Cinque Terre & Tuscany 2024: a 4x5" Portfolio and a story

[Vieri]

In October 2024, my wife and I spent ten days in Cinque Terre & Tuscany between Workshops and personal work. We have been traveling to both these destinations so often in the last decade that they always felt like home to us. We loved Tuscany so much that in 2023 we made it our actual home.

Both destinations are world-famous, beautiful and charming, but to us they are much more. Cinque Terre are five villages clinging on a rocky coast on the Ligurian Sea. As a teenager, I spent my summer holidays there for years, which makes them very close to my heart, and I know them like the back of my hand.

In Cinque Terre, besides photographing the famous village views that everyone knows and comes for, I always had a lot of fun in finding and portraying the more secret corners, those that nobody ever goes to. If one cares to look, Cinque Terre offers amazing rock formations, minimalist subjects and more, and after having gone there for ages those are the ones that I enjoy photographing the most these days.

Tuscany is arguably one of the world’s most beautiful regions, known for its quintessential, iconic Italian landscapes, its man-made history and – just to name one thing - for having gifted the world the Renaissance. Out of all the diverse beautiful areas of Tuscany, we decided to focus on the northern seaside, close to Liguria, and on Val d’Orcia inland. Val d’Orcia is where we made our home, and I enjoy keeping exploring it and finding new, unknown locations to photograph.

In October 2024, for the first time I tried my hand at these landscapes with a 4x5” camera, back then my Arca-Swiss F-Line, and I truly enjoyed how the meditative feeling coming from the medium perfectly complemented the kind of landscapes and weather.

Click here to read the rest of the article: https://www.vieribottazzini.com/2026/05/cinque-terre-tuscany-2024-a-4x5-portfolio.html, and enjoy some photos out of the Portfolio!

All photographs taken on Ilford FP4+ except for the second from the top (Fomapan 200 Creative), both film exposed at 100 ISO, developed in Pyrocat-HD for 12 min 30 sec, 10 inversions at start followed by 3 inversion per minute. Scanned on an Epson V850 Pro and Vuescan.

Best regards,

Vieri

 

[Kevin Allan]

A very impressive set of images

 

[Helen Summers]

These are really nice, but one and four fall into the category of I wish I had made those photos and I would put those two on my wall at home, which is the highest praise I can give any photograph.

 

[Toby Webster]

These are super lovely. I actually think that I favour #2 over the others, it's a bit grittier; and that's despite my having had a bad experience with Fomo 200 recently.

 

[John2]

1 then 2 for me but the whole set is excellent.

 

[Vieri]

A very impressive set of images

Thank you very much Kevin, glad you enjoyed them!

These are really nice, but one and four fall into the category of I wish I had made those photos and I would put those two on my wall at home, which is the highest praise I can give any photograph.

Thank you very much Helen, that is great praise indeed and truly much appreciated!

These are super lovely. I actually think that I favour #2 over the others, it's a bit grittier; and that's despite my having had a bad experience with Fomo 200 recently.

Thank you very much Toby, glad you enjoyed them! At the beginning of my journey with 4x5", I tried various films to decide what to settle on moving forward. I eliminated some along the way, and I was left with Fomapan 200 Creative and Ilford FP4+ (which I loved during all my film years prior to digital) as my last two-film-standing, so to speak.

So, I decided to give Fomapan 200 Creative a chance and used it for a couple of months non-stop; I loved the results, the character of the film and (most of the time) the tonal range. What I didn't like is the technical quality of it (or perhaps Foma's quality control), which resulted in much more "fragile" negatives than FP4+ in terms of their resistance to scratches, bad dots, lumps, pinholes, and the like.

Since I digitise, post-process in Photoshop and print digitally, that is nothing that can't be fixed; but, it's time consuming and annoying. Ilford FP4+ is perhaps marginally less sharp than FP 200 but it's way more consistent, plus I just love the tonal range and I am very familiar with its response, and so on.

I might give Fomapan 200 another try as time goes by, see if anything improved on their manufacturing process.

1 then 2 for me but the whole set is excellent.

Thank you so much John, glad you enjoyed them!

Best regards,

Vieri