Built by a TV cameraman. Built for photographers.
I'm a cameraman. That's the job — over twenty-five years of it on TV productions — and it's what I am first, not a side note to something else. Photography came later, on my own time, and it's stayed exactly that: mine, separate, the thing I do because I want to, not because someone's paying me to.
I studied at the Institute of Cinematography and Television R. Rossellini in Rome, and started working as an assistant cameraman in 1998. Two years later I was shooting as a full cameraman — and I've been doing it ever since, on productions for major TV networks, in Italy and wherever the work took me. It's still what I do. It's still what I'd call myself first if you asked.
That's a longer stretch of my life than it sounds — twenty-five-plus years, and I'm 46 now. Call sheets, early mornings, other people's schedules. It teaches you things a photography course never would — how to read a room before it happens, how to get the shot in one take because there won't be a second one, how to see light the moment it's worth catching instead of a second after.
Photography started almost by accident — a camera in the bag between setups, on travel days, in the hour before a shoot when the light was doing something a TV crew doesn't have time to wait for. The job put me in places I'd never have chosen to visit on my own, and slowly the habit of carrying a second camera for myself turned into the thing I actually looked forward to.
I gravitated toward street photography and landscapes — the unposed moment on one hand, the wide, quiet shot that makes you stop scrolling on the other. Two very different disciplines, but the same instinct behind both: wait for the frame to be true, then take it.
I moved to Ireland in 2020. I'm still in the TV industry, still shooting street and landscape on my Nikon D7000 whenever the light and the schedule line up.
For years, my own Instagram never grew the way I thought the work deserved. It took me a long time to admit what the actual problem was — it wasn't the photos. I could compose and shoot a frame in seconds, on instinct — that's what two decades behind a TV camera does to your eye. Then I'd sit in front of an empty caption box for twenty minutes, or stall out completely trying to write three lines for a reel, and half the time I'd just... not post it. A finished shot, going nowhere, because the words never came as fast as the image did.
The gap wasn't talent and it wasn't effort. It was that writing and shooting are different muscles, and mine had only ever trained one of them. CAPTD is the tool I built to close that gap — first for myself, then for every other photographer who's better with a camera than with a keyboard.
Find me on Instagram: @marco_instapicture_rome
Not ready for a Content Pack yet? Try the free photography tools — calculators, sun/moon planners and shoot-prep utilities, no signup needed.