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Simone Sbaraglia - Interview by Mark Lapin Accordians, Baseball and Beauty - Our Interview with Simone Sbaraglia Article rating: 10.00

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TakeGreatPictures.com (TGP): When did you first get into photography?

Simone Sbaraglia (SS): I started in childhood.  My mother was very interested in photography, not as a professional but as a hobby.  She always traveled a lot and liked to do travel photography and portraits for family and friends.  She had a darkroom and I watched her while I was growing up.  I learned to develop by the time I was 14 or 15.  But I was never very serious about it because I was into so much other stuff.

TGP: What other things were you into?

SS: Well, I played many musical instruments.  I started with guitar, then switched to something like an accordion, then finally I started with drums, which I still play even though I don’t really have a place to practice now.  In high school, I played guitar with one band, and drums with a different band.  Maybe because I kept switching instruments, I never got really good at any of them.

TGP: What about sports?

SS: I played basketball in high school and all the way up till my second or third year in college.  At university, I was in a league called the Pro C series.  We didn’t get paid but it was pretty competitive.  Finally, I had to quit to keep up with my studies. 

I still play.  IBM has great workout facilities, so when I come to New York in the summer, we play every day.  We skip lunch and play basketball.  When the summer interns come, they crush us old guys.  They’re so young, strong and fit that they destroy us completely,

TGP: What kind of research are you doing with computers?

SS: I work on high performance computing, developing software for high performance machines for science, research labs, and national laboratories.  I’m very much into software in general, so when digital cameras came along, I just felt I could understand them better than film. 

TGP: Has digital changed the way you shoot?

SS: Yes, definitely.  With film, I didn’t really know how to shoot for the final result.  I was a decent a decent printer, but certainly not great.  You can do post processing with film, scan negatives and take them into Photoshop, but it takes so much longer and is more painful.  With digital, post-processing is so much easier, a natural continuation of your shooting. 

TGP: Why are you so drawn to Japanese cranes?

SS: I’m concentrating more and more on endangered species.  Japanese cranes migrate from Siberia to Hokkaido every year.  They’re incredible animals with very complex mating rituals.  They dance, they jump, they bring meat to their partners, they throw sticks in the air.  All this takes place in silence and very cold weather, very far north.  When you see thousands of cranes dancing like that, it’s almost a mystical experience.  Cranes are sacred in many ancient cultures.

TGP: What are some of the essential qualities that make a good photographer?

SS: Well, we’re getting a little philosophical here but I think a photographer should be someone trained to recognize beauty.  When I travel with other people, we see the same scenes.  But when I come back and my show pictures, they say ‘Oh, that’s beautiful.  I didn’t see that.  Where was that, where did you take that?’  The scene was there but the other person didn’t have that training to see and isolate the beauty.

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