The Glass Canal | Weekly Photo #28
“Venice is the exemplar of human wit and ingenuity. Despair of man and go to Venice: you will cease to despair. If human beings can build a city like this, their souls deserved to be saved.”
Like many photographers, I love to take photos of Venice. It has everything I like from charming streets and intimate canals to grand, cityscape vistas that will take your breath away. This picturesque city has an abundance of rustic splendour and oozes history throughout.
Fujifilm X-T10 | XF18-55mm | 18mm | 480 Seconds | f/8 | ISO200
During a previous trip to Venice in 2017, I decided to venture out before sunrise to capture the city as it sleeps. As an urban landscape photographer, whatever city you happen to be in, there is no better time to capture it than at sunrise. This is the time where you can have the place to yourself and capture the landscape in a way not normally experienced by most other people.
If there was one shot I just had to capture during my stay it was this composition below looking down the Grand Canal towards the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute in the distance. The light wasn't as epic as I hoped but if I was going to capture a long exposure, this had to be it.
Upon the Ponte dell’Accademia Bridge, I set my camera onto the tripod, composed, focused and then mounted my filter. You can see the settings I used directly under the image above. I also have an easy 10-step process to taking long exposure photos which is available to download by subscribing to my newsletter. Having already taken a test shot without the filter, with the light levels as they were, the resulting exposure was an impressive 8 minutes. So, with the remote cable release connected, I went about taking the shot.
What I really like about this image is I had one chance to capture it while there was some light in the sky. The eight-minute exposure makes the water almost mirror-like with a touch of etherealism and the resulting image is a clean crisp shot ensuring the sweeping curve of the water leads the eye to the main focus being the architecture and Basilica.
Back in Lightroom, I had to deal with one of the downsides of such a long exposure and that was the many hot pixels across the image. These are areas of electrical discharge created by the sensor getting hot whiles taking the long exposure. Noticeable in the shadows, I had to endure the tedious process of cloning out the hundreds of small red dots from the darker parts of the image.
If you’re interested, I wrote a two-part travel blog about my trip to Venice which is filled with photos and information about the many places I visited.
Until next time.
Trevor
This post is featured in my Weekly Photo series where I post a new photo every Monday. To have this delivered directly to your inbox, you can subscribe to the mailing list here.