St Mark's Square, Venice, at night

Venice at night #4

The story behind this image

Wandering round St Mark's Square in Venice as night falls is a surreal experience.

On the one hand you've got this ancient and stunningly beautiful architecture, tastefully lit in a way that's a real visual treat. On the other hand there's this huge advertising banner (this wasn't the only one) draped over a whole building frontage.

I can only imagine it's covering up some major renovation work, and I wonder how much the advertisers paid to put it there - quite a sum I would imagine.

And what about those strange blue light trails, seemingly completely at odds with the warm lights on the buildings?

Well St Mark's Square was packed with trinket vendors of all sorts, and the toy of the day seemed to be these little paper helicopters that were launched into the sky with a catapult, auto-rotating as they descended. The clever thing was that they were fitted with blue LED lights which showed up very vividly during the 20 second long exposure I made of this scene.

If I was a 'proper' travel photographer, trying to get an image of St Mark's Square for Conde Nast or some such I would have given up in disgust by now. But I'm not, and instead of despairing at these distractions I enjoyed the curious juxtapositions of ancient and modern, of refinement and brashness and of cool and warm light that were before my eyes and camera lens that evening.

Image data

Filename - venice night 04.jpg

Camera - Canon 5D

Lens - 17-40mm zoom @ 35mm

Exposure - 20secs @ f16, ISO100

Location - Venice, Italy

This image - 800x400px JPEG

Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2

Comments - Tripod, mirror lockup and cable release used to prevent camera movement.