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Venice by night
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Hi Gavin
Welcome, and thanks for making your first posting here in this section.
Your image interests me a lot and I want to think about it and add more feedback later. (I’m struggling to get much time online yesterday and today anyway.)
But for now I wanted to ask a couple of things.
– Do you have a note of the settings at which this was shot (or EXIF data)?
– Do you mind if I add another Venice/People at Night photo to your thread?Don’t think that my image is going to draw any comparisons. Mine is flawed. I think that shooting people at night or in low-light is one of most difficult things to capture in travel photography. Yes, we can get portraits if they stand still. But often these people are street performers who add greatly to the city’s atmosphere, and we want to capture them doing their act. I haven’t mastered shooting that and I’d like this thread to grow into a wider discussion of that, if that’s ok with you too.
More later…..
Post away…as for settings, cant remember of hand and Im bad at keeping records (usally get to excited to remember to write them down)
Film was Ilford HP5
Shutter 30 -90 I think
And the fStop would have been as wide as I could get it, 3.5 I think.Thanks for taking the time.
Thanks for adding the camera settings details.
I like virtually everything about this image other than the people. The pillars of the archways, the lighting, it?s reflection on the pavement, the foreground paving, the arched window and its positioning within the photo. It is very atmospheric.
I was surprised to see that the shutter speed was 30-90, which I take to mean somewhere between 1/30 and 1/90. I?d have guessed a much slower shutter speed that that ? especially if those are people who moved out of the frame there beside the window. Anyway, the problem is that the people are puzzlingly indistinct. I guess that they are doing something interesting ? singer on the left, crowd on the right? streetside caf?? But I can?t tell. This mystery could be a good effect in some other areas of photography, but in travel photography it is probably not ideal.
As I mentioned above, shooting people in low light is a big challenge ? especially when there is some movement. This was a good try.
Here is the Venice night shot I mentioned earlier.
It is also taken on San Marco Square, just outside one of the famous streetside cafes where the guests sip coffees sitting at tables on the square and the cafes’ musicians play in these canvas awnings. It is a beautiful end to an evening in Venice.
My photo has the problem I mentioned earlier. Motionless people come out not too badly, but people in motion, like the violinist, the accordian player and the leftmost waiter, are unacceptably blurred. I shot it from a tripod with a Nikon D70 using a 17-55mm lens at 55mm, f11, 1/2 sec and ISO 400. The D70 seems to get very grainy above ISO 400. I wanted a good depth of field – hence f11. What would you have done in a situation like this?
All feedback on this point will be greatly appreciated as I don’t really have much of a solution myself. Any comments on other points about the photo will be equally welcome.
Wow
Thats a lot of usefull feedback, the blurred people in my photo is a negative alright, I was hoping for the waiters to be blurred moving across the image and for the patrons sipping coffee to have more detail but again are blurred and lack some white areas.
As for your own pick I had great problems my self trying to take that spot, I just coud’nt find an angle I was happy with that showed the drapes and players, I felt that the chairs in the bottom half of the image take away from the timeless atmosphere and create a lot of clutter and again you had the same problem as myself with blur. I have no colour shots of venice by night but your image captures the warmth of the light through the drapes. As for shutter speed on my own image again I find it hard to keep records so you could be right may have been slower.
I ended up going for this image, again its small, ans it lacks white spots in dark areas which I hope to correct in darkroom as I do very little to my scanned negs.
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