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This is the visually stunning St Mark's Square in Venice, Italy, and my wife Liz and I were privileged to be able to spend a day and an evening here as part of a cruise around the Mediterranean.
Knowing we had an evening here, and having seen other beautiful shots of this place on the web, I made sure I was toting my tripod and full camera bag to make the most of the opportunity.
When photographing artificially lit buildings at dusk, there's about a 15 minute window of opportunity when the light balance between the cool blue sky and the warmly lit buildings is roughly even, and you can capture the buildings without the lights burning out, while still retaining some colour detail in the sky.
Obviously, you don't want to turn up just at this perfect moment and have to start looking for a composition, setting up your camera and so on, because by the time you've done all that the light will have gone. So I had spent the previous half hour walking the square, trying different angles until I finally came up with this view of the famous clock tower, framed in one of the arches of the Doge's Palace just on the opposite side of the square.
A low viewpoint and wide angle lens gave me the composition I needed, now the next issue to deal with was the hundreds of tourists milling around confusing my foreground.
In order to reduce the moving tourists to ghost images, or to get rid of them alltogether, required a long exposure. Fortunately the light levels were low enough by now to allow me a 15 second shutter speed which did the job nicely, just leaving a few ghost impressions causes by particulary slow moving pedestrians. Nice.
My final issue with getting this shot was the brightly lit market stalls dotted around the square, one of which ended up right at the base of the clock tower in my chosen arrangement.
Nothing I could do about that at the time of shooting the photo, and I pondered whether or not to clone it out, but in the end I decided to leave it in as it was a valid part of the St Mark's Square 'experience', and adds a wee bit of extra interest in that part of the image.
All in all, a great evening's experience, both from the point of view of just being there, and being able to make what for me was a very pleasing image.
Filename - venice night 01.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 17-40mm zoom @ 19mm
Exposure - 15secs @ f16, ISO100
Location - Venice, Italy
This image - 640x800px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - Tripod, mirror lockup and cable release used to prevent camera movement.
All content copyright © Howard Litherland 2009-2024 unless otherwise stated.