This was one of those brief moments where a shot briefly appears before your eyes. The shape of the buildings, the people resting by the fountain, and the man in the bright yellow shirt striding across the campo. Seconds later other groups of people had wandered into the frame, cluttering the scene, and removing the sense of space and heat that this picture says to me.
Quite often I miss those chances, those decisive moments, as Henri Cartier Bresson famously said. I think I got a nice picture here though.
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
Two photographs of bridges in Venice today. There are probably other famous bridges in Venice, but these are the two that immediately spring to mind.
The first is the Bridge of Sighs which connects the interrogation chambers in the Doge’s Palace to the New Prison. It is so named because the view of Venice from the windows of the covered bridge would be the last sight of the outside that convicts would see, and they would sigh wistfully before being taken to their cells.
If prisoners were to cross the bridge today, they would witness dozens of tourists (such as I) taking photographs of the bridge from the next one along.
The second bridge is the Rialto Bridge, a spectacular crossing across the width of the Grand Canal. The Grand Canal is spanned by just three other bridges other than this one.
The Rialto Bridge was completed in 1591, replacing an earlier wooden bridge dating to 1251 (which itself had replaced the first crossing – a floating pontoon bridge – from 1181). Similar to the wooden bridge that came before, the current stone built bridge has two rows of shops on its span.
It was difficult to find a good vantage point to capture the bridge in it’s entirety, especially with the Trip 35’s fixed focal length, but I quite like this picture with the colourful mooring poles in the foreground.
The final picture is the southerly view along the Grand Canal from atop the bridge’s arch.
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
On the second day of out short break in Italy we decided to take a trip to Venice, about an hour’s travel by bus and ferry from Lido di Jesolo.
It was our second trip to Venice, the first being over thirty years ago on a day trip from our holiday to Rimini on the Italian Adriatic. On that day we took a full excursion, complete with following a tour guide with a bright umbrella around the sights. We visited various places, including a glass factory, and the place was lovely, but my abiding memories are of being crapped on by a pigeon the moment we stepped off the coach, and of my wife banging her head on a fire extinguisher (I think we were in a stairwell) so hard that she still has a small depression on the top of her head to this day!
On this trip we kept wary eyes out for both pigeons and fire-extinguishers.
The weather was lovely on the day and the ferry from Punta Sabbioni to Venice was busy. I was asked by a fellow passenger – he sounded like he was from one of the Scandinavian countries – if we were not concerned about missing the coronation of King Charles, but I can honestly say that I didn’t miss it at all, and much preferred the cool breeze and the scenery of the Venetian Riviera passing me by to being cooped up at home waching the coronation on TV.
The pictures below were taken on the waterfront after we disembarked from the ferry. There’s something very appealing about the colours in these photos I think. There was also a certain pleasure to be had making them with my Olympus Trip 35 – serving the purpose for which it was designed.
The majority of the photos I took on the trip to Italy were shot during the Venice trip, so more to come!
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
As a child, VW Beetles were a commonplace sight, whether parked on the street or seen driving along roads, their passage announce by distinctive air-cooled engine sound. Sometimes I would be overjoyed to see one that had been painted to look like Herbie.
But over time they faded from view and it wasn’t until the new, much worse looking (in my opinion), New Beetle arrived in the late 1990s that the cars began to be widely seen again, on British roads at least. The New Beetle lasted from 1997 to 2011, when it was replaced by the sleeker-looking Beetle A5, which itself was finally retired in 2019.
The original Beetle design is a classic and as a result there are still many being maintained, so it’s easy to find one (or several) at classic car shows, and they also turn up in customised form. There’s a customised green Beetle often to be found parked near my local fish & chip shop which I’ve thought about photographing but, apart from a digital snap I took a few years ago, I haven’t gotten around to doing so.
When I spotted this pristine Beetle in Lido di Jesolo, I just had to get a few pictures. It’s nice to see one in such pristine condition in the wild.
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
A very noticeable feature of the beach at Lido di Jesolo was the sheere quantity of sunloungers and beach umbrellas. There were thousands of them, probably tens of thousands! It’s someting I’ve noticed in other Italian resorts too (in my relatively limited experience of them), but they really stood out here.
Hotels have their own section of beach with sunloungers for their guests, although I think they can be hired by non-residents too. Some of the hotels are directly adjacent to the sand, but others might be a street or two further inland.
We visited in early May, before the main Italian holiday season begins, so most of the loungers were unoccupied while we were there. I expect it is a sight to behold at the height of the season!
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
This interesting building sits atop the EuroSpar supermarket in Lido di Jesolo. It was pointed out to me that it was designed by Stefano Pujatti of ELASTICOFarm. This doesn’t mean much to me being somewhat unfamiliar with the world of modern architecture, but I was happy to see more pictures of the structure and find out more about it via this link: https://www.elasticofarm.com/architecture/le-batiment-descendant-lescalier/
I had no idea that the swimming pool was there on the occasions we visited the supermarket!
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
A whole bunch of pictures to come over the next week or two from my recent trip to Lido di Jesolo in Italy with my wife. It was only a short, three-day break, but I managed to get through two-and-a-half rolls of film with my Olympus Trip 35.
As it’s late and I (shock! Horror!) almost forgot to write a blog post today, I’ll keep this one quite short.
This small building was set just back from the beach and, like so many other hotels and houses, was painted a vivid shade. It has “1937” written on the wall in Roman numerals. I guess it’s possible that the building dates back to then, but I suspect it may have some different significance. Whatever the case, I felt it made for a nice colourful subject, and I like the leading lines formed by the strips of matting in the foreground..
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
The photo published here today is the only decent photo from the roll of Kodak Gold I shot recently that still looks good in colour. All the others had colour casts and I had to convert them to black and white. This one managed to avoid the weird colours. The colour here is quite subtle but I think it still adds something to the image.
Fujica GW690& Kodak Gold . Lab developed. Home scanned and and converted using Negative Lab Pro.
One of the common nicknames for cow parsley is Mother-die. I learnt this from my grandma when I was pretty young and I remember spending quite a few years as a child being especially careful around the stuff, just in case. The name mother-die is thought to originate from rural villages and said that if a child picked the plant and brought it home then their mother would die. The rationale behind this is likely that, while cow parsley is edible, there are a number of very similar looking plants that are harmful, including hemlock.
Fujica GW690& Kodak Gold (converted to B&W in Lightroom).
Steel City Snapper photography 