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Venice at night #5

Bridge of Sighs, Venice, at night

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The story behind this image

Liz and I had spent a fantastic, if a bit manic, evening in Venice and we were making our way along the waterfront from St Mark's Square to the water taxi station when we passed this view, looking up a side canal to the Bridge of Sighs.

This is one of those iconic views of Venice that appear in all the guide books, and I was in two minds whether or not to stop, set up all my camera gear (again), and take the same photo that I'd seen countless times before.

To add to my indecision, all light had now faded from the sky, which was a complete black. The bridge however, was floodlit and stood out in high contrast to the surrounding sky, walls and canal. A very tricky exposure situation.

In the end the good old protestant work ethic prevailed and I set to work re-assembling camera, tripod and so on, much to the amusement of Liz who seemed to be getting ridiculously good photos on her camera phone.

Still, if you want low noise tonal information then there's no contest, and a thirty second exposure in RAW at a low ISO gave me details in most parts of the image except the sky, being careful not to over expose the bridge.

Even when I took the photo I knew it would be a monochrome conversion, the sombre nature of the Bridge of Sighs kind of demanded that approach, so in post processing I concentrated on getting the tonalities right over the entire composition, rather than worry too much about colour integrity.

To that end I converted the RAW file three times, with -1ev, 0ev and +1ev exposure adjustments, saving the resulting files as 16 bit TIFFs. These were then loaded into Photomatix Pro, not for HDR conversion, but for simple exposure blending which I find gives a much more subtle result than the full blown HDR route. There's none of those annoying noise artifacts or halos you get with HDR either.

Having blended my TIFFs I set to work in PhotoShop to locally fine tune the tonalities of the shadow and highlight areas, and finished off with a monochrome conversion with a warm tone overlay.

In the end, I'm rather pleased with the result, which is a little different to the normal travel catalogue type photos of this scene that I'd seen previously.

It just goes to show that if in doubt, take the photo. You never know how your vision for that particular image may develop later on.

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Image data


Filename - venice night 05.jpg

Camera - Canon 5D

Lens - 17-40mm zoom @ 17mm

Exposure - 30secs @ f16, ISO200

Location - Venice, Italy

This image - 800x648px JPEG

Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2

Comments - Exposure blending used to accomodate tonal range.