close your eyes and hope for the best

Moonlit gondolier, Venice Italy. (click image to enlarge)

it was my second last film shoot before I migrated to digital photography.

It’s been drolly remarked that Venice is the only city where you can get seasick by crossing the street. Water and canals are everywhere and so are opportunities for photographers but, as with water, you can drown in the possibilities. What do you shoot that hasn’t been done before? Venice is one of the most photographed and painted cities in the world. To anyone with a heartbeat and a visual instinct, it’s irresistible which means the possibility of doing something new and fresh is slim indeed.

This was one of the challenges I faced when, after an editorial assignment in Tuscany in the late 1990s, I tagged on an extra four days in Venice for stock and personal photography. My mission was to get just a few images that might distinguish themselves among the many I would inevitably take. One concept that teased me immediately was the idea of a moonlit photo with a gondola and gondolier. Walking around Venice on my first evening, I witnessed the scene several times. Technically, however, the challenges in getting such a shot were daunting. The exposure would be too long to freeze any motion and balancing the exposure so that the canal and sky and moon were adequately exposed was impossible in a single image.

At the time, I was shooting film. Indeed, it was my second last film shoot before I migrated to digital photography. To get the moonlit shot I wanted, I decided to build on some extra time with a gondolier I’d hired anyway for some more traditional stock shots I was doing in the main Grand Canal. Late in a May afternoon a couple of hours before sunset, I asked the fellow - Brunello was his name - to pole back and forth in a narrow canal I had selected because it had lots of the old world ambience I thought might work.

A couple of weeks later when I was back home in Toronto and the film had been processed, I looked at the images. Certainly, they didn’t look at all like the much more romantic imagery I had in my mind’s eye. The water reflected buildings, not the hidden blue sky, and was a turgid greenish brown. I wasn’t discouraged, however, because I had already decided this was going to be a two-part picture. The first part was in the taking of course. For the second part, I decided I would lean on Photoshop to import a moon from another Venice shot and to morph the image into purplish-blue vision that kept resonating in the windmills of my mind.

Getting the photo that I wanted proved to be a more difficult undertaking than I’d imagined. At the time, I wasn’t well versed beyond the basics of Photoshop and I hadn’t done such a wholesale transformation. The photo had to look real but mystical at the same time. Hours were spent finding the right way to make the colour shifts look authentic. Sections were lassoed. Channels were adjusted. Hue and Saturation were tweaked. Finally, after some feedback from my editor and the digital department at Masterfile, the stock photo agency that represents my work, I achieved an image that was very close to what I had imagined several weeks before.

The image has sold only a few times in stock but it’s one of my most popular gallery prints when I participate in exhibitions and studio tours. The bulk of my work never gets adjusted beyond the basics such as levels or curves in Photoshop but this image taught me that sometimes it’s worth giving free rein to the mind’s eye.

© Greg Stott 2007

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 9:54 am and is filed under Greg Stott. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.