As I was coming down the stairs from the pedestrian overpass connecting the Garbatella Metro station with the other side of the railroad tracks, I saw this scene. This is actually about repetition, in a way: a repetition of one.
There’s one lamppost, one van, one A/C unit, and one yellow wall. A series of solitudes.
Just a one-off today – a single leaf that had turned brown and fallen on the black cobblestones outside the Centrale Montemartini museum.
In travel, you make plans, and if you’re smart, you have either backup plans or you’re open to serendipity. I do a bit of both.
I had wanted to go see the Museo Centrale Montemartini, which is a collection of overflow ancient sculptures from the collections of the Capitoline Museums in downtown Rome, housed in a former power generation plant along the Tiber river. I had figured I’d go there on Monday, since most museums are closed on Monday, but the Capitoline Museums are open on Mondays. Well… long story short, Centrale Montemartini may be part of the Capitoline Museum group, but since it’s three subway stops out of downtown, it’s not like the ones on the hill overlooking the Forum, and it DOES close on Mondays. So I found myself in semi-suburban Rome looking at a closed museum, camera in hand. What’s a girl to do when faced with a loaded camera and a closed museum? Photograph the first fallen leaf of fall on some artfully laid cobblestone blocks in the museum driveway (and get honked at by a scooter driver for blocking the two and a half lane wide driveway). It also gave me time to shoot the bridge you saw in a previous post.
The Colosseum is truly one of the marvels of ancient Rome. A building that could seat somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 (the higher number comes from an ancient source – modern estimates are lower) but evacuate them all in just minutes, hosted mock sea battles, and was designed and constructed without the use of decimals or precision measurement systems.
There is an ongoing project to restore and stabilize the outer wall of the Colosseum. To that end, they’ve wrapped parts of the exterior in scaffolding to assist in the work.
Viewed from a different angle, the scaffold takes on the appearance of a modern skyscraper.
I spotted this bit of graffiti on a wall outside the entrance to the Colosseo Metro station.
A simple shot of the Colosseum exterior wall in a section not undergoing stabilization work.
You’ll notice I have no shots of the interior of the Colosseum. I did not make it inside. Traveler’s tip – if you want to see it without booking a tour, you need to buy a timed entry ticket, which you can get from the ticket booth at the entrance to the Forum. Get the ticket from the Forum (it lets you in to both the Forum and the Colosseum) instead of trying to get it directly from the Colosseum. Why? Because the line to get in, EVEN if you have the RomaPass card, is about 2-3 hours long.
There will be lots of touts outside the Colosseum offering tours that will let you skip the line to get inside. Most of these will have the sole value of letting you skip the line – the guides are of varying and often poor quality. You’re better off pre-booking your tour in advance through an agency with online reviews that you can tell how good a program they offer. The advantage of a pre-booked tour is that the tour guides will be able to take you in to parts of the Colosseum you can’t enter if you just go in yourself.
You’ll find public drinking fountains all over Rome. It’s one of the charming features of the city. Unlike fountains in some cities, they run continuously. You can fill a cup or a kettle from the spigot, or if you just want a sip, you can put your finger under the water spout to block it and water will squirt up from a small hole in the top of the pipe so you don’t have to hang upside down to get your water fix.
That’s a try-at-your-own-risk activity though – if the water pressure on the spout you’re blocking is good, it comes out the little hole with quite some velocity – I tried it on this fountain and got a thorough squirting in the face. Given the heat of the day it was a welcome squirt, but not expected.
I don’t know how old the trough under the spigot is, but it appears to be of the late Imperial era. It may have always been a water trough, or it may have been a sarcophagus – it’s the right size for it. But probably only in Rome will you be able to drink your water in a 1700 year old water fountain.
A detail of the carvings on the fountain.
Italy isn’t all about ancient structures – while there are historical and architectural marvels aplenty in the center of the city of Rome, modern architecture happens too. At the Garbatella Metro station, this enormous viaduct that carries a four lane road over the railway tracks soars into the sky like a giant DNA strand or a dinosaur skeleton bleached white in the sun.
