Photographing in St Mark's Square, Venice can be quite a challenge, as I found out one evening in August as Liz and I were enjoying a cruise stopover in that wonderful city.
One of the reasons that we chose that particular P&O cruise was the overnight stop in Venice, and I was determined to make the most of the opportunity to photograph some of iconic views that had so beguiled me from the webpages of my favourite photographers.
To that end I carried my entire camera kit, plus tripod, around Venice, not wanting to miss any given opportunity for lack of equipment.
However, when the time came to actually take photographs, in that perfect time when the artificial lights of the Square were balanced by the remaining twilight, I found I had two problems to overcome.
The first was the hordes of tourists milling around doing what tourists do, taking photos of large places in the dark handheld with tiny flashes going off - why bother?
To overcome that problem i set my camera up on my tripod and dialled in a long exposure to reduce said tourists to ghost images, or get rid of the faster moving ones altogether. That worked pretty well, but I noticed that my fully extended tripod had another beneficial effect in that people would take one look at it and give me a very wide berth, ushering each other out of the way. I don't know why a tripod should garner such respect, but I'm glad it did. Has anyone else seen this effect?
So, tourist problem solved. My next problem was distortion. I'd dearly love a PC (perspective control, not politically correct) lens so I can correct distortions in camera, but I haven't got one yet, so I was forced by the composition I wanted to point my 17-40mm zoom (at 19mm) upwards. Oh dear. I immediately entered a Dali-esque world of bendy lines and seriously converging verticals as lens distortion took serious hold.
Oh well, I knew if I wanted to correct those verticals in PhotoShop I'd need some serious warping, and so it proved to be.
My usual method for correcting distortions is the lens correction filter, but this image was so far gone that I had to use the warp tool instead, having doubled the canvas size first so I didn't have to crop too much of the image away.
The warp tool did a suprisingly good job, but I'm still hankering after that PC lens!
Filename - venice night 03.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 17-40mm zoom @ 19mm
Exposure - 8secs @ 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.
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