt13-0054nl with i9 10900k, 64gbyte of fast ram, an Nvidia RTX3090 and an Oculus Rift connected to an Asus ROG SWIFT Curved PG348Q Gaming Monitor. Games are loaded in my Steam, Origin, EPIC, Gog and Microsoft libraries.

That's all I guess. Any more questions? Write to me :)

Updated 02 July 2023