An interesting feature of Milan, for me personally, was the very prominent presence of armed military personnel on the streets. They were part of “Operazione Strade sicure” – an ongoing initiative to use armed forces to preserving public order and to fight crime. This is certainly not typical of North America, and I thought it would be interesting to photograph the soldiers. After all, it would be a kind of “men at work” type of a photo series.
However, for some reason I found it awkward to take photos of the soldiers most of the time. I guess, this was some kind of self-censorship at work, where I was projecting my expectations of not being allowed to take pictures of security-related activities (e.g. near luggage-screening areas in airports, some bridges in US, etc.) To be fair, I have never seen any signs prohibiting photography of the Italian soldiers, and they gave an impression that they probably would not mind a photo opportunity.
that one of the most important educational aspects of baking for young children is learning the value of a systematic process, so baking makes a perfect subject for a documentary.
This time, however, I tried to be mindful and take photos that would be representative of my experience of that place and that moment – being tired after climbing hundreds of steps of a narrow spiral staircase, trying to imagine the thoughts of the artists, who created the countless sculptures that cover the cathedral, watching tourists enjoying a cool breeze on the rooftop or looking at their maps and planning visits to other sites…
I bought a two-day ticket, which allowed admission to various sites, including the terraces on the rooftop of the cathedral. From there, one can see small statues nested int the niches of the spires that face away from the streets below.
exclusively. It is wide enough to allow some flexibility for 
When I took photos of my mother and daughter baking together in a small kitchen, the quarters were so tight that I did not have much choice in terms of the composition. Fortunately, a 35 mm lens provides a wide enough field of view to allow some cropping afterwards. In terms of the colours, I did not want to convert the photos to black-and-white if at all possible, so I tried to position myself so that the brightly coloured background elements (e.g. a wall calendar, etc.) would not be in the frame. In this particular case, the scene itself, which has a lot of sentimental value for me, outweighs the technical shortcoming.
Some of the street corners in the neighbourhood where I grew up look as if they were taken out of Milan, with a notable exception of many advertising signs and billboards, all in loud, conflicting colours. Right next to these neighbourhoods are new construction cites and Soviet-style architecture that are characteristic of China.
This is not a big problem in the sense that could have been worse (e.g. I could have lost images from a professional assignment), but it is definitely frustrating. I guess, the dual CF slots and the option to write files on two cards simultaneously in my 
are there for this kind of eventuality.
The sign at the entrance showed a camera in a red circle, crossed with a red line. Suspecting that in this case “no” does not necessarily mean “no”, I asked a lady at the ticket office to confirm, and she said that photography without a flash is allowed. Then she saw my camera (I had a 
lens, which happened to be extended to its longest focal length) and said that I cannot use it, because it was “professional.” As I was thinking about what to say, I turned the zoom to 24 mm, which made the lens shorter by about 50%. Seeing this, the lady said, pointing at the camera, “This is Ok. You can use that.”
Whether these parallels are useful, is a different question, though. I have read an autobiographic story by 
about an episode from his student years, when he was asked to draw parallels between poetry and theoretical physics. He did that, but pointed out that the world is full of such similarities, and therefore dwelling on them is meaningless: