Alessio Albi, a 29-year-old photographer based in Italy, is known for his conceptual portraiture and refreshing use of environments, and with over 250,000 followers on Instagram, his work certainly strikes a chord across the board. But Albi isn’t a professionally working photographer—he’s a nutritionist by day, with a burning passion for the medium after hours.

Albi considers this shot a self portrait, “even if I don’t appear at all in the photo,” he says. “The hands holding the mirror are of a friend of mine, and I don’t appear in the image because I shot it from below, taking advantage of the inclination of the mirror. For this reason, the shot was pretty difficult to get, as even a little movement would have made me appear in the reflection. To make it more complicated, the weather was very windy—we were shooting on top of a mountain.” A steady hand and focused mind helped him pull it all together.

(Shot on an old Nikon D600 and 24-85mm lens at 24mm, f/8 and 1/160th of a second.)

Check out more Photos of the Day, and email [email protected] for submissions.