About

My name is Angelo Failla, also known as “pallotron” on the internet, and I was born in Catania (Sicily, Italy) in 1981. I moved to Dublin (Ireland) in February 2008 to develop my career in the IT industry.

Photography was not really an interest for me until recent years; I remember myself shooting few rolls when I was 12 years old using the KИEB-19 35mm reflex camera  or trying to find a sense in the Fujifilm Instax100 that I received as present for my 18 years birthday party.

Shots were good (actually I’ve lost all of ‘em! sigh!) but I didn’t fall in love with photography so I ended up being a computer gerk! :)

I spent years learning various programming languages and the UNIX(tm) operating system firstly studying at the university and then, not happy with the level there, quitting and continuing on my own.

I firmly believe in self-teaching approach as the best method to learn and improve ourselves.

In the meantime I owned different compact digital camera, like the Kodak DC220, one of the first digital camera, 1 megapixel, serial rs232 connectivity with which I have to say I took the worst shots I’ve ever made!

My job satisfied me along all these years but in the recent period I felt the need of finding something which could let me stay away from sitting all day long in front of a computer (being just for fun or for work). Here is where photography came about 3 or 4 years ago: one day I went to a small trip with a friend of mine and had the opportunity to spent all 3 days with his digital reflex camera. I felt in love, this time seriously, fascinated by the commodity of the digital.

I bought then my first reflex camera, Canon350D with a set of lenses (Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II, Sigma 10-20mm, Sigma 70-300 EX APO DG, Canon EF 100m f/2.8 USM) and started making progresses and experience. I use mainly open source software like the GNU/Linux OS and Gimp for my digital workflow with the exception of BibblePro for Linux.

Going on I found out that digital photography was not actually helping me out in avoiding sitting in front of a computer due to the digital darkroom workflow… :)  I own an account on flickr.com and I’ve recently joined photographyireland.net, a place where you can meet very nice people and brilliant photographer.

I recently bought a Canon 5D and I’ve started messing around with the spot metering and the magic of the manual exposition based on a simplified version of the Zone System for digital cameras.

I’m also fascinated by film photography: I own a Holga 120N and a Vivitar V2000 and I’ve recently completed my darkroom kit for developing films at home.

That’s all folks!!! Hope you enjoy my pictures, for any questions, info, suggestions or everything else please contact me by email writing to angelo.failla@freaknet.org

If you are interested in the non-photography profile of me please go to the main site or to my blog.

Equipment used

  • Canon 5D MKI
  • Canon ES 17-40 f/4.0 L USM
  • Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro USM
  • Canon 50mm f/1.8 II
  • Sigma 70-300 EX APO DG
  • Cokin Z-pro filter holder + kood filter set (red, orange, ND, GND etc)
  • Vivitar V2000 with 50mm f/1.4
  • Holga 120N
  • Yashica Mat 124G
  • Manfrotto tripod