Tag Archives: Italy

Architecture, Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Travel

The Colosseum, Rome

November 3, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

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.

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Photography, Travel

Mercato Centrale, Firenze

October 27, 2015 dcphotoartist 1 Comment

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.

Cameras, Color, Medium Format Cameras, Panoramics, Photography, Travel

Italian Panoramics

October 26, 2015 dcphotoartist Leave a comment

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).

Albumen Prints, Chambersburg, Military, Occupationals, Other People's Work

19th Century Travelogue in CDVs

March 28, 2012 dcphotoartist 1 Comment

Ok- I managed to succumb to indiscretion and bought the rest of the “C.R.” cartes-de-visite. If you’re new to my blog, I posted earlier about this set of cartes-de-visite a “C.R.” purchased and collected during what I assume was his (not hers) journeys across Europe during and after the US Civil War. It’s a fascinating travelogue spanning three countries and twenty-one years. Two of the images in this second set are in fact photo reproductions of sketches. Given the dates and locations of the earliest ones in the set, one can’t help but wonder if “C.R.” was a Union or Confederate supporter, perhaps even a Confederate agent sent to the U.K. to try and purchase arms and ships for the Confederacy. Or was “C.R.” just a Northern businessperson whose work frequently took him to England, Scotland, France, Italy and Germany (there were one or two more in the set that I was unable to acquire that showed German churches) and had a soft spot for ecclesiastical architecture?

The oldest one in the complete set of nine CDVs dates from July 1864, and the last one is May 1885. Here’s the complete set, in chronological order.

AllowayKirk, Ayr, Scotland, July 16, 1864

Palazzo Diamantini, Ferrara, December 29, 1864

Church of St. Michael, Dijon, France, November 1867

Villa Pallavicini, Genoa, November 25, 1867

Interior of La Nunziata, Genova, November 25, 1867

The Cathedral of Rouen, France, May 31, 1885

CDVs, Collecting, Photography, Travel

Antique Affinity

February 19, 2012 dcphotoartist 5 Comments

Trolling around on eBay (something I do WAY too much of), I came across this group of CDVs. They represent a form of travelogue by an American in the 1860s, bopping around Europe during and after the Civil War. How do I know he (assuming the gender here) was an American? The way he writes the dates – July 16, 1864 – is the Yankee way of writing dates – had it been a European, the date would have been 16 July 1864. I felt compelled to buy them because not only did I feel an affinity for this person’s being an American in foreign countries, but I had been to several of the same places. There were more images that I could have bought, but good fiscal sense called me back from the brink and I chose only those images from places I had been to (or at least near).

In chronological order-

I love how C.R. (the collector of these images) wrote his notes on the back – the haunted church with the pews that had the wood reclaimed to sell as souvenirs. I’ve not been to Scotland yet, but when I was a teenager, I spent a month with my parents living in London, and we took an extended driving trip through Wales, so I’ve seen many a ruin like this on the side of a winding country road.

Palazzo Diamanti, Ferrara, December 29, 1864

Now we’re off to Italy, and the Palazzo Diamanti in Ferrara. I’ve not been to Ferrara myself yet, but I have been to Italy twice, and I loved the inclusion of people in the photo for scale, and for the fact that they’re pretty sharp and clear, something not easy to achieve when shooting wet plate collodion images of subjects who don’t know they need to sit still.

The world famous Cathedral of Pisa, from a less famous view. Most images of the Cathedral show it from the bell tower side. You can see the cathedral and the tower from the rail station at Pisa, where I changed trains en route from Genoa to Florence. C.R.’s note: ” ‘Cathedral and leaning tower’ at Pisa, with a small part of the Baptistery”.

A sight I missed out on in Genoa when I was there. The Villa Pallavicini is now home to the Archaeological Museum, and the gardens are open to the public as well. The scan on eBay did not do the image justice – the original card is in pristine condition, minus the pin-hole. The albumen print is incredibly sharp and clear, with minimal discoloration and foxing.

And here we come to the image that started my interest in this set – the “old” cathedral of Genoa. When I went to Genoa, I stayed with a friend of mine who lives all of six blocks from the cathedral, so it was a daily sight on our excursions. On this one, C.R. is rather terse, simply noting “Cathedral of Genoa”, his initials, and the year, 1868. This is another card in the group that is far better than the scan would suggest. Truly pristine.

The great and the sad thing about these cards is that they again provoke my personal wanderlust, and I’ve got a serious itch to hit the road to Italy again. And to Scotland for the first time, and to half a dozen other places! I’d love to bring one of my big cameras, say my 5×7 or the whole plate camera, and try and re-create these same images, or at the very least capture some very modern interpretations of the same scenes as they would be found today. NOT like the recent Annie Liebowitz show of her super-privileged travel photos of famous people’s homes (Freud’s office, Eleanor Roosevelt’s bedroom in ways you and I could NEVER photograph them).

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