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.
There was something in the jumble of white buildings, cluttered windows, and the bands of water and sky that appealed here. The classy looking powerboat adds a splash of additional warm colour at the bottom.
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.
This tower is one of those that doesn’t look as big in pictures but which is huge when you get up close and personal. On my last visit to Venice I went up to the viewing balcony (without my wife, who isn’t keen on heights), but this time I just admired it from its base and the surrounding area.
I didn’t realise until recently that the tower completely collapsed in 1902 and the tower in place today was completed in 1912.
Olympus Trip 35 & Kodak Gold. Lab developed. Home scanned and converted with Negative Lab Pro.
This was one of the first photographs I took after getting of the boat to Venice. The canal is the Rio del Greci and the tower is the campanile bell tower of San Giorgio dei Greci (or Saint George of the Greeks, in English).
The foundations of the tower collapsed due to subsidence during the building phase, resulting in the leaning tower. It’s stood intact since 1592 when construction was completed, so it’s doing pretty well despite the lean.
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.
I got back home yesterday after a few days away with my wife. We took a short trip to Lido di Jesolo, a beach resort in north-east Italy, that she had said she would like to visit. The resort is very much built for tourists – it’s mostly hotels and the restaurants, cafes, and shops that serve the visitors, but it’s clean, friendly, and a nice place to spend some time. It has a very long beach – over nine miles in length – which is equally clean (it has a Blue Flag rating) and with lots of public facilities such as cafes, bars, and showers. It also has thousands of sun-loungers and parasols, with many of the resort’s hotels having their own reserved section of the beach.
The plane we flew on to Italy – a Boeing 737-800 should you be interested.
Flying over the Alps.
Making our descent into Venice Marco Polo Airport, with Venice visible in the centre of the Venetian lagoon.
The resort is also only a short distance from Venice, and it’s easy to catch a bus and a ferry to the historic city – a trip of approximately an hour from the bus station – meaning an abundance of culture and history is there should you wish to partake of it. We visited Venice on the second day of our trip, and here are a few pictures from the day out.
Piazza San Marco, Venice
Rialto Bridge, Venice
A canal scene, Venice
I’ll be posting a bunch of photos from the trip once I’ve got them processed and scanned, but in a break from tradition (given that this blog is advertised as being about film photography) I’ve dropped a few digital photos into today’s post. I don’t intend to start posting digital photographs on a regular basis, but I’ve decided that sometimes it might be apt. Because I often have a backlog of film pictures to develop, scan, and upload, it can often be many weeks before I get to post them. Using some digital pictures now and then will allow me to better illustrate the posts where I witter on about what I did that day with actual images from the events, rather than some random unrelated film photo I took weeks earlier.
Steel City Snapper photography 