Everything about this bridge was designed with an artistic conceit, even the railings that surround the suspension cable anchor points – they undulate like the bridge form itself, like a ribbon or a snake winding its way between the cables.
Even the safety barrier between the lanes on the roadway has been thoughtfully designed from an aesthetic as well as functional perspective.
From my trip to the Mercato Centrale in Florence. It’s challenging shooting in someplace like the Mercato Centrale because it’s very crowded, and the lighting is generally miserable- overhead fluorescents mixed with neon mixed with halogen and now mixed with LED spots. One of the things that helps pull it together is a great film – Kodak Portra 800 to be specific. It’s very fine-grained for a film that fast, and it, like the other films in the Portra family, does an incredible job of handling mixed lighting sources. No special filtration was used to color-correct these images.
Here begins my Italian saga. I got back less than a week ago from my Italian excursion, having spent 12 days in Florence and Rome. I posted an odd and end from my phone while on the road, but now that I’m home I’m working my way through the 79 (yes, 79!) rolls of film I shot. I’ve got 16 processed so far, and will try to develop some more after work during the week so I don’t have to totally binge on the weekends.
If you’ve been following the blog, shortly before I went away I got a Lomo Belair X/6-12 panoramic camera. I posted a few shots I took with the 58mm super-wide lens, and that lens is, well, marginal at best. Very soft, very low-contrast, and horrendous barrel distortion. Not the kind of lens I would want to shoot a lot of architecture with, and that’s what I’d be shooting a lot of in Italy. I brought it with me just in case, but kept the 90mm lens on the camera and ended up shooting exclusively with that.
This is the courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti, as seen from the Boboli gardens behind it. As you can see from this shot, the 90 is sharper than the 58, but still not up to the standards of a glass lens (the 58 and the 90 are both plastic).
The 90 is better, but better is a relative term. Certainly, I wouldn’t have been able to take these shots without the camera, and I genuinely like them, but they’re not what I normally think of when I think of my style of photograph. If I’m going to stick with the camera, it’ll be a mental adjustment to apply the tool to tasks appropriate to it. It’s very good at transforming the time of day of a shot- while this is titled “Ponte Vecchio Evening”, it was actually shot around 10AM.
This has also been a lesson for me in making peace with cropping. I’ve been for the most part a full-frame kind of guy – I try to compose to the edges of my frame so everything shows the way I want it to and I don’t need to crop. But sometimes, the best of intentions when composing in the heat of the action don’t always work, and you learn to crop after the fact. This shot, for example. In the original full frame, the obelisk was dead center in the frame. I think at the time I pushed the shutter button I thought the little girl was out of the picture, but there she was. On the left, the edge of the fountain in front of the obelisk was intruding into the scene. Looking at the image actually captured, all the action in the scene included the little girl playing off against the obelisk, and the edge of the fountain was a real distraction. Cropping to get rid of the fountain completely changed the dynamic and makes the image go from being a record shot to something actually interesting.
This is the facade of the Palazzo Pitti, originally home to the Medici family, later a residence for Napoleon Bonaparte, then the administrative center of the Italian government for the first few years after unification, and now an art museum. The shutter has a maximum speed of 1/125th of a second, which is fairly slow all things considered. I don’t know how fast an exposure this was – the camera doesn’t tell you what speed it is using – so I’m guessing somewhere in the 1/60th range given the amount of movement in the cyclist. That’s another thing you have to make peace with with this camera – unpredictability. I don’t know that I’m there yet. I’ve got about 12 more rolls of film from this camera to process in my black-and-white film, so we’ll see how I feel after getting through those.
Sometimes the panoramic composition works phenomenally, like this one of St. Peter’s Basilica as seen from inside an arch on the Castel Sant’Angelo.
Other times, the panorama gives you compositional challenges that provide serendipitous solutions to themselves, like shooting the bridge in front of the Castel Sant’Angelo. The landscape around the bridge provides an S shape through the composition that leads your eye around and through the entire scene, not just pulling you from lower right to upper left and shooing you out of the frame at the end.
Another argument in favor of cropping – the original of this included the heads of the patrons of the Castel Sant’Angelo cafe (yes, they have a cafe in the battlements of the Castel Sant’Angelo, which began life almost 2000 years ago as the burial monument to the Roman Emperor Hadrian).
I recently acquired a Lomo Belair X 6-12 City Slicker model. It comes with a 58mm and a 90mm lens and the matching viewfinders. The camera is a weird beast, sort of a neither-fish-nor-fowl thing, in that it has multiple film formats (it has masks for 6×6, 6×9 and 6×12 frames), interchangeable lenses (58 and 90mm plastic lenses, and an optional accessory 112mm all glass lens), auto-exposure in aperture-preferred mode, and a hot-shoe flash. However, it is manual film advance completely separate from shutter cocking, there are only two apertures on each lens (f8 and f16), the only sort-of control you have over the shutter is to set the film speed and/or set it to B for long-time exposures), the shutter has a maximum speed of 1/125th of a second, and focusing is zone focusing with indicator marks on the lens for infinity, 3 meters, 1.5 meters, and 1 meter. Oh, and there’s no cable release provision so you have to be extra careful when using B that you don’t shake the camera. The 58mm lens, especially at the 6×12 configuration, is very lo-fi and has gobs of obvious barrel distortion. However, where else are you going to find a 6×12 panoramic camera with a 58mm lens on it with auto-exposure for $250? Your next cheapest option is to put a 6×12 back on a press camera, which is going to run you at least a cool grand to put together. Even a 6×12 back on the new-but-still-effectively-vaporware Travelwide, plus a 65mm lens will run you a good $700-800.
I put a couple rolls through it to test it out last week and weekend. It is wicked wide with the 58, and sharp enough in the center. My example tends to run a bit to the overexposure side, which I think accentuates some of the weaker characteristics of the lens (like the low contrast from the plastic optics), although I’d rather have it overexpose than underexpose. One thing I haven’t figured out yet is if any of the lenses including the glass lens will accept filters. I’d love to try out the camera with a roll of Infrared and see what it does. It could be a great combination, or it could suck dirty dog toes. This spring, I’ll give it a try and find out.
This shot is of my student Todd Walderman from my Intro to Platinum/Palladium Printing class, and his new puppy, Cookie.
The Glen Echo Park sign, backlit at evening time. This shot as much as anything shows the amount of barrel distortion the 50mm lens has. Used appropriately it can really add to an image. But don’t use it to take pictures of things that need to be plumb and square, because they’ll look terrible. Knowing when to use it and when not is an art form in itself.
The Glen Echo carousel.
That weekend, they were having an end-of-summer-season festival at Glen Echo, which included a mini antique car show and the final running of the carousel for the year. Among the honored guests was this vintage Ferrari:
In keeping with the spirit, sort-of anyway, of the whole Lomography lo-fi movement, I was running 10+ year out-of-date Ilford FP4+ through the camera. I don’t think it really made a difference, though, as you’ve seen shots I’ve taken this year using the exact same film through my Rollei, and if I hadn’t told you it was 10 years out of date you’d never know.
This was the sunrise that greeted me this morning. What a beautiful way to start the day.
Canon EOS 5D Mk.1, 24-105 L @ 50mm.
The things you don’t see until you look. I have only ever passed this fountain in the daytime and had no idea it was so beautiful at night.
Just another little snippet of my neighborhood in Washington DC: the Satellite Room, a small bar/club on the back side of the 9:30 Club.
You can see behind it the massive structure of the Atlantic Plumbing building, which will house a new outpost of the Landmark Theaters chain in addition to residential condos. Landmark Theaters specialize in independent, foreign and classic films, and this will be their third location in DC itself, with an additional location in Bethesda and one in Baltimore. Just another sign of the massive gentrification of the area – ten years ago it was a rare-for-DC industrial area with a few bombed-out row houses scattered between. Now it’s high-end theaters with bar service and million-dollar condos.
Clubs like the 9:30, the Satellite Room and Town helped pioneer the neighborhood making it desirable as a location to visit. With the more recent addition of Nellie’s (just across the street on 9th where U Street turns back into Florida Avenue)
and The Brixton, even the former dive bars have been cleaning up their acts and getting wine lists and 18 year old Scotch.
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