Category: explanation

Tales from Venice #1

A Room Without a View

For our recent Venice holiday, instead of staying in a hotel, we booked an apartment for the 2 weeks we were there. After much searching on the Interwebs we decided we liked the look of Ca Rina in the Dorsoduro district. It was anything but bland, dull and boring like some modern apartments. We thought it would be fun, and it was.

Having had some experience with real estate photography I was expecting that the photos on the web site would turn out to have been very ‘flattering’ to the size of rooms. In fact I was expecting the bedroom to be a small shoebox with pillows.

We were very pleasantly surprised, not only was the room not as small as I expected, it was actually a little larger than the photo led us to believe. It still wasn’t a roomy room, but at least we could move about in it without bumping the walls, though walking past each other was a little tricky.

The whole apartment was decorated in rich colours with the best of the flamboyant flourishes saved for the bedroom. The photo doesn’t do justice to the richness of the colours with the deep reds and the gold trim.

And best of all was that cheeky little putto hanging above the pillows.

The Guardian Putto

One very odd thing about the bedroom had us puzzled, but it took a while to work out what it was. We eventually worked out what was bothering us. The bedroom was upstairs, but it wasn’t above the single downstairs room, the lounge room was. We never did find out what was under the bedroom. Heard the odd noise and an occasional waft of music, but never sighted anyone.

For the technically minded, the photos were hand-held at 1600 ISO.

Ghost Trees

This image is one of a number I took around Emu Flat, Victoria. I had been out in that area a few weeks before with Stuart Forsyth and between us we produced an interest range of images. I went back on my own to explore another road in the area.

A local real estate agent pointed me toward this hill with promises of interesting rocks and artistic trees. A number of other shots from this expedition are in this gallery at Ipernity.

I took most of the shots with a 20mm lens on the front of the Canon 5D. I love the effect this gives you when shooting from a low perspective with a good subject and a dramatic sky.

When processing this image, I decided I wanted a ‘ghostly’ look rather than a totally sharp image. I thought this suited the pale, dead trees. I use Adobe Camera RAW 4.6 for processing. To achieve the basic effect, I moved the Clarity slider to the left, instead of the right. The amount of ‘negative’ clarity depends on the image. With some images it works really well, with others, not so much.

In Photoshop, I used a layer to ‘paint’ some light onto the highlights of the rocks and the tree trunks and to darken the shadows on the rocks.