Trapped in Sesto San Giovanni by the flu, there was a chance to explore the town a little and as an experiment I have tried to produce a series of cinematically styles images of architecture and odd points of local colour.

Sesto is one of the satellite towns to Milan, named after the distance from here to the centre (6 Roman miles). Most of the construction here is 20th century, although much of the industry that was present early on has been or is being replaced with residential blocks. Like much of Italy, the population here has a curious mix of retirees, youth and a sizeable immigrant community. There are also a seemingly unprecedented number of Chinese massage parlours that are always open but which no one ever seems to go in to or out of.

The images were shot with a Canon DSLR and process and cropped to 12:5 format in Lightroom. The cropping is quite extreme and several photographs that I had wanted to include simply do not work when cropped in to this form. To produce a very flat style most of the images were shot from some distance using a telephoto lens and perspective correction was adjusted in Lightroom.

As a further experiment the images here are sourced from Flickr rather than uploaded directly, using the new embed codes. The new iframe code was used on the top image, and the URL edited manually to only select images from a specific set on Flickr. The remaining images were linked using the usual static HTML. One problem with doing this is that the embedded images have fixed widths that have to be manually edited if you want them to fill the WordPress page width.