Photography
By
William M. Fantini
Still
And Motion
Digital
and Film
|
QuicktimeVR
(Virtual Reality Pan And Zoom)
|
Will received
his first 35 mm camera ( a Canon AE-1 ) from his father as a present
on his ninth birthday. His father, radio personality Bill Fantini,
has always been an avid amateur photographer and was eager to
share this hobby with his son. Along with the camera, Will received
ten rolls of slide film, a flash, a tripod and a couple books
on the subject of photographic techniques.
Will immediately
took to the camera and, even at the young age of nine years old,
studied the concepts of framing, depth of field, exposure control
and shutter speed / ISO techniques. After all, the AE-1 was a
fully manual, non-automatic camera... focus, aperture and shutter
speed had to be set for every photograph.
As an adolescent
and teenager, Will was an athlete and also performed in school
plays. And his main creative expression was writing poetry and
short stories. Photography, to him, was a second-nature type hobby
that he mostly took for granted. People always complimented his
skills with the camera when he photographed family portraits,
and especially when he traveled. He would always go out of his
way, lay on the ground, climb a tree... whatever it took to get
an angle that no one else would see.
At the age
of eleven, Will went on a family vacation with his parents, a
cruise to the Virgin Islands. He photographed national monuments
in Puerto Rico, waterfalls in St. Thomas and surfers in Nassau.
At the age of thirteen, Will spent a summer in Europe with his
mother, visiting London, Paris and Rome. He shot over twenty rolls
of film on that trip, documenting everything he saw from his own
unique perspective.
When he was
fifteen, he spent a summer in Mexico with a Mexican family in
Puebla, on an exchange program with the Experiment in International
Living. He did not photograph much while on the "homestay,"
however the last two weeks of the program were spent exploring
the Yucatan with his travel group. Will's photographs of the Mayan
pyramids and the jungle foliage were printed in the school newspaper
that fall and still remain among his favorites. "I certainly
earned some of those pictures... one time I ran down one pyramid
and climbed all the way to the top of another just to get a portrait
of my travel group on top of the first one."
Photography
was still just a hobby for Will until he went to Boston University
and started working for the school newspaper, The Daily Free Press.
It was the first time he worked in a darkroom (four years before
Photoshop 1.0 changed the world) and he just could not get enough.
At the time, he was a student of Aerospace Engineering and a member
of the Varsity crew team... what little time he had left in a
day, he spent photographing between classes and midnight hours
in the darkroom. The second semester of his Freshman year, he
enrolled in a Photojournalism class and his life began to change.
He saw everything through the eye of a lens, calculating light
readings, exposure settings and depth of field in his head for
fun.
By the end
of his Sophomore year in Engineering, Will had taken twenty credits
of photography classes and knew he was in the wrong school. He
continued with Engineering for one more semester while he figured
out exactly what he wanted.
Leaving Engineering
meant losing the financial and emotional support of his family,
so Will had to take a year and half away from school to figure
out how to make it work. He traveled for a summer, driving across
country with friends and photographing every national park in
the West and returned to Boston in the fall. His writing and photography
skills were strong enough to earn him a position in the B.U. Publications
Department where he worked as an Editorial Assistant and Photographer
for the University course catalogs and other publications. Many
of his black and white photographs still appear in B.U.'s catalogs
over twelve years later, as he left copies in the archives.
Will did not
earn credits for working for B.U., but he earned tuition credit
to be applied towards classes. A year later, Will had enough tuition
to re-enroll in B.U. with a major of Broadcasting and Film. He
continued to work full time for the University while taking summer
courses and twenty credits in the fall. All told, Will graduated
from B.U. in three and one half years of enrollment.
Will's academic
advisors and even his parents all thought he was crazy and didn't
believe he could build such a curriculum, nor did they know what
he planned to do with it all. Five years after he graduated, Boston
University began to offer a Multimedia Development curriculum
which mimics Will's personal adventure through college, with strong
emphasis on computer science, creative writing and photography
and video production. He was a bit ahead of his time. And still
is.
As a graduation
present, a friend gave Will Photoshop 1.0 for the Mac. He had
a Mac Plus with an extra floppy drive and no hard drive and used
Photoshop to manipulate some of his earlier photographs. The first
time he launched the program, he knew the world was about to change.
Since College,
Will has never lost his passion for Photography and has worked
professionally as still photographer, videographer and motion
picture camera operator on a variety of projects. Will has photographed
countless musicians for press kits, album covers and promotional
materials; he has videotaped entire music conferences of famous
and independent artists, as well as photographing models and countless
landscapes.
Visit Will's
Photography Portfolio for samples of his work.
