Not every trip with a camera in hand is for a client. This one was just me, my family, and a few days wandering Naples with the Nikon ZR.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DXtOxIAiE59

We covered a lot of ground: Spaccanapoli, the narrow, dead-straight street that cuts through the historic center like a blade and still feels like walking through two thousand years of the city’s history at once; the Quartieri Spagnoli, all narrow alleys, washing lines overhead and life spilling out of every open door; and the Lungomare, where the city finally opens up and the Bay of Naples takes over the frame. Few cities in Italy give you this much visual contrast in the space of a single afternoon dense, chaotic streets one moment, open sea views the next.

I brought three lenses for the trip: a Tamron 17-28mm for the tight streets, a Nikon 40mm for general walking-around shots, and a Sigma 85mm f/1.4 for anything that needed more compression or a shallower look. Everything was shot handheld, no gimbal, in 6K RAW at 25p on the Nikon ZR letting the camera’s own stabilization and the RAW file’s flexibility do the heavy lifting rather than adding rigging to a trip that was, first and foremost, about being present with my family.

The result did something I didn’t fully expect: it went properly viral on Instagram. On YouTube, I had to swap the music due to rights issues, and the same edit hasn’t picked up anywhere near the same traction there a reminder of just how different the two platforms behave, even with near-identical footage.