web and social – Dario Solera Photography

How Many Photos Are Too Many?

Dario Solera — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:00:20 +0000

I have over 1,100 photos published on my website.Is that too many? It’s not an easy question to answer. Yes, it’s a lot, but… That number represents only about 14% of the photographs I’ve post-processed and less than 5% of the total images I’ve captured – since the beginning of time. I strive to keep […]

Escaping From Mainstream Social Media

Dario Solera — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 13:00:00 +0000

There’s been lot of talk these days about users fleeing from X to Bluesky. I’m one of them. I wrote about this already, but it’s worth repeating that I don’t use social media to find fullfilment, validation, or happiness. I know I won’t find any of those – quite the opposite, in fact. I quit […]

Places Over Categories

Dario Solera — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 11:00:00 +0000

One thing that I’ve always struggled at is categorizing photos and assigning a specific genre to them. Of course, many of them are easily grouped and while I think of myself as a street and landscape photographer, in reality the boundaries between genres and categories are very blurred. The image above is a perfect example. […]

My Quest For Minimalism

Dario Solera — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0000

It’s probably my brain. I’m an engineer and I want things to be clear, square, and precise. That obviously shows in my photographs as well. Of course there are many possibile interpretations of minimalism, especially in photography. The image above is an example from 2007 that I still love and that I would call a […]

The Call of Vertical Photos

Dario Solera — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The human field of view is wider than it is taller (source: Wikipedia). It follows that we humans should prefer horizontal images. Well, according to my statistics, I shoot about half of my images with a vertical orientation. In certain places like my hometown Milan, Italy, that number goes as high as three quarters. I […]

Connecting To The Real World

Dario Solera — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Over the past few years I noticed a trend in my habits that I find ineresting. I observe a lot. I dwell on details. I constantly look around myself. That happens even in mundane situations, like while commuting or when waiting for food in a restaurant. It is all a by-product of photography. Photography forces […]

Why a Blog in 2023?

Dario Solera — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 14:00:00 +0000

Nobody reads blogs anymore! – Everybody on the web Not true. Fewer people write or read blogs than some years back, but… stay with me. First off, I like writing. I even wrote a few novels and short stories, but that was another life. Writing feels liberating to me because it helps getting messy ideas […]

Seeking Validation In The Social Media Era

Dario Solera — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0000

“Don’t obsess over followers and likes counts,” they say. It’s more complex than that. Way more complex. We all seek some sort of validation. We are social animals after all, and part of our personality is determined by what our peers think of us. It’s innate and written in our DNA. It’s both good and […]

Opt-out From AI Training Datasets

Dario Solera — Thu, 18 May 2023 15:30:00 +0000

Update 2024/07/04 Cloudflare has implemented an automated way to block AI bots, scrapers and crawlers that is free to use on all Cloudflare-proxied websites. Original Post Content It is now clear that AI models are trained using data, text, and images scraped from the web using programs called crawlers. I won’t go into the details […]

What’s A Portfolio?

Dario Solera — Mon, 08 May 2023 09:00:00 +0000

I’ve been publishing my photos on this website for quite a while now – almost two years in fact. One day I noticed I had gotten to about 2,700 photos. It’s a bit too much, in my opinion. I published new images almost every day, so it didn’t take much time to become a bit […]