My second trip to Italy in 2004 was for 3 weeks to attend the US-Italy Joint Meeting on Climate Change Research & Technology in Venice, October 20-22, 2004, an Advanced Flux Measurement Workshop in Rome, and some additional test work on the Sky Arrow aircraft in Florence. Below are some of the pictures from the trip.
The picture on the left is a view of the Grand Canal in Venice from the Ponte dell Accademia looking to the East toward the Dogana, the large cathedral visible in the picture. The picture on the right was taken from the same Ponte (bridge), only looking toward the West. This is one of the classic views of Venice. Most of the days in Venice were cloudy and low overcast, making the picture-taking somewhat difficult due to the lack of good strong light to highlight a lot of the details. Contrast these pictures with the one below and to the right (of Piazza San Marco) where the lighting was much better.
The picture on the left was made about midnight one night. The picture of the Dogana was made from near Piazza San Marco. The clouds parted and revealed a few lights in the sky. Note the streaked boat running lights that resulted from the slow shutter speed (1 sec at ISO 1600) near the bottom left. The picture on the right is a view of Piazza San Marco on the last day I was in Venice when the clouds parted again and the lighting became nearly perfect to illuminate the extraordinary detail in the Piazza San Marco architecture.
These are two of my favorite images from Venice. The image on the left is a guitar player who obviously doing something he enjoyed! He was excellent and became visibly more animated as I started clicking pictures. The image on the right was seen plastered across a building face on the south side of the Grand Canal. Note the language in which the graffiti was written ensured the intended audience would be well aware of the locals' desires!
What would Venice be without gondolas and gondoliers? These two images were two of the best I took while on the trip. Notice the gondola in the image on the left is not actually built straight, but the keel is crooked. This is to allow the gondola to track straight in the water while the gondolier stands on one side and rows on the other. The gondoliers in the middle picture are waiting for business. While we were walking around, we stumbled on a mask shop (Ca' Macana Venezia) that had made the masks for the movie 'Eyes Wide Shut.' These are shown in the picture on the right.
Venice is a city built on and around water, so this picture of a private water taxi driver in Venice was hard to pass up. It was made early one morning with a zoom lens (105 mm) from one of the public water taxis as we cruised the Grand Canal. picture on the right if of an accordion player that I saw on a street corner in Florence. Like the guitar player in the picture above, he noticed me getting my camera ready to take his picture and immediately perked up and stared straight at the camera, which I try hard to avoid. The picture still turned out pretty well, I think.
Of course, I couldn't resist adding another picture of the Roman Forum. This one was made on a great day with good lighting and with a decent camera. The picture on the right is of two Sky Arrow aircraft that were used in the Advanced Course in Flux Measurement held in Rome. One aircraft is used for flux measurement (the one in the foreground with the turbulence probe on the nose) and the other is used for remote sensing.
Night photography is one of my favorite things, and this trip to Italy provided plenty of opportunities to exercise my skills. The picture on the left is of a statue of Caesar that I saw on the way to the Coliseum and Forum area while walking from the monument to Vittorio Emanuelle. The picture on the right is of a church that was made somewhere between Piazza de Spagna (Spanish Steps) and the Pantheon.
Photography Notes: All
images on this page were taken with a Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel camera at
maximum resolution (6.3 megapixels) with JPEG compression. All photos have been
shrunk to a reasonable resolution (approximately 640x480) for posting on the web.
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