Life through a lens

Finally, today I had some time to dedicate to photography, so I picked up my D-SRL camera and went to Venice. The weather was not of the best, but it was good enough to let me take a lot of photos. Unfortunately I had only 4 hours, so I didn't walk all over the city but only in famous places like Rialto and San Marco. The purpose of this photo-walk was that of improve my composition technique together with obtaining the right exposure in different light conditions. The white clouds didn't help me in this, so I had to compensate the under exoposure of the on-board metering system, over exposing of about one stop. However, sometimes, the over exposure produced washed out highlights. Anyway, here are some of the best results of today. Let us comment the single shots.

These are only four of the many shots I have taken, so stay tuned on my Flickr page for further updates. Note that I've also created two HDR versions of Canal Grande, seen from Rialto. When I finish the producing work, I put them online.

Let me know what do you think about these photos, thank you.

In these days I have no time to improve my photographic technique, but I'm experimenting black and white (hereafter B&W) photography. I have to admit that I prefer colored pictures, but actually even B&W could be funny.

Indeed, as in colored photos, even with B&W you have to take enough time in the digital darkroom. Obviously, the parameters you have to modify are less than the previous cases, but you still obtain nice results.

Here I post two photos (larger versions can be found by clicking on the thumbnails, re-directing you to relative Flickr pages) that have been corrected in some parts with different editing programs.

In the first photo there is something like a barbed wire on a blurred fields and hills background. At the moment of the shot, the problem I had in mind was that of highlighting the wire but, at the same time, not to loose too many details of the background. There was another problem: it has just started to rain and I had not the time to adjust properly the settings of my camera. So I shot in "P" program (something like a semi-authomatic mode) in JPEG with only the B&W setting selected. The result is amazing: the wire is visible and you still can distinguish the background (I mean: you see the blurred hills and fileds, but that's enough to contextualise the wire). At home, I imported that picture in Apple's iPhoto and adjusted it working on sharpness, color tone, contrast and levels. The result is this.

I hope you like those first attempts in taking B&W photos. Let me know what you think about that.