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: 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.

Films

Time for a review of some of the films I've watched lately.   First up, Letter to Brezhnev.   It's a 1985 film about two young working class women on a night out who meet two Russian sailors.   One of them falls in love, and is determined to see her sailor again after he sails away.   But it's the middle of the Cold War, so she faces lots of obstacles to going to Russia to find him.   The movie ends with her getting on a plane to Russia.   I quite enjoyed this.   I liked the beginning with the two sassy young woman having fun and running wild in Liverpool.   I quite liked how the ending was uncertain, and not a smoochy happily ever after.   The middle was so horrifically cheesy though!   With the two young lovers banging on about stars and destiny.   Ugh.   And the stars looked awful too!   Bad special effects!   But if you don't watch the middle section it's an alright film.   A bit different.

Next, the 1933 black and white live action version of Alice of Wonderland.   I have to say this was almost as bizarre a trip as reading the original book.   Very very odd.   There was a surprising amount of content in it.   As well as using the whole Alice's Adventures in Wonderland "story", they also do Through the Looking Glass, and some other Lewis Carroll elements that had nothing to do with either book, like The Walrus and the Carpenter.   I wonder if this is where Disney got the idea to include it in their version as well.   There are quite a few famous people in this, like Cary Grant, W. C. Fields and Gary Cooper, though sadly none of their perfomances are really note worthy.   I was reasonably impressed by the actress of Alice though.   The special effects, such as Alice growing and shrinking are also pretty good for the time, and I think that on the whole the film captured the madness of Alice in Wonderland pretty well.

And finally, To Rome With Love.   It's another one of those films by Woody Allen set in a European city.   It also has Woody Allen himself in it.   It has several sets of characters and several stories, some in English and some in Italian.   There's a young American tourist who falls in love with an Italian, whose parents are meeting for the first time.   The bride's father (Woody Allen) discovers that the groom's father is an excellent opera singer and is determined to make him a star, however the groom's father and his family are very reluctant.   There's a young newly wed couple arriving in Rome for the first time.   The wife goes to get a haircut, gets lost, and has an adventure.   Meanwhile the husband gets sent a prostitute by mistake and has to spend the day pretending to his family that she's his wife.  The prostitute is played by Penelope Cruz, whose Italian is excellent.   Her performance impressed me.   Then Roberto Benigni plays a nobody who one day wakes up to find he's famous for no reason at all.   Everywhere he goes he has journalists following him and women throwing themselves at him.   At the end of the film everyone forgets about him overnight and his life goes back to normal.   There's no explanation at all given for any of this.   It's a nonsensical little story, but I really liked it.   Whimsical and silly.   And I love Roberto Benigni!   He's so funny.   The last story concerns an American couple studying in Rome.   A friend of the girlfriend's comes to stay and the boyfriend ends up having an affair with her.   In the end the friend leaves him and goes back to America for a film role.   She's played by Ellen Page and the boyfriend is played by Jesse Eisenberg.   Alec Baldwin also plays a role in this story, as a famous architect, the boyfriend's hero.   He spends the story looking over the boyfriend's shoulder and giving him advice.   But I have to say that it's not very clear about whether they ever did meet in real life or not, or whether the boyfriend just imagines him being there from the start.   Bit odd.   I really enjoyed the film though.   It's very funny, and seeing as I love Rome, it's really nice to see it on screen like that.   I thoroughly enjoyed Woody Allen's performance too.   The film is quirky and charming.   Recommended.