Carrara’s marble quarries

Posted on Apr 15, 2016

These photos published in this article, unfortunately, arrived with the sad news of the accident yesterday occurred right in the same place I visited just over a week ago in Massa Carrara’s marble quarries.

In the accident that happened, a wall of marble came off sweeping two workers. At the moment the workers are still missing under the rubble. We pray in god that some good news could arrive…
[Update on 15/4/16: unlucky the sad news that we didn’t want to hear has arrived. The fireman found the bodies lifeless under the stones]

This sad news even more stress on the difficulty and the danger of hard work such as the extraction of marble from the quarries. The Carrara’s Marble makes us famous worldwide. Is in fact used as a decorative feature in many floors of luxurious villas and as a material for sculpture as well (among countless works, we can just remember the famous David by Michelangelo, whose piece of marble comes from these quarries).

To visit the marble quarries in Carrara you must go accompanied by authorized persons and experts of the area: the streets in the quarries are in fact inaccessible and are not suitable for normal cars. In order to move in these areas, you must use a Jeep and need to know very well what are the roads and the difficulties that may arise.

Our tour in the quarries was carried out with our guide Graziano (here link of the site of tours) which has guided us with his Jeep through the streets of the slots making us explore the workplace and the panoramic views from the top.

Having chosen a day as Saturday as a day for the tour, we found the place absolutely empty from workers and therefore was a quiet environment to be photographed without the presence of man.

Technically speaking, I used the new Fuji X-Pro 2. It was the first official photography work I’ve been taken with it outside of the studio. It has been also a good moment to begin using the Fujinon 10-24mm which, thanks to the wide angle of view, it allowed me to take the scenic parts of the quarries.

2 Comments
  • Alireza
    Posted at 23:22h, 07 May Reply

    hi,

    Fantastic photos as all of ur others are,
    your work really inspires me,
    could you tell me if this pics are straight out of x-pro2 or been made out of raw?
    if from raw what changes you did to the picture?
    regards

    • Alessandro Michelazzi
      Posted at 16:55h, 08 May Reply

      Ciao Alireza and thank you for your comment and nice words about the photos.
      The photos has been capture in .raw since I like to have some control over the postproduction in Lightroom. I love the fact that now, especially with the X-Pro2 the color profile in Lightroom match almost perfectly the colors of the .jpg produced in camera. Then usually I just modify the white balance (I love a bit colder, but strong colors) and enhance the contrast with slight tone curve. That’s it! 🙂

Post A Comment