Francesco Gola

I'm a seascape photographer, an educator and an engineer. I was born in Pavia in 1981 and grew up on the plain, about as far from the sea as you can get in northern Italy. Then a job sent me to the Ligurian coast. I barely knew anyone there, so every free hour went into walking the shore with a camera, and I fell in love with the sea, and later with its lighthouses.

A photo usually shows what a place looked like. I'm more interested in what it felt like. That's why I shoot long exposures: a fraction of a second never matches what I saw, but leave the shutter open for a minute and the sea turns into movement, mood, time. So I carry a tripod and a bag of filters everywhere, and a storm makes me happier than a sunny day.

My teachers are painters, William Turner and Ivan Aivazovsky, but I'm an engineer by training, and it shows: nature is always in charge, so most of the work happens before I leave home, and back home I move on to colour management and printing. For about ten years I've been teaching all of this, on the coast, online and on stage, and my prints have been exhibited around the world.