Photographer Valerio Minato’s spectacular shot of an Italian basilica, the moon, and the mountains in perfect alignment required precision planning. By coming up with a new and innovative, attention-grabbing visual, the photographer not only offers a whole new perspective on a city landmark, but his work also immortalizes the beloved Italian basilica at a moment of intense beauty.
Titled “Cathedral, Mountain, Moon,” the image showcases the Basilica of Superga in Turin, the capital city of Piedmont in Northern Italy, with Monviso mountain in the background. The cherry on the cake is the setting moon, photographed using long exposure to capture the night side of the moon illuminated by earthlight, visible next to the shining crescent.
Six years ago, Mr. Minato, 42, became captivated by the idea of creating the masterpiece photo when he realized the triple alignment occurred. The following years saw him trying repeatedly to get the exact right conditions to produce the dream shot, but he was thwarted time and time again.
“In 2017, I started marking on my calendar the dates when the moon was going to set in the right phase, with the extremely precise angle,” Mr. Minato told The Epoch Times. To achieve the desired result, his calculation had to be exact to within a tenth of a degree. Being even the tiniest bit out—a hair to the left or right—would have resulted in failure.
From 2017, the dogged Italian photographer endured multiple flawed attempts—until the night of December 15, 2023. Yet again, he found himself between the municipalities of Castagneto Po and San Raffaele Cimena in the city of Turin, with the Gothic-Romanesque abbey in sight. Armed with a Canon R5 and telephoto lens, Mr. Minato would, at long last, get the magical image he’d waited so long for.
The satisfaction he felt was immense.
Watch the behind-the-scenes video:
For Mr. Minato, who bought his first camera “for fun” in 2012 and went on to become a professional photographer, his picture is loaded with a sense of hard work, patience, and never giving up.
“I use it a little bit as a weapon in my defense,” he said, adding that in this particular shot, nothing is magnified. Using a long focal length lens doesn’t change any of the proportions but simply allows him to capture little details in a very small space of sky.
In “Cathedral, Mountain, Moon,” the moon appears enormous due to the distance between the photographed subjects.
“The farther you can move away from the subject, in this case the Basilica of Superga, the more it makes the apparent size of the moon seem larger. But the moon is actually always the same size, while it is the earthly subject—the Basilica—that shrinks as you move away,” he said.
Post-production entails making slight adjustments to shadow and light, but everything else, dimensions and ratios, is entirely natural.
A self-taught photographer, Mr. Minato, is a chemistry graduate who worked in textile chemistry at the very start of his career but quickly realized it wasn’t for him. Originally from the Piedmont province of Biella, at 24 he moved to Turin to study forestry and environmental sciences; completely changing course. In the end, Mr. Minato decided not to work as a forestry and environmental scientist after all because he fell on photography instead.
Here are some of his favorite photos:
