Photography: Italy Trip, Part 2

Some more photos from my Italian trip.

 Angera Castle

 Villa Taranto Botanic Gardens

Photography: Northern Ireland, Day 1

Some pictures from my Northern Ireland trip a couple of years ago.   Once again, using HDR to pretend the light was interesting.   the first couple are of these are Belfast, and the rest were taken in Portstewart, a tiny town on the Causeway Coast.   Enjoy!

Photography: Rome, Day 6

The 6th and final day of my Roman Holiday included going round St. Peter's and the Castel Sant'Angelo.   The latter is a fascinating building.   It was built as the emperor Hadrien's mausoleum, but was later turned into a fortress!   How odd.   Anyway, here are my favorite photos from the day:

 View of Castel Sant'Angelo from the top of St. Peter's

View of Piazza San Pietro from the top of St. Peter's

 

   Tricolore by Castel Sant'Angelo

Photography: Rome, Day 5

Day 5 of our Rome trip included a trip to Villa Borghese (lovely art gallery) and an evening trip to the Vatican.   My favorite photo of the day was an HDR photo of a statue of a statue at the temple of Asclepius in the gardens of Villa Borghese.   There's a lovely golden quality to the light.   It looks like somewhere straight out a myth.  

  

Photography: Rome, Day 4

The fourth day of our Rome trip took us back to the Palatine Hill for a proper look round there, and to the forum, and to the Pantheon as well.   The two photos I liked best from the day weren't really of any of those things.   I really liked one HDR photo over the roofs of Rome.   The normal version looked pretty mundane, but the HDR version really brought the scene to life.   You can see a little bit of the forum in the foreground, but the focus is on the rooftops.   The other is a photo of the Colosseum from a different angle.   I really like the warmth of it.   It looks almost autumnal.

   

Photography: Roma Night Photos

Taking night photos in Rome was my first attempt at HDR night photos.  I really like the effect.   The way you can have a lot more stuff correctly exposed with HDR is really accentuated with night photos.   They look really bright and vibrant.  I'll definitely be doing this again.  

 The Typewriter by night.   The blue streaks were caused by a police car passing in front of it.   The flashing of the light makes interruptions in the streak.  Pretty!

 And again.   Photomatix has a default setting that removes "ghosts", or parts of the photo that appear in one exposure, but not the rest.   This is very useful for automatically removing things like passers-by that wander in front of the camera and traffic and objects moving in the wind.   By turning this setting off I got a lot more streaks of light from passing cars than I otherwise would have.

Fontana di Trevi.   A very famous fountain in Rome.   It's surrounded by tourists day and night.   If you throw a coin in over your shoulder with your back to it it's meant to mean that you'll come back to Rome someday.

Photography: Rome, Day 3

The photos from the third day of my Rome trip are also from Tivoli.   This time I went to Villa d'Este, a big renaissance villa.   The house itself is pretty forgettable, but the gardens are amazing!   There are stupid numbers of water features.  It's absolutely gorgeous.   Well-worth a visit!   Again, most of the are HDR, but the last two are just ordinary photos.

Photography: Rome, Day 2

There's a town outside Rome called Tivoli, and it's well-worth going there for two or three days if you're in the area.   Getting there on Italian public transport was...interesting, but we made it, and spent a happy day going round Hadrien's Villa.   It was his summer palace, and was a shrine to decadence.   It's an absolutely enormous site, and does pretty much take a day to explore fully.   You'll find pools, baths, barracks, complete with mosaic floors, massive storehouses, Hadrien's private study, surrounded by his own moat, and his incredible outdoor banqueting area.   It's a fascinating place.   I'm very pleased with some of my photos from the day, but to honest, most of them aren't of the ruins themselves.  

 Poppies, poppies, poppies, poppies!

  This statue is part of the outdoor party area.   This pool would have been surrounded by columns and statues and the whole thing would have been draped with vines and candles.   At the far end you can see a covered area where the feast itself would have taken place.  Can you see it?  The rich food, the wine, the musicians, the peace of a warm Italian summer night, the candles, the slaves, the Roman nobles in their togas and gold and the emperor Hadrien himself?

Photography: Roman Holiday, Day 1

I've decided to split up my Rome photos by day, seeing as there are so many of them.   Day 1 is mostly HDR, seeing as it was overcast and the light was bad.   The non-HDR photos just looked flat and uninteresting.   We went round the Colosseum and had a bit of a wander around the Palatine Hill as well.   Carrying my equipment round Rome all day for a week certainly took its toll on my shoulders, but I think the results were worth the pain.

 Colosseum, obviously.   I love how the HDR turned boring, grey, overcastness into fierce storm clouds.

Arch of Constantine as seen from the Colosseum.    Also love how the HDR turned mundane tourists-in-the-way to splashes of brilliant colour.

                                                                    Arch of Titus

                                                Colosseum seen from the Palatine Hill

                                                                 Arch of Constantine

 Vittorio Emmanuele monument.   AKA the typewriter.   Most Romans don't like it cos it's so pompous and self-indulgent.  I do though.   The marble glows white in the sunshine.   This was my best attempt to get it without traffic in the way.

      Poppies coming up between the paving slabs in the forum.   The only non-HDR photo from the day that I liked.   There were poppies absolutely everywhere.   It was beautiful.

France

So back in August I had a lovely holiday in France.   Being in the middle of nowhere the photo oppurtunities could have been really good but sadly the weather was not on my side.   It was lovely and warm, but often hazy as is so often the case in the height of summer.   Still, I got a few good shots out of it.   Here are a few favorites:

                                                          

                                                                French countryside

                                                                   Thistle Macro

                                                 And a couple of night sky pictures


I took advantage of being in the middle of nowhere to take a few night shots.   Obviously for photos like this a tripod is a necessity and not an optional extra.   A remote release is good too, to minimise camera shake.  Seeing as stars move, it's possible to use a long exposure and capture their paths across the sky.   The above photo had an exposure of about 15 minutes.   For a stationary night sky shot it's a bit of a fine balance between freezing the stars and getting them to look bright.   I find that as long as the stars are frozen you can brighten them up a fair amount in photoshop afterwards.  The biggest problem with getting shots like these (especially with an older camera like mine) is noise.   Long exposures mean that the sensor heats up and you get hot pixels.   There are also problems with night pollution creeping in, hence the rather drastic crops of both these photos.   Still, overall I'm pretty happy with both of them.   :)