Fabio Antenore - Lord over time

Technology and creativity have always played a major role in the professional life of Swiss-born Fabio Antenore. In his former job as a sound engineer and music producer, however, his work primarily revolved around capturing and implementing the creative ideas of other creatives in the best possible way.

After a burnout, Antenore decided to focus on his own creativity and passion for photography. "I was out and about a lot at the time and wanted to capture what nature gave me. Landscapes make no demands on you. That helped me to find myself," Antenore recalls. From the very beginning, his aim was not to document the beauty of nature in a sober way. Instead, Antenore wanted to create works of art that depicted nature as beautifully as possible. Over time, Antenore developed his style, which he now calls "hyperrealistic photography". His aim is not fidelity to reality, but maximum emotion and perfection. While he focused on landscapes for many years, in recent years he has also increasingly been photographing cityscapes. Antenore recently published an e-book on "Streetscape Photography" on his website, in which he reveals his best tips and tricks.

How much reality is there in Antenore's hyperreality?

Antenore's pictures are probably best described as "spectacular". They are colorful, rich in detail, technically brilliant and often captivate with lighting situations that are rarely found in reality. If you look at his pictures superficially, you might think they are AI-generated or composings of many different images. The suspicion of compositing points in the right direction, but in a different way than one might think. There are several reasons for the "hyperreal" effect of his pictures. The most decisive one is probably the fact that the time axis, or more precisely, the time of shooting, plays a very special role in the creation of the images. Antenore follows a self-imposed standard of truthfulness in his photography: the conditions of the location are fixed. Everything that can be seen in the picture was photographed by him on location. Only the time axis is variable. This means that individual elements of the image were photographed at different times of the day and then combined in post-production and given a suitable lighting mood; a technique called time glare.

Collecting pieces of the puzzle

This is also the reason why Antenore's pictures often take a long time to create and why he often remains behind his tripod for many hours, taking numerous identical photos at different times of day. This results in pictures in the sunshine, in the golden and blue hours and with stars or even the Milky Way. Antenore then "assembles" the finished image in post-production by putting together individual areas of the image like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle from different versions of the same image. His pictures are not realistic afterwards. But they still differ dramatically from AI images or composings in which elements from different places have been put together. Antenore still shows the photographed location. 

Just not as a real situation, captured in a brief moment, but as an idealized "best-of".

When asked about the success factors of his pictures, Antenore answers: "30% detailed planning, 30% advanced shooting technology on location and 30% post-production on the monitor. The rest is luck."

Location scouting and preparation

Antenore maintains a comprehensive bucket list of places he wants to photograph one day and is gradually working his way through it. He has now collected more than 1,000 locations on Google Maps, along with a wealth of relevant information for photography. With the help of relevant tools such as Photo Pills or Google Earth, he researches additional information that he can use to plan the shoot on site. This way, he can plan the position of the sun, moon and Milky Way in advance and determine the ideal travel period. “Incidentally, this part is the least fun for me,” admits Antenore, “but it is very important so that I can implement my ideas on site.”

The GFX 100 has an enormous contrast range. Nevertheless, graduated filters are used in critical motifs to reduce contrasts in the image and prevent the highlights from "burning out" and the shadows from "drowning". He also uses ND gray filters to achieve slow shutter speeds during the day. In other situations, Antenore creates exposure series. In general, his working method could be summarized as a gigantic exposure series. Over many hours, he creates numerous variations of the same photo under different lighting conditions. The actual image is then created in the next step - post-production.

The image is created in post-production

After the shoot, Antenore returns to his digital darkroom, where his ColorEdge CG2700X is waiting for him. The task here is to view the images and find a basic mood on which the finished image can be based. Antenore then gradually adds individual image elements from other images, for example to work out the shadows or highlights or to add the night sky with the Milky Way, which may have been taken hours after the basic exposure. "In the end, I have to harmonize the numerous pieces of the puzzle in such a way that I create a plausible, harmonious overall lighting mood and thus a hyper-realistic image," Antenore explains the biggest challenge of his working method. Depending on the number of individual exposures used, Antenore's pictures require an average of 2-3 hours of image processing. However, complex motifs can sometimes take a whole working day. Antenore recently published a Photoshop panel on his website, which can be used to significantly simplify many of his complex editing steps.

The ColorEdge CG2700X, Antenore's monitor, plays a central role in this. "My images are hyper-realistic, but when it comes to the monitor, I prefer an absolutely precise, realistic display," explains Antenore. "I want the monitor to show me my file exactly. And as it looks at the moment. Not more colorful, not richer in contrast and not sharper than it actually is." What sounds so obvious, however, is more of a peculiarity, as Antenore explains: "On my MacBook, the image display is also somewhat hyperreal. Too colorful, too contrasty, too sharp. That may look nice, but it's not what I need when I'm editing images. Then there's the glossy display, which I often find annoying."

In addition to the absolutely precise image display, Antenore appreciates the sharp image display of the 4K monitor, the perfect homogeneity across the entire display surface and the built-in calibration sensor. "The CG2700X gives me the absolute certainty that I can always rely one hundred percent on the precision of the image display. So I can trust my eyes. I've programmed my monitor to calibrate itself at regular intervals, so I don't have to do it myself and I can't forget," explains Antenore and continues: "So I can use the time I'm sitting in front of the computer to post-produce my images and plan new shoots and not waste it on maintenance work on my infrastructure."

As a technically minded creative, Antenore does not limit himself to creating images with the help of cameras. He has also been working with generative artificial intelligence (AI) for years. “I'm still in the learning phase here. But it's fascinating to be able to create works of visual art from scratch that are completely the product of my own imagination and creativity,” explains Antenore.

Own creativity in images artificially generated by a computer may sound contradictory at first, but on closer inspection the parallels with photography become clear: the photographer encounters a situation which he then makes his own using his creative possibilities, e.g. by choosing the point of view, the image section, exposure time and aperture, and thus creates his own image. Even with AI-generated images, the AI first creates an image from the briefing, the so-called "prompts", which may show the desired situation, but probably does not directly correspond to the creative's ideas. It is then necessary to modify the prompts or change the result using the so-called chain-prompt technique until it meets the user's wishes. Antenore then often combines the result with his conventional image editing workflow and edits and modifies the images until the finished work meets his expectations.

When asked whether photographers aren't sawing off the branch they are sitting on, Antenore replies: "AI is here, it's spreading, it's getting better and better and at the same time easier to use. It's not going to go away! And in this context, AI doesn't just mean generative AI, which I use to create images out of nothing. AI can also be used to speed up and simplify numerous image processing steps. I clearly see AI as a great opportunity here. But of course there are areas of photography where generative AI will make life difficult. This is where I see microstock photography, for example. The agencies are currently being flooded with AI images, but as soon as the buyers of the images understand how they can generate AI images themselves, the air here could become much thinner. 

But as a creative, I can't sit back and not deal with new developments. Rather than freeze up because of potential risks, I draw the conclusion that I need to deal with the issues in depth and take advantage of the opportunities offered by new technologies. Because nobody can take away what makes me a human artist, my creativity, my vision and my skills. And in the end, it doesn't matter what tools I use to create images. And this is where the circle closes with regard to monitors: here, too, it doesn't matter whether the image files were photographed or prompted. The requirement for the monitor always remains the same: to guarantee an absolutely precise view of the image file. And that's what my EIZO does".