Saturday, 30 October 2010
Gondola In 60 Seconds, Venice
You say "bokeh", I say "water damage". This was shot in rain using our hotel bathmat as a tripod and makeshift camera cover. Bathmats make better tripods than you'd imagine, as it turns out.
Although shot with a weatherproof lens (always worried about the fact Canon commit to nothing numerical by way of definition in this regard), my six year old 300D definitely isn't. Half-covered in the bathmat, half-sheltered by my leaning hooded form, it survived. I'm delighted by it's longevity - probably 100,000+ shutter actuations and lots of knocks along the way.
What it doesn't do so well is noise control, however. This shot was a wretched thing to clean, and this posted version remains a bit ropey even after an hour or so in LR3 and PS7.0 tidying it up. The white balance was a nightmare too, with no result I was ever entirely happy with. I settled on this one, married with a not insignificant desaturation. Otherwise, I used PS to lessen the distortion of the buildings (exacerbated by the lean-inducing bathmat) and LR to bring that church tower back (somewhat) from the shadows of the sky.
Just for pedants - you're right - it's not a gondola. Sadly I couldn't think of a punning film title with "vaporetto" in the title. It is 60 seconds though.
See Gondola in 60 Seconds on Flickr.
