The photo series "Promenade Moments" was created in 2017. Since 2005 I live in the hinterland of Nice on the Côte d'Azur, in southern France. I like to spend my free time with my camera, among others on the Promenade des Anglais, with the sea and the sun and the hustle and bustle - a successful antidepressant in a difficult moment of life. On the evening of the terrorist attack on the 14 July 2016, my children were in Nice for the fireworks and had to spend the night in the house of friendly unknown people. I could not bring them home until the following day. But how many others did not have this luck!
I want to share the happiness I was able to recover. The result are these colorful, positive, happy pictures, these moments on the promenade full of life and light. I make photographic workshops with traumatized adolescents and donate large prints to the victims and their families. With my "Promenade Moments" series from 2017 on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, I want to give back some colour and light to the victims of the 2016 terrorist attack by donating metal prints of my pictures to the associations (Promenade des Anges; Hospital Lenval; Habitat & Humanisme).
I took these pictures with an Olympus E-M5 II, with a tripod and A cable remote control (settings usually 1/6 - 1/10 sec at aperture 22, focal length 60mm, ISO 200, no flash, no filter). The long exposure time and the high luminosity of the Côte d'Azur lead to overexposed images that were subsequently compensated with Lightroom CC. Overall, my basic idea is to make the image in its final form directly with the camera. So I limited the post-processing on the computer to a minimum. No picture is artificially composed, cut or reassembled. The movement was captured directly with the camera through the extreme settings. They're all natural, non-posed photographs of people on the promenade.
I had my first photographic exhibition - with this series "Promenade Moments" - in November 2017 in Menton, France, at PhotoMenton 2017, and received ad hoc the first prize ("Prix de l'Affiche") with the picture "The Orange Cap".
Photo prints are available for sale: photo@piaparolin.com